Year in Review

The United States government’s effort to deprive China of AI computing power backfired as China turned the tables and banned U.S.-designed chips.

Coding apps moved beyond autofill-style code completion to agentic systems that manage a wide range of software development tasks.

Top AI companies announced plans to build data centers that are projected to burn through trillions of dollars and gigawatts of electricity in the next few years.

Leading AI companies fought a ferocious war for talent, luring top talent from competitors with levels of compensation more commonly associated with pro sports.

Think step by step. Explain your reasoning. Work backwards from the answer. As 2025 began, models executed these reasoning strategies only when prompted. Now most new large language models do it as a matter of course, improving performance across a wide range of tasks.

Is AI progressing rapidly? Yes! But while the progress of underlying AI technology has indeed sped up over the past 2 years, the fastest acceleration is in applications.

The Batch AI News and Insights: Is AI progressing rapidly? Yes! But while the progress of underlying AI technology has indeed sped up over the past 2 years, the fastest acceleration is in applications.

Big AI companies found creative ways to gain cutting-edge technology and talent without buying startups.

For years, the best AI models got bigger and bigger. But in 2024, some popular large language models were small enough to run on a smartphone.

Video generation exploded in an abundance of powerful models.

Fierce competition among model makers and cloud providers drove down the price of access to state-of-the-art models.

The AI community laid the foundation for systems that can act by prompting large language models iteratively, leading to much higher performance across a range of applications.

The Batch - AI News & Insights: Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.

Fans of AI-driven music pressed play, while a major recording company reached for the stop button. AI grabbed listeners by the ears when it helped produce a new single by The Beatles, mimicked the voices of beloved stars, and generated music from text prompts.

Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps.