Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B round led by Theory Ventures, founder and CEO Jeff Morgan tells Julie Bort of TechCrunch. The funding follows a $15 million Series A led by Benchmark’s Peter Fenton, bringing the company’s total funding to $88 million. Ollama, launched in 2023, lets developers run open-weight AI models on …
A new open-source tool called Rowboat wants to turn AI assistants into a full workspace rather than just a chat window. The developer, posting under the handle segmenta, introduces the project in a Show HN post on Hacker News, describing it as a local-first alternative to Claude Desktop. The team behind Rowboat previously built AI …
Tencent has released the full version of its Hy3 language model under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, removing regional restrictions that previously excluded the European Union, the United Kingdom and South Korea. Sam Witteveen reports for VentureBeat that the license reversal, more than the model’s capabilities, drove the strongest reaction from the open-model community. Hy3 …
AI creative tools startup Krea has released the weights of its new image generation model Krea 2 as two public downloads: Krea 2 Raw and Krea 2 Turbo. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that both models are available on Hugging Face and target a growing frustration in creative industries: AI-generated imagery that looks generic, predictable, …
The Netherlands is building its own large language model, independent of major American AI providers. TNO writes that the project, called GPT-NL, is being developed by research institute TNO together with SURF and the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI). The Dutch government has allocated €13.5 million to the initiative through the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. The project …
Google has released DiffusionGemma, an experimental open AI model that takes a fundamentally different approach to generating text. Brendan O’Donoghue and Sebastian Flennerhag write for Google’s blog The Keyword that the model can produce text up to four times faster than conventional large language models on dedicated GPUs. It is available under an Apache 2.0 …
Google has released Gemma 4 12B, an open-weights multimodal AI model designed to run entirely on a standard laptop with 16 GB of VRAM or unified memory. The model is available now for free download and marks a notable step toward powerful AI that operates offline, without sending data to the cloud. The model is …
Odysseus is a new open-source project that lets users run a full-featured AI workspace on their own hardware. Developer pewdiepie-archdaemon publishes the project on GitHub as a self-hosted alternative to commercial AI interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude, with a strong focus on privacy and local data storage. And, yes, that PewDiePie, the YouTube guy. …
Nvidia’s new Nemotron 3 Ultra has claimed the top spot among open AI models from the United States. Maximilian Schreiner reports for The Decoder that the model scores 48 points on the Artificial Analysis intelligence ranking, putting it clearly ahead of other open US models. For comparison, Google’s Gemma 4 31B scores 39 points, Nvidia’s …
Canadian AI company Cohere has unveiled Command A+, a large language model designed for complex reasoning, document processing, and autonomous workflows. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that the model is available for free on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license, making it the first Cohere model that anyone can use, modify, and commercialize without …