New 8B parameter AI model outperforms rivals ten times its size

Essential AI has launched Rnj-1, an open-source large language model designed to excel at coding, mathematical reasoning, and scientific tasks. The model, named after Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan and pronounced “range-1,” marks the company’s first major contribution to the open-source AI ecosystem. The team reports on the Essential AI blog that the 8 billion parameter …

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Mistral 3 brings frontier AI to your pocket with unprecedented openness

Mistral AI has launched Mistral 3, a collection of 10 open-source AI models designed to run on devices ranging from smartphones to enterprise cloud systems. The French startup released all models under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing unrestricted commercial use. The release includes Mistral Large 3, the company’s flagship model, and the Ministral 3 series …

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Black Forest Labs FLUX.2 is an advanced image generation AI

German AI startup Black Forest Labs, founded by the original creators of Stable Diffusion, has launched FLUX.2, a new family of AI models for generating and editing images. According to the company, the system is designed for professional creative workflows, aiming for reliability and control rather than one-off demonstrations. FLUX.2 introduces several key enhancements over …

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Ai2 releases Olmo 3 with a focus on full development transparency

The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), a Seattle-based nonprofit research institute, has released Olmo 3, a new family of open-source language models. According to Ai2, the new models are designed to be competitive with other leading open models in performance and efficiency while offering a new level of transparency for developers and researchers. The key …

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Kimi K2 Thinking: open source AI matches performance of leading proprietary systems

A new open source AI model from Chinese startup Moonshot AI has matched or exceeded the performance of leading proprietary systems, including OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5, according to multiple benchmarks. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that the Kimi K2 Thinking model achieved 44.9 percent on Humanity’s Last Exam, 60.2 percent on BrowseComp, …

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IBM releases small AI models designed to run on personal devices

IBM has launched four new artificial intelligence models that are small enough to run on a standard laptop or even within a web browser. Carl Franzen reports for VentureBeat that these Granite 4.0 Nano models represent a shift in AI development, prioritizing efficiency over massive size. The models are open source and available under the …

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MiniMax-M2 is a powerful new open-source model for agentic tasks

Chinese AI startup MiniMax has launched MiniMax-M2, a new large language model available under a permissive MIT license for free commercial use. The company states the model is specifically designed for complex “agentic” tasks, where AI acts independently to use software tools, and for programming. According to a report by VentureBeat, citing the independent benchmarking …

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IBM releases Granite 4.0 language models with new hybrid architecture for efficiency

IBM has announced the launch of Granite 4.0, the next generation of its open-source large language models. The new models feature a hybrid architecture that combines two different AI technologies, Transformer and Mamba, to balance high performance with significantly lower memory requirements and costs. The models are designed for enterprise use, with a strong focus …

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New Qwen3-VL model aims to understand and act in the digital world

The QwenTeam has released a new series of open-source vision-language models called Qwen3-VL. According to the team’s official announcement, the models are designed not just to see images and videos but to understand context, reason about events, and perform actions. The flagship model, Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B, is available in two versions. The developers claim the “Instruct” version …

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Qwen3-Omni is an open-source model for text, image, audio, and video

The Chinese technology company Alibaba has released Qwen3-Omni, a new generative AI model that can process a combination of text, images, audio, and video. The model is notable for its “omni-modal” capabilities and its open-source license, positioning it as a direct competitor to proprietary models from U.S. tech companies like OpenAI and Google. According to …

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