Manus, an AI agent developed by Chinese startup Butterfly Effect, has generated significant buzz in the tech world. Described as “the first general AI agent” capable of autonomously executing complex tasks, Manus has been hailed by some as China’s second “DeepSeek moment” – referring to the earlier breakthrough when Chinese AI model DeepSeek R1 outperformed …
Alibaba’s Qwen Team has introduced QwQ-32B, a new open-source language model that matches the performance of much larger models like DeepSeek-R1 despite having significantly fewer parameters. The 32-billion-parameter model, released under the Apache 2.0 license, leverages reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance reasoning capabilities for complex problem-solving tasks. Key features and capabilities QwQ-32B demonstrates impressive performance …
Cohere’s research division has launched Aya Vision, an open-weight vision model supporting 23 languages. According to Carl Franzen’s report in VentureBeat, the model comes in 8-billion and 32-billion parameter versions and can analyze images, generate text, and translate visual content. Aya Vision outperforms larger models like Llama 90B while requiring fewer computational resources. The model …
Alibaba Group has made its video and image generation AI model Wan 2.1 publicly available as open source. Reuters reports that four variants of the model are now accessible globally through Alibaba Cloud’s ModelScope and HuggingFace platforms for academic, research, and commercial use. The most powerful variants can process up to 14 billion parameters, enabling …
Sesame, a startup led by Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, has unveiled a new AI voice assistant called Maya that aims to cross “the uncanny valley of conversational voice.” According to a recent article by technology journalist Sean Hollister, Maya offers more natural and engaging conversations compared to existing voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s …
Microsoft has unveiled two new AI models in its Phi series: Phi-4-multimodal with 5.6 billion parameters and Phi-4-mini with 3.8 billion parameters. These small language models (SLMs) deliver exceptional performance while requiring significantly less computing power than larger systems, challenging the notion that bigger AI models are always better. The Phi-4-multimodal model stands out for …
Nous Research has released DeepHermes-3, a new AI language model that allows users to switch between detailed reasoning and quick responses. As reported by Carl Franzen for VentureBeat, this 8-billion parameter model builds on Meta’s Llama technology. Users can activate a special reasoning mode that makes the AI show its thought process before providing answers. …
Hugging Face has developed an open-source version of autonomous research technology, matching key capabilities of OpenAI’s recently launched Deep Research feature. As reported by Benj Edwards for Ars Technica, the project called “Open Deep Research” was completed within 24 hours of OpenAI’s announcement. The new tool enables AI models to independently browse the web and …
A group of 20 European research institutions and companies has announced OpenEuroLLM, a collaborative project to develop open-source multilingual language models. The initiative, coordinated by Charles University’s Jan Hajič and AMD Silo AI’s Peter Sarlin, will create AI models specifically designed for European commercial and public services. The project aims to strengthen Europe’s AI capabilities …
Researchers from Stanford and the University of Washington have developed an AI model called s1 that rivals the capabilities of expensive commercial AI systems while costing less than $50 in computing resources to train. The model, which was created through a process called distillation using Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental model, demonstrates similar performance …