Alibaba’s video and image AI model Wan 2.1 now open source

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 …

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Sesame introduces conversational AI assistant with natural voice presence

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 …

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Microsoft introduces efficient Phi-4 for text, image, speech processing

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 …

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Nous Research launches AI model with optional reasoning mode

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. …

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Hugging Face creates open alternative to OpenAI’s Deep Research

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 …

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European consortium launches open-source language model initiative OpenEuroLLM

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 …

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Stanford researchers create AI reasoning model for under $50, challenging industry giants

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 …

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Ai2 Tulu 3 is an open-source language model rivaling leading systems

The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) has released Tulu 3 405B, a new AI language model that, according to the institute’s internal testing, outperforms several leading AI systems including DeepSeek V3 and matches capabilities with OpenAI’s GPT-4o on certain benchmarks. The model contains 405 billion parameters and required 256 GPUs running in parallel for …

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Mistral Small 3 rivals larger competitors

French startup Mistral AI has announced the release of Mistral Small 3, a 24-billion-parameter language model that the company claims matches the performance of models three times its size. According to Mistral AI, the new model achieves 81% accuracy on standard benchmarks while processing 150 tokens per second, making it comparable to Meta’s Llama 3.3 …

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DeepSeek-R1 brings significant cost reduction for Enterprise AI

DeepSeek’s new AI reasoning model R1 could substantially reduce the costs of developing AI applications. According to an analysis by Ben Dickson in VentureBeat, DeepSeek-R1 offers similar capabilities to leading models at a fraction of the price. The model costs $2.19 per million output tokens, compared to OpenAI’s o1 at $60 per million tokens. When …

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