AI News 2025-03-27

General

Research Insights

LLM

Multimodal

AI Agents

Safety

  • Superalignment with Dynamic Human Values. They treat alignment as a dynamic problem, where human values may change over time. The proposed solution involves an AI that breaks tasks into smaller components, that are easier for humans to guide. This framework assumes that alignment of sub-tasks correctly generalizes to desirable outcomes for the overall task.
  • Google DeepMind: Defeating Prompt Injections by Design.

Audio

  • OpenAI announced new audio models: new text-to-speech models (test here) where one can instruct it about how to speak; and gpt-4o-transcribe with lower error rate than Whisper (including a mini variant than is half the cost of Whisper).
  • OpenAI update their advanced voice mode, making it better at not interrupting the user.

Image Synthesis

  • Tokenize Image as a Set (code). Interesting approach to use an unordered bag of tokens (rather than a serialization, as done with text) to represent images.
  • StarVector is a generative model for converting text or images to SVG code.
  • Applying mechanistic interpretability to image synthesis models can offer enhanced control: Unboxing SDXL Turbo: How Sparse Autoencoders Unlock the Inner Workings of Text-to-Image Models (preprint, examples).
  • The era of in-context and/or autoregressive image generation is upon us. In-context generation means the LLM can directly understand and edit photos (colorize, restyle, make changes, remove watermarks, etc.). Serial autoregressive approaches also handle text and prescribed layout much better, and often have improved prompt adherence.
    • Last week, Google unveiled Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental image generation (available in Google AI Studio).
    • Reve Image reveal that the mysterious high-scoring “halfmoon” is their image model, apparently exploiting some kind of “logic” (auto-regressive model? inference-time compute?) to improve output.
    • OpenAI release their new image model: 4o image generation. It can generate highly coherent text in images, and iterate upon images in-context.
      • This led to a one-day Ghibli-themed spontaneous meme explosion.
      • It is interesting to see how it handles generating a map with walking directions. There are mistakes. But the quality is remarkable. The map itself is mostly just memorization, but the roughly-correct walking directions and time estimation point towards a more generalized underlying understanding.

Video

  • SkyReels is offering AI tools to cover the entire workflow (script, video, editing).
  • Pika is testing a new feature that allows one to edit existing video (e.g. animating an object).

World Synthesis

Science

Hardware

  • Halliday: smart glasses intended for AI integration ($430)

Robots

  • Unitree shows a video of smooth athletic movement.
  • Figure reports on using reinforcement learning in simulation to greatly improve the walking of their humanoid robot, providing it with a better (faster, more efficient, more humanlike) gait.
  • Google DeepMind paper: Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World. They present a vision-language-action model capable of directly controlling robots.
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AI News 2025-03-20

General

Research Insights

LLM

  • Baidu announce Ernie 4.5 and X1 (use here). They claim that Ernie 4.5 is comparable to GPT-4o, and that X1 is comparable to DeepSeek R1; but with lower API costs (Earnie 4.5 is 1/4 the price of 4o, while X1 is 1/2 of R1). They plan to open-source the models on June 30th.
  • Mistral release Mistral Small 3.1 24B. They report good performance for the model size (e.g. outperforming GPT-4o-mini and Gemma 3).
  • LG AI Research announce EXAONE Deep, a reasoning LLM (2.4B, 7.8B, 32B variants; weights) that scores well on math benchmarks.
  • Nvidia release Llama-Nemotron models, which can do reasoning (try it here).

Safety

Vision

Image Synthesis

  • Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (available in Google AI Studio) is multimodal, with image generation capabilities. By having the image generation “within the model” (rather than as an external tool), one can iterate on image generation much more naturally. This incidentally obviates the need for more specialized image tools (can do colorization, combine specified people/places/products, remove watermarks, etc.).

Video

Audio

Science

Robots

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AI News 2025-03-13

General

Research Insights

LLM

AI Agents

Safety

  • OpenAI blog post: Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models. They study how the natural-language chain-of-thought operates in reasoning models. They find that aggressive optimization of reasoning, especially optimizing for the CoT to not exhibit misaligned text, leads to model behaviors where undesired thoughts are not expressed in CoT (but are nevertheless activated). Conversely, under-optimized CoT remains human-legible, providing an opportunity to detect and modify undesired behavior. They advocate for strongly avoiding over-optimization of CoT, thereby keeping it legible; noting that this may require hiding the CoT from the end-user (e.g. so model can freely consider dangerous topics in the CoT, while ultimately not expressing these in the response to the user).
  • Dan Hendrycks, Eric Schmidt and Alexandr Wang released: Superintelligence Strategy, a detailed essay about ASI risks, with concrete mitigation suggestions, including Mutual Assured AI Malfunction (MAIM).

Audio

  • Elevenlabs adds speed control for text-to-speech; can be controlled down to the word level to control a performance.
  • Tavus are demoing AI avatars (audio and video) that are fairly lifelike and responsive.
  • Nvidia release Audio Flamingo 2 (paper, code), an audio-language model with long-context and understanding of non-speech audio.
  • Sesame has now released the weights for their remarkable conversational audio model (demo, example): use, code, weights.

Image Synthesis

Video

  • Hedra releases Character 3, an improved video avatar model, that can lip-sync to provided audio.
  • Captions AI’s Mirage model also achieves more emotive lip-sync than older methods.

Science

Robots

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AI News 2025-03-06

General

Research Insights

LLM

AI Agents

Audio

  • Sesame have a demo of a voice audio chatbot that is remarkably fast and natural-sounding (example). They claim that they will open-source soon.
  • Podcastle (podcasting platform) introduces Asyncflow, a library of 450 AI voices.

Video

Science

Robots

  • Figure announces that it is accelerating deployment plans, starting in-home alpha testing this year.
  • UBTECH claims they are deploying swarm methods, where individual humanoid robots share knowledge and communicate to collaborate on problems (apparently being tested in Zeekr’s car factory).
  • Dexmate introduce their semi-humanoid Vega.
  • Proception are working on a humanoid, starting with the hand.
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AI News 2025-02-27

General

Research Insights

  • Surprising result relevant to AI understanding and AI safety: Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs. By fine-tuning an LLM to produce insecure code, the LLM also incidentally picks up many other misaligned behaviors, including giving malicious advice on unrelated topics and expressing admiration for evil people (example outputs).
    • They even find that fine-tuning to generate “evil numbers” (such as 666) leads to similar kinds of broad misalignment.
    • The broad generalization it exhibits could have deep implications.
    • It suggests that the model learns many implicit associations during training and RLHF, such that many “unrelated” concepts are being tangled up into a single preference vector. Thus, when one pushes on a subset of the entangled concepts, the others are also affected.
    • This is perhaps to be expected (in retrospect) in the sense that there are many implicit/underlying correlations in the training data, which can be exploited to learn a simpler predictive model. I.e. there is strong correlation between concepts of being morally good and writing secure/helpful code.
    • This is similar to previous result: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction.
    • From an AI safety perspective, this is perhaps heartening, as it suggests a more general and robust learning of human values. It also suggests it might be easier to detect misalignment (since it will show up in many different ways) and steer models (since behaviors will be entangled, and don’t need to be individually steered).
    • Of course much of this is speculation for now. The result is tantalizing but will need to be replicated and studied.
  • SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution. Meta demonstrates 41.0% on SWE-Bench Verified despite being only a 70B model (vs. 31% for the non-RLed 70B model), further validating the RL approach to improving performance on focused domains.
  • Sparse Autoencoders for Scientifically Rigorous Interpretation of Vision Models. They find evidence for cross-modal knowledge transfer. E.g. CLIP can learn richer aggregate semantics (e.g. for a particular culture or country), compared to a vision-only method.
  • Inception Labs is reporting progress on diffusion language models (dLLMs): Mercury model (try it here). Unlike traditional autoregressive LLMs, which generate tokens one at a time (left to right), the diffusion method generates the whole token sequence at once. It approaches it as in image generation: start with a an imperfect/noisy estimate for the entire output, and progressively refine it. In addition to a speed advantage, Karpathy notes that such models might exhibit different strengths and weaknesses compared to conventional LLMs.

LLM

  • Different LLMs are good for different things, so why not use a router to select the ideal LLM for a given task/prompt? Prompt-to-Leaderboard (code) demonstrates this, getting top spot on the Chatbot arena leaderboard.
  • Anthropic release Claude 3.7 Sonnet (system card), a hybrid model that can return immediate answers or conduct extended thinking. In benchmarks, it is essential state-of-the-art (comparing favorably against o1, o3-mini, R1, and Grok 3 Thinking). Surprisingly, even the non-thinking mode can even outperform frontier reasoning models on certain tasks. It appears extremely good at coding.
    • Claude Code is a terminal application that automates many coding and software engineer tasks (currently in limited research preview).
    • Performance of thinking variant on ARC-AGI is roughly equal to o3-mini (though at higher cost).
    • Achieves 8.9% on Humanity’s Last Exam (c.f. 14% by o3-mini-high).
    • For fun, some Anthropic engineers deployed Claude to play Pokemon (currently live on Twitch). Claude 3.7 is making record-setting progress in this “benchmark”.
  • Qwen releases a thinking model: QwQ-Max-Preview (use it here).
  • Convergence open-source Proxy Lite, a scaled-down version of their full agentic model.
  • OpenAI have added Assistants File Search, essentially providing an easier way to build RAG solutions in their platform.
  • Microsoft release phi-4-multimodal-instruct, a language+vision+speech multimodal model.
  • DeepSeek releases:
  • OpenAI releases GPT-4.5. It is a newer/better non-reasoning LLM. It is apparently “a big model”. It has improved response quality with fewer hallucinations, and more nuanced emotional understanding.

AI Agents

Audio

  • Luma add a video-to-audio feature to their Dream Machine video generator.
  • ElevenLabs introduce a new audio transcription (speech-to-text) model: Scribe. They claim superior performance, compared to the state-of-the-art (e.g. OpenAI Whisper).
  • Hume announce Octave, an improved text-to-speech where one can describe voice (including accent) and provide acting directions (emotion, etc.).

Video

3D

Science

Robots

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AI News 2025-02-20

General

  • Perplexity adds a Deep Research capability (similar to Google and OpenAI). You can try it even in the free tier (5 per day). They score 21% on the challenging “Humanity’s Last Exam” benchmark, second only to OpenAI at 26%.
  • TechCrunch reports: A job ad for Y Combinator startup Firecrawl seeks to hire an AI agent for $15K a year. Undoubtedly a publicity stunt. And yet, it hints towards a near-future economic dynamic: offering pay based on desired results (instead of salary), and allowing others to bid using human or AI solutions.
  • Mira Murati (formerly at OpenAI) announces Thinking Machines, an AI venture.
  • Fiverr announces Fiverr Go, where freelancers can train a custom AI model on their own assets, and have this AI model/agent available for use through the Fiverr platform. This provides a way for freelancers to service more clients.
    • Elevenlabs Payouts is a similar concept, where voice actors can be paid when clients use their customized AI voice.
    • In the short term, this provides an extra revenue stream to these workers. Of course, these workers are the most at threat for full replacement by these very AI methods. (And, indeed, one could worry that the companies in question are gathering the data they need to eventually obviate the need for profit-sharing with contributors.)

Research Insights

LLM

  • Nous Research releases DeepHermes 3 (8B), which mixes together conventional LLM response with long-CoT reasoning response.
  • InfiniteHiP: Extending Language Model Context Up to 3 Million Tokens on a Single GPU.
  • ByteDance has released a new AI-first coding IDE: Trae AI (video intro).
  • LangChain Open Canvas provides a user interface for LLMs, including memory features, UI for coding, display artifacts, etc.
  • xAI announces the release of Grok 3 (currently available for use here), including a reasoning variant and “Deep Search” (equivalent to Deep Research). Early testing suggests a model closing in on the abilities of o1-pro (but not catching up to o3 full). So, while it has not demonstrated any record-setting capabilities, it confirms that frontier models are not yet using any methods that cannot be reproduced by others.

AI Agents

Safety

Image

Video

3D

World Synthesis

  • Microsoft report: Introducing Muse: Our first generative AI model designed for gameplay ideation (publication in Nature: World and Human Action Models towards gameplay ideation). They train a model on gameplay videos (World and Human Action Model, WHAM); the model can subsequently forward-simulate gameplay from a provided frame. The model has thus learned an implicit world model for the video game. Forward-predicting gameplay based on artificial editing of frames (introducing a new character or situation) thus allows rapid ideation of gameplay ideas before actually updating the video game. More generally, this points towards direct neural rendering of games and other interactive experiences.

Science

Brain

Robots

  • Unitree video shows robot motion that is fairly fluid and resilient.
  • Clone robotics is moving towards combining their biomimetic components into a full-scale humanoid: Protoclone.
  • MagicLab Robot with dextrous MagicHand S01.
  • Figure AI claims a breakthrough in robotic control software (Helix: A Vision-Language-Action Model for Generalist Humanoid Control). The video shows two humanoid robots handling a novel task based on human natural voice instructions. Assuming the video is genuine, it show genuine progress in the capability of autonomous robots to understand instructions and conduct simple tasks (including working with a partner in a team).
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AI News 2025-02-13

General

Research Insights

LLM

  • OpenAI announce that o1 and o3-mini now have file and image upload capabilities.
  • Distillation Scaling Laws. Is it better to directly train a small model, or to train a larger model and distill that into a smaller model? The answer is complicated. Roughly, if on a tight compute budget, then directly training a small model may be better. However, if the cost of the big model is “free” (you want to have the big model for other purposes, etc.) then distillation of course can be efficient.

Safety & Security

  • Auditing Prompt Caching in Language Model APIs. They use the response speed to detect whether a given input has been previously cached. This allows one to detect whether someone else has already input that prompt, which thereby leaks information between users. This has a similar flavor to other attacks based on timing or energy use; a system leaks information when it implements internal efficiencies. Leakage can be stopped, but only by giving up the efficiency/speed gains.

Voice

Video

Science

Hardware

  • Groq has secured $1.5B to expand AI inference infrastructure in Saudi Arabia.

Robots

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AI News 2025-02-06

General

Research Insights

LLM

  • Nvidia is providing a host for DeepSeek-R1 through their API.
  • OpenAI releases o3-mini, a powerful reasoning model that leverages inference-time compute.
  • Open-R1 is an attempt to reproduce the DeepSeek-R1 model/result/method in a fully open manner. Their first update shows progress in replicating DeepSeek’s results.
  • s1: Simple test-time scaling. They investigate the simplest possible inference-time compute method for increasing reasoning: they arbitrarily insert “Wait” tokens when the model tries to complete its response. This forces it to reconsider and think longer, yielding gains that scale with compute.
  • ACECODER: Acing Coder RL via Automated Test-Case Synthesis. It provides another way to think about expending post-training but pre-inference compute in order to improve a system.
  • Google releases Gemini 2.0 broadly. Although not the top models in raw benchmark scores, this set of models seem to establish a new record in terms of the Pareto tradeoff between performance and inference cost.

Safety

AI Agents

Vision

Video

Voice

Robots

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AI News 2025-01-30

General

Research Insights

LLM

  • Release of Qwen2.5-1M model, with a 1 million token context (technical report).
  • Release of Qwen2.5-VL, a vision-language model.
  • DeepSeek releases Janus Pro 1B (includes image generation and chat with PDF). It can run local/in-browser via WebGPU (demo here).
  • Open Thoughts has launched as an effort to curate quality datasets for training reasoning models (e.g. validated synthetic reasoning traces). Initial dataset has 114k traces.
  • Open-R1 is an attempt to reproduce the DeepSeek-R1 model/result/method in a fully open manner.
  • OpenAI has added a “think” option to GPT-4o, allowing it to invoke some form of chain-of-thought.

Safety

AI Agents

Audio

Video

Science

Robots

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AI News 2025-01-23

General

Research Insights

LLM

Safety

  • OpenAI: Trading Inference-Time Compute for Adversarial Robustness (full paper). The results suggest that inference-time compute can be used to improve safety (guardrails, alignment, etc.). This makes sense, given that inference-compute increases capabilities, and alignment can be viewed as a particular kind of capability (desired response).

Image Synthesis

Video

Audio

  • Bland AI (now bland.com) is running a publicity stunt where you can call their AI on your phone, and after 10-60 seconds of talking, it will clone your voice and start talking to you in your own voice. Intentionally unnerving, and a good reminder that we must now be skeptical of suspicious phone calls (even if they sound like loved ones), and for banks to stop using voice-print as a security factor.

Science

  • Published: Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model. (This was previously released as a preprint.) The ESM3 foundation model is trained on sequence, structure, and function of proteins. You can (e.g.) input a desired function and it will generate a candidate protein.
  • OpenAI has created an AI model for longevity science. More specifically, GPT-4b micro was trained to predict variants of protein factors with increased/controlled function. Since this model is not yet broadly available, we can’t estimate the utility. But it reinforces the notion that there is still plenty of opportunity space for tuned/task-specific advances wherever we have data and compute.

Robots

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