Mike Loukides 🧠

O'REILLY's Radar trends to watch: 

• Little Language Models is an educational program that teaches young children about probability, artificial intelligence, and related topics. It’s fun and playful and can enable children to build simple models of their own.
• Grafana and NVIDIA are working on a large language model for observability, apparently given the awkward name LLo11yPop. The model aims to answer natural language questions about system status and performance based on telemetry data.
• Google is open-sourcing SynthID, a system for watermarking text so AI-generated documents can be traced to the LLM that generated them. Watermarks do not affect the accuracy or quality of generated documents. SynthID watermarks resist some tampering, including editing.
• Mistral has released two new models, Ministral 3B and Ministral 8B. These are small models, designed to work on resource-limited “edge” systems. Unlike many of Mistral’s previous small models, these are not open source.
• Anthropic has added a “computer use” API to Claude. Computer use allows the model to take control of the computer and use it to find data by reading the screen, clicking buttons and other affordances, and typing. It’s currently in beta.
• Moonshine is a new open source speech-to-text model that has been optimized for small, resource-constrained devices. It claims accuracy equivalent to Whisper, at five times the speed.
• Meta is releasing a free dataset named Open Materials 2024 to help materials scientists discover new materials.
• Anthropic has published some tools for working with Claude in GitHub. At this point, tools to help analyze financial data and build customer support agents are available.
• NVIDIA has quietly launched Llama-3.1-Nemotron-70B-Instruct-HF, a language model that outperforms both GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 on benchmarks. This model is based on the open source Llama, and it’s relatively small (70B parameters).
• NotebookLM has excited everyone with its ability to generate podcasts. Google has taken it a step farther by adding tools that give users more control over what the virtual podcast participants say.
• Data literacy is the new survival skill: We’ve known this for some time, but it’s all too easy to forget, particularly in the age of AI.
• The Open Source Initiative has a “humble” definition for open source AI. The definition recognizes four distinct categories for data: open, public, obtainable, and unshareable.
• Does training AI models require huge data centers? PrimeIntellect is training a 10B model using distributed, contributed resources.
• OpenAI has published Swarm, a platform for building AI agents, on GitHub. They caution that Swarm is experimental and they will not respond to pull requests. Feel free to join the experiment.
• OpenAI has also released Canvas, an interactive tool for writing code and text with GPT-4o. Canvas is similar to Claude’s Artifacts.
• Two of the newly released Llama 3.2 models—90B and 11B—are multimodal. The 11B model will run comfortably on a laptop. Meta has also released the Llama Stack APIs, a set of APIs to aid developers building generative AI applications.
• OpenAI has announced a pseudo-real-time API. Their goal is to enable building realistic voice applications, including the ability to interrupt the AI in the flow of conversation.
• Will AI-powered glasses become the next blockbuster consumer device? Meta’s Orion prototype could be the killer user interface for AI. It’s not about gaming; it’s about asking AI about the things you see. Now if they can only be manufactured at a decent price point.
• AI avatars are interviewing job candidates. This is not going to go well…
• The Allen Institute has developed a small language model called Molmo that they claim has performance equivalent to GPT-4o.
• Humane Intelligence, an organization founded by Rumman Chowdhury, has offered a prize to developers building an AI vision model that can detect online hate-based images.
• These days, it’s not a surprise that a computer can play chess and other board games. But table tennis? You may prefer the video to the paper.
• The Qwen family of language models, ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters, is getting impressive reviews. Even the largest can be made to run on older GPUs, not just H100s and A100s.
• Now an AI can “prove” it’s human. An AI-based computer vision model has demonstrated the ability to defeat Google’s latest CAPTCHA (reCAPTCHAv2) 100% of the time.
• Open AI is now expanding access to its Advanced Voice Mode to more users. Advanced Voice Mode makes ChatGPT truly conversational: You can interrupt it mid-sentence, and it responds to your tone of voice.
• Neural motion planning is a neural network-based technique that allows robots to plan and execute tasks in unfamiliar environments.