Nvidia has unveiled the NVLM 1.0 family of multimodal LLMs, a powerful open-source AI that the company says performs comparably to proprietary systems from OpenAI and Google. Led by NVLM-D-72B, with 72 billion parameters, Nvidia’s new entry in the AI race achieved what the company describes as “state-of-the-art results on vision-language tasks, rivaling the leading proprietary models (e.g., GPT-4o) and open-access models.” Nvidia has made the model weights publicly available and says it will also be releasing the training code, a break from the closed approach of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Read more

Microsoft announced that its Copilot AI assistant has received a major overhaul, gaining voice and vision capabilities. Copilot also now has a virtual news reader mode to present headlines, as well as the ability to see what you see and to interact in a more conversational manner. Before a general release, these tools will be trialed among a subset of Copilot Pro users “to gather feedback” and make them “better and safer.” Microsoft AI Executive VP and CEO Mustafa Suleyman says the changes herald “a calmer, more helpful and supportive era of technology, quite unlike anything we’ve seen before.” Read more

OpenAI unveiled major updates at its DevDay conference with the focus largely on making AI more accessible, efficient and affordable. Included were four innovations: Vision Fine-Tuning in the API, Model Distillation, Prompt Caching and the public beta of Realtime API. The approach underscores OpenAI’s effort to empower its developer ecosystem even as it continues to compete for end-users in the enterprise space. The Realtime API gives developers the option of building “nearly real-time” speech-to-speech app experiences, selecting from among six OpenAI voices. Vision Fine-Tuning for GPT-4o enables customization of the model’s visual understanding of images and text. Read more

Accenture is forming an internal Nvidia Business Group staffed with 30,000 global employees trained to help clients “reinvent processes and scale enterprise AI adoption with AI agents,” the consulting firm announced. Accenture will also use its AI Refinery platform to help companies customize AI models and agents using the full Nvidia AI stack including AI Foundry, AI Enterprise and Omniverse. “With generative AI demand driving $3 billion in Accenture bookings in its recently closed fiscal year, the new group will help clients lay the foundation for agentic AI functionality,” Accenture said. Read more

Reuters and CNN are among the global news services that will be charging those who want access to their digital content beyond a free quota. Reuters plans to add $1 per week pricing in the U.S., Canada and parts of Europe in the weeks ahead, while CNN is beginning to ask visitors for $4 a month or $30 per year. Vox Media’s popular tech publication The Verge is also said to be considering subscription fees. The outlets are pursuing digital monetization strategies as ad-supported models are increasingly challenging for those who aren’t Google, Meta or Amazon. Read more