San Francisco-based AI startup Deep Cogito has released five AI models in preview, making them available under an open-source license agreement. The models come in sizes 3B, 8B, 14B, 32B and 70B, with plans to release 109B, 400B and 671B versions in the weeks and months ahead. As for the current models, “each outperforms the best available open models of the same size, including counterparts from Meta, DeepSeek and Alibaba, across most standard benchmarks,” Deep Cogito claims, noting that the 70B model in particular “outperforms the newly released Llama 4 109B MoE model.” Continue reading Deep Cogito Is Out of Stealth with Hybrid Reasoning Models

Meta Platforms has released its first Llama 4 models, a multimodal trio that ranges from the foundational Behemoth to tiny Scout, with Maverick in between. With 16 experts and only 17B active parameters (the number used per task), Llama Scout is “more powerful than all previous generation Llama models, while fitting in a single Nvidia H100 GPU,” according to Meta. Maverick, with 17B active parameters and 128 experts, is touted as beating GPT-4o and Gemini 2.0 Flash across various benchmarks, “while achieving comparable results to the new DeepSeek v3 on reasoning and coding with less than half the active parameters.” Continue reading Meta Unveils Multimodal Llama 4 Models, Previews Behemoth

Google’s YouTube is rolling out new tools to make YouTube Shorts even more competitive with social-video platform TikTok. The new publishing suite includes an improved video editor, a tool for generating AI stickers, enhanced templates, and a feature that can synchronize content to a musical beat. YouTube says the upgraded editing feature will provide users with the ability to make more precise adjustments, fine-tuning the timing of each clip. Users can “move or remove clips to create a rough version, add music or timed text, and preview their Short to make sure it tells the story the way they want it to,” according to YouTube. Continue reading YouTube Shorts Updates Video Tools to Compete with TikTok

Meta Platforms is developing a deluxe entry for its popular Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses line that is said to incorporate hand-gesture controls and will include a screen for displaying photos and apps. The price tag will reportedly be more than $1,000 (and possibly as high as $1,400) when the item hits the shelves, possibly by the end of this year. Code-named Hypernova, the souped-up eyewear is part of a Meta plan to make a wearable alternative to Apple iPhones. Existing Ray-Ban Meta glasses can pair with Android phones to make calls. Continue reading New Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses to Include Built-In Screen

French video game publisher Ubisoft has created a subsidiary focused on three of its most iconic and narratively cohesive brands: the worlds of the time-shifting actioner “Assassin’s Creed,” anthology mystery “Far Cry,” and tactical combat thriller “Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six.” Essentially a spin-off unit, Ubisoft has secured backing from its minority investor Tencent, which is plowing $1.25 billion into the new venture. The Chinese game giant — sixteenth on the Companies Market Cap list of the world’s most valuable companies, at $593 billion as of this month — in September 2022 upped its stake to 10 percent of Ubisoft. Continue reading Tencent Builds on Ubisoft Stake with $1.25B for New Venture

Just prior to the start of the weekend, Elon Musk announced that his artificial intelligence company xAI is acquiring his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) “in an all-stock transaction,” valuing xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45 billion less $12 billion in debt). The merger has the potential to create a powerful GenAI-powered content platform. The billionaire purchased Twitter in late 2022 for $44 billion, following months of legal skirmishes. According to Musk, X currently touts more than 600 million active users, while “xAI has rapidly become one of the leading AI labs in the world, building models and data centers at unprecedented speed and scale.” Continue reading Elon Musk Announces xAI Corporation Will Purchase X Social

China’s Ant Group is using local semiconductors to train AI at a cost that is 20 percent less than companies typically spend, according to reports. Ant used domestic chips — from companies including Alibaba, an investor in Ant, and Huawei — to launch a unique Mixture of Experts (MoE) training approach that produced results commensurate to training with Nvidia H800 chips. Ant is the latest Chinese company to focus on low cost training, joining a competition triggered by DeepSeek, which in January announced it could build AI comparable to the models released by U.S. companies like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google for billions less. Continue reading Ant Group Stacks Chips to Reduce Development Costs for AI

Utah has become the first state to make app stores responsible for verifying users’ ages. The Utah App Store Accountability Act shifts the burden of proving one’s age from social platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and X to digital storefronts, namely Google Play and Apple’s App Store. Those who create accounts in the state will have to prove they’re over 18 or, if underage, link their account to a parent or guardian’s. Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed the bill into law on Wednesday and it begins taking effect May 7. Google opposed the legislation and lobbied the governor to veto it. Meta, X and Snap applauded the measure and are encouraging other states to follow suit. Continue reading Utah Law Is First in Nation Making App Stores Verify User Age

Snap has marked the six-month anniversary of its fifth generation Spectacles by showcasing new geo-location features that developers can start using now, and previewing what an all-day AR experience might be like, though that capability is not here yet. The latest Spectacles — introduced September 2024 and described as “still very much a developer kit” — have only 45 minutes of standalone battery power. But Snap has made immediately available for developers a swathe of geo-location data for better outdoor AR experiences, showcasing the integrations with gear from Utopia Labs. Continue reading Snap Updates Geo Data for Spectacles, Previews All-Day AR

Cerebras Systems was founded 10 years ago on the belief that there would be a shortage of processors powerful enough to drive enterprise AI computing at scale. Its solution, the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine, is integrated into Cerebras’ CS-3 systems, which will power six new data centers launching this year that the company says will make it “the world’s number one provider of high-speed inference and the largest domestic high speed inference cloud.” Cerebras notes the new facilities will collectively serve over 40 million Llama 70B tokens per second to clients that now include Hugging Face and financial intelligence firm AlphaSense. Continue reading Cerebras Is Moving into Mainstream with New AI Data Centers

Los Angeles-based AI startup Moonvalley has released a video generator purpose-built for entertainment and advertising. Called Marey, its creators say it was designed with the “specifications and tastes” of filmmakers and studios in mind and trained exclusively on owned or fully licensed source data to protect users from lawsuits. Asteria, a partner in the venture, owns a large documentary library through its subsidiary XTR. Its founders say Marey aims to usher in “a new era of GenAI video built to empower — not replace — the creative forces behind modern motion pictures.” Continue reading Moonvalley and Asteria Unveil Cinematic GenVid Model Marey

Meta Platforms has reportedly begun “a small deployment” of its first in-house chip designed for AI training. The accelerator chip is engineered around the open-standard RISC-V architecture. TSMC produced the working samples now being tested. The goal is to create purpose-specific chips that are more efficient than Nvidia’s general purpose GPUs, enjoying the cost-savings that would come with wide use and reducing reliance on outside chip suppliers in a tight market. If the tests go well, Meta plans to scale up production for expanded use by 2026. Details of the new chip’s specifications remain unknown at this time. Continue reading Meta Tests New AI Accelerator Chip Designed with Broadcom

Amazon is experimenting with AI dubbing so Prime Video customers globally can experience content from other territories, gaining access more quickly and efficiently to licensed films and TV series. The company is using a hybrid “AI-aided” system in which localization professionals oversee the AI output to ensure quality control. Currently limited to a dozen movies and series that will be AI-dubbed in English and Latin American Spanish, the pilot will expand if the results prove popular with audiences. In December, Netflix experienced backlash against AI-assisted dubbing, with viewers complaining generative mouth adjustments looked unnatural. Continue reading Amazon Prime Video Tests AI Dubbing for Movies and Series

Taiwan’s Foxconn, the contract manufacturer that assembles Apple’s iPhones, has built its own AI. Called FoxBrain, the company says the large language model was trained in just four weeks with help from Nvidia, using 120 of that company’s H100 chips. FoxBrain has reasoning and mathematical skills and can analyze data and generate code. Initially built for in-house use, Foxconn says it intends to open source the model and hopes it will become a collaborative tool for its partners and enable advancements in manufacturing techniques and supply-chain management. Continue reading Foxconn AI Trained in Four Weeks, Suggesting Industry Shift

Instagram is experimenting with a community chat feature that lets users gather in groups of up to 250. Meta’s photo- and video-sharing network is prototyping the feature internally, though external sources with knowledge of it are comparing it to Discord since it reportedly allows users to form chats around different topics and control who can join. While participation is said to be capped at 250 simultaneous users per community, all are invited to join and message. Instagram has had a flurry of new features, among them a video tool called Edits, and “profile cards” geared toward small businesses that want a more professional presence on the app. Continue reading Instagram Is Internally Testing Discord-Style Community Chat