Foxconn AI Trained in Four Weeks, Suggesting Industry Shift

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

Pinterest AI Labeling Policy Unveiled as Q4 Earnings Top $1B

Popular social media platform Pinterest is now labeling generative AI content. The app, which earned a reputation as fertile ground for design inspiration related to hand-crafted goods and human artistry, has recently been plagued by an onslaught of “AI slop,” something its regular users have been complaining of on Reddit and to Pinterest directly. The GenAI content was often used to redirect people to spammy sites, according to a recent report. Pinterest’s labeling news coincides with an earnings report of $1.15 billion in Q4 revenue, marking an 18 percent increase year-over-year. Continue reading Pinterest AI Labeling Policy Unveiled as Q4 Earnings Top $1B

OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 Model Sees Patterns and Thinks Creatively

OpenAI is releasing a research preview of what it calls its “largest and best” chat model to date, GPT‑4.5, which scales unsupervised learning in pre-training and post-training. As a result, the new chat model has the ability to recognize patterns, draw connections, and generate creative insights without having to draw on time and energy consuming “reasoning.” GPT‑4.5 is currently available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers ($200 per month) and developers subscribing to OpenAI’s API tier. ChatGPT Plus and ChatGPT Team customers are expected to gain access this week. Continue reading OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 Model Sees Patterns and Thinks Creatively

New Blackwell AI Chip Helps Boost Nvidia to Record Quarter

Nvidia delivered stellar earnings again, with profit up 80 percent to $22.09 billion for fiscal Q4, the period that ended January 26, 2025. Record quarterly revenue hit $39.3 billion, a 12 percent uptick from Q3 and a 78 percent increase year-over-year, driven in part by sales of the company’s Blackwell AI chips. The results rebut predictions that the leading-edge chipmaker would suffer due to a recent wave of Chinese AI models created using fewer and largely older chips. That trend rocked Nvidia stock over the past quarter, but the Silicon Valley-based company managed to maintain momentum. Continue reading New Blackwell AI Chip Helps Boost Nvidia to Record Quarter

Round One in Thomson Reuters AI Lawsuit Is a Victory for IP

Thomson Reuters scored a victory defending its intellectual property in the first AI model training case to produce a substantive legal judgment. U.S. District Court of Delaware Judge Stephanos Bibas on Tuesday issued a partial summary judgment for Westlaw parent Thomson Reuters in its copyright infringement case against Ross Intelligence. The court found that after Thomson Reuters refused Ross’ offer to license Westlaw material the startup hired a third-party to procedurally reconstitute the material, resulting in infringement. Ross defenses, including fair use, “all fail,” says the court. Continue reading Round One in Thomson Reuters AI Lawsuit Is a Victory for IP

OpenAI In-House Chip Could Be Ready for Testing This Year

OpenAI is getting close to finalizing its first custom chip design, according to an exclusive report from Reuters that emphasizes the Microsoft-backed AI giant’s goal of reducing its dependency on Nvidia chips. The blueprint for the first-generation OpenAI chip could be finalized as soon as the next few months and sent to Taiwan’s TSMC for fabrication, which will take about six months — “unless OpenAI pays substantially more for expedited manufacturing” — according to the report. Even by usual standards, the training-focused chip is already on a fast track to deployment. Continue reading OpenAI In-House Chip Could Be Ready for Testing This Year

Reasoning Model Competes with Advanced AI at a Lower Cost

Model training continues to hit new lows in terms of cost, a phenomenon known as the commoditization of AI that has rocked Wall Street. An AI reasoning model created for under $50 in cloud compute credits is reportedly performing comparably to established reasoning models such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1 on tests of math and coding aptitude. Called s1-32B, it was created by researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington by customizing Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct, feeding it 1,000 prompts with responses sourced from Google’s new Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental reasoning model. Continue reading Reasoning Model Competes with Advanced AI at a Lower Cost

ByteDance’s AI Model Can Generate Video from Single Image

ByteDance has developed a generative model that can use a single photo to generate photorealistic video of humans in motion. Called OmniHuman-1, the multimodal system supports various visual and audio styles and can generate people doing things like singing, dancing, speaking and moving in a natural fashion. ByteDance says its new technology clears hurdles that hinder existing human-generators — obstacles like short play times and over-reliance on high-quality training data. The diffusion transformer-based OmniHuman addressed those challenges by mixing motion-related conditions into the training phase, a solution ByteDance researchers claim is new. Continue reading ByteDance’s AI Model Can Generate Video from Single Image

Perplexity Bows Real-Time AI Search Tool, Android Assistant

Perplexity joins the list of AI companies launching agents, debuting the Perplexity Assistant for Android. The tool uses reasoning, search, browsers and apps to help mobile users with daily tasks. Concurrently, Perplexity — independently founded in 2022 as a conversational AI search engine — has launched an API called Sonar intended for enterprise and developers who want real-time intelligent search, taking on heavyweights like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. While to date AI search has largely been limited to answers informed by training data, which freezes their knowledge in time, next-gen tools can pull from the Internet in real time. Continue reading Perplexity Bows Real-Time AI Search Tool, Android Assistant

CES: AI Pioneer Yann LeCun on AI Agents, Human Intelligence

During CES 2025 in Las Vegas this week, Meta Vice President and Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun had a compelling conversation with Wing Venture Capital Head of Research Rajeev Chand on the latest hot button topics in the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence. Some of the conclusions were that AI agents will become ubiquitous — but not for 10 to 15 years, human intelligence means different things to different AI experts, and nuclear power remains the best and safest source for powering AI. And, for those looking for more of LeCun’s tweets, he said he no longer posts on X. Continue reading CES: AI Pioneer Yann LeCun on AI Agents, Human Intelligence

CES: Nvidia Unveils New GeForce RTX 50, AI Video Rendering

Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang kicked off CES 2025 with a keynote that was filled with new product announcements and visionary demonstrations of how the company plans to advance the field of AI. The first product that Huang unveiled was the GeForce RTX 50 series of consumer graphics processing units (GPUs). The series is also called RTX Blackwell because it is based on Nvidia’s latest Blackwell microarchitecture design for next generation data center and gaming applications. To showcase RTX Blackwell’s prowess, Huang played an impressively photorealistic video sequence of rich imagery under contrasting light ranges — all rendered in real time. Continue reading CES: Nvidia Unveils New GeForce RTX 50, AI Video Rendering

Google Releases Gemini 2.0 in Shift Toward Agentic Era of AI

Google has introduced Gemini 2.0, the latest version of its multimodal AI model, signaling a shift toward what the company is calling “the agentic era.” The upgraded model promises not only to outperform previous iterations on standard benchmarks but also introduces more proactive, or agentic, functions. The company announced that “Project Astra,” its experimental assistant, would receive updates that allow it to use Google Search, Lens, and Maps, and that “Project Mariner,” a Chrome extension, would enable Gemini 2.0 to navigate a user’s web browser to complete tasks autonomously. Continue reading Google Releases Gemini 2.0 in Shift Toward Agentic Era of AI

World Labs AI Lets Users Create 3D Worlds from Single Photo

World Labs, the AI startup co-founded by Stanford AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, has debuted a “spatial intelligence” system that can generate 3D worlds from a single image. Although the output is not photorealistic, the tech could be a breakthrough for animation companies and video game developers. Deploying what it calls Large World Models (LWMs), World Labs is focused on transforming 2D images into turnkey 3D environments with which users can interact. Observers say that reciprocity is what sets World Labs’ technology apart from offerings by other AI companies that transform 2D to 3D. Continue reading World Labs AI Lets Users Create 3D Worlds from Single Photo

DeepMind Genie 2 Creates Worlds That Emulate Video Games

Google DeepMind’s new Genie 2 is a large foundation world model that generates interactive 3D worlds that are being likened to video games. “Games play a key role in the world of artificial intelligence research,” says Google DeepMind, noting “their engaging nature, challenges and measurable progress make them ideal environments to safely test and advance AI capabilities.” Based on a simple prompt image, Genie 2 is capable of producing “an endless variety of action-controllable, playable 3D environments” — suitable for training and evaluating embodied agents — that can be played by a human or AI agent using keyboard and mouse inputs. Continue reading DeepMind Genie 2 Creates Worlds That Emulate Video Games

Qwen with Questions: Alibaba Previews New Reasoning Model

Alibaba Cloud has released the latest entry in its growing Qwen family of large language models. The new Qwen with Questions (QwQ) is an open-source competitor to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model. As with competing large reasoning models (LRMs), QwQ can correct its own mistakes, relying on extra compute cycles during inference to assess its responses, making it well suited for reasoning tasks like math and coding. Described as an “experimental research model,” this preview version of QwQ has 32-billion-parameters and a 32,000-token context, leading to speculation that a more powerful iteration is in the offing. Continue reading Qwen with Questions: Alibaba Previews New Reasoning Model