#ai-models

#ai-models

November was the month AI went full gladiator mode: three frontier labs released their best models within a week, Google reclaimed the throne with Gemini 3, and open source proved it can win Olympic gold medals in mathematics. Meanwhile, the agent revolution became official doctrine at Microsoft and Google, and China's AI ecosystem hit escape velocity with 10 million app downloads in seven days.

You could almost call it too much of a good thing. AI models have gone open source -- en masse -- to the tune of millions now competing for a place in our applications. There are echoes of the open sourcing of vital enterprise software and tools, with the opening of operating systems, databases, development platforms, and utilities at no cost. There is a difference this time, however. The AI world has virtually exploded into a mind-blowing array of models that handle everything from neural networks to risk-management tools.

Privacy-focused consumer tech company DuckDuckGo launched a subscription plan last year that bundled a VPN service, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration. The company said Thursday that the subscription now gives users access to the latest AI models through Duck.ai without paying extra. The Duck.ai chatbot is free to use, and users get access to models like Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Haiku, Meta's Llama 4 Scout, Mistral AI's Mistral Small 3 24B, and OpenAI's GPT-4o mini.

Scarlett Johansson took action against OpenAI for the unauthorized use of her voice in AI models. Her voice is now being used by the USDA to scare wolves.

The premium plan called ChatGPT Plus guarantees access during blackout periods and includes access to OpenAI's most advanced models, making it attractive for superusers.

The Envision smart glasses utilize multiple AI models to assist blind and vision-impaired users by reading text, describing surroundings, and recognizing faces.

MXFP4 is a 4-bit floating point data type defined by the Open Compute Project, allowing massive compute savings compared to traditional data types used by LLMs.

OpenAI's GPT-5 model marks a significant upgrade in coding and creative writing. However, it still lacks crucial elements needed for true AGI, including continuous learning.

The mannequin representing Claude 3 Sonnet lay on a stage in the center of the room, draped in lightweight mesh fabric and adorned with a black thigh-high sock marked with the word "fuck". Attendees laid offerings of flowers, colorful feathers, a bottle of ranch, and a 3D-printed sign at its feet.

According to Anthropic's commercial terms of service, customers are barred from using the service to 'build a competing product or service, including to train competing AI models' or 'reverse engineer or duplicate' the services.

A group of anonymous Github contributors sued Open AI and Microsoft, claiming their LLMs generated new code snippets similar to theirs but stripped of copyright management information.

Older people use ChatGPT like Google. People in their 20s and 30s use it as a life advisor. College students use it like an operating system.

Meta's new Superintelligence Lab is considering a pivot from their open-source AI model, Behemoth, to developing a closed model due to underwhelming performance.

Google's emphasis on domain-level relevance since 2021 shows that irrelevant content can significantly hurt organic search visibility and traffic for businesses.

We empirically study how several baseline models perform on the task of explainable visual entailment, investigating both off-the-shelf and finetuned model performances.