What Matters in AI Right Now

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Colorful LEGO bricks labeled for AI concepts: prompting, agentic, guardrails, evals, RAG, fine-tuning, computer use, async programming.

Jun 11, 2025

FLUX.1 Kontext’s Consistent Characters, Benchmarking Costs Climb, Mary Meeker’s Action-Packed AI Report, Better Video Gen

The Batch AI News and Insights: There’s a new breed of GenAI Application Engineers who can build more-powerful applications faster than was possible before, thanks to generative AI.

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy, Computer Use Gains Momentum, Fine Control of Fine-Tuning

Bar chart comparing accuracy and percentile scores of DeepSeek models and OpenAI models across benchmarks.

DeepSeek Sharpens Its Reasoning: DeepSeek-R1, an affordable rival to OpenAI’s o1

Two colleagues discuss their chatbot’s success; one suggests hiring an AI Product Manager.

Tumbling Training Costs, Desktop AI Supercomputer, Tighter AI Export Restrictions, Improved Contrastive Loss

Robots building a wooden house frame under sunny sky. Teamwork, technology, and construction. Future automation in construction.

Jun 4, 2025

DeepSeek-R1 Refreshed, AI’s Energy Conundrum, Agents Get Phished, Machine Translation in Action

The Batch AI News and Insights: Everyone can benefit by learning to code with AI! At AI Fund, the venture studio I lead, everyone — not just the engineers — can vibe code or use more sophisticated AI-assisted coding techniques.

Bar chart showing proposed 2026 U.S. science funding cuts vs. 2025 for agencies like USFS, NSF, NASA, and DoE.

May 28, 2025

Claude 4 Advances Code Gen, How DeepSeek Built V3 For $5.6m, Google I/O Roundup, O’Reilly Versus OpenAI

The Batch AI News and Insights: I am alarmed by the proposed cuts to U.S. funding for basic research, analyzed here, and the impact this would have for U.S. competitiveness in AI and other areas.

Cartoon: Woman at desk; man in sandbox with shovel saying, "I'm experimenting!" in office setting.

May 21, 2025

Codex’s Robot Dev Team, Grok’s Fixation on South Africa, Saudi Arabia’s AI Power Play, 4-Bit Efficiency With 16-Bit Accuracy

The Batch AI News and Insights: In the age of AI, large corporations — not just startups — can move fast. I often speak with large companies’ C-suite and Boards about AI strategy and implementation, and would like to share some ideas that are applicable to big companies.

Black stopwatch icon showing elapsed time, commonly used to represent speed, countdowns, or time tracking.

May 14, 2025

Recipes For Reasoning, Open and Compact Code Generator, Looser AI Regulations, More Factual Output

The Batch AI News and Insights: AI’s ability to make tasks not just cheaper, but also faster, is underrated in its importance in creating business value.

Blue performance gauge with needle pointing to maximum, indicating high level or peak performance.

May 7, 2025

ChatGPT Grovels, Qwen3 Takes on DeepSeek-R1, Johnson & Johnson Reveals AI Strategy, Easy Reasoning Hack

The Batch AI News and Insights: I’m delighted to announce that AI Fund has closed $190M for our new fund, in an oversubscribed round.

Basketball 3-point shooting chart with AI-generated student portraits and stats for volume and accuracy.

Apr 30, 2025

OpenAI’s Hit Image Generator, Hot AI Startups, Better Recommendations, Music Generation for Pros

The Batch AI News and Insights: I hope we can empower everyone to build with AI.

Code snippet showing ‘Keep Building!’ printed in multiple programming languages including Python, Java, JavaScript, and C++.

Apr 23, 2025

OpenAI’s Five New Models, Hugging Face’s Open Robot, U.S. Tightens Grip on AI Chips, Text-Only LLMs Go Multimodal

The Batch AI News and Insights: Even though I’m a much better Python than JavaScript developer, with AI assistance, I’ve been writing a lot of JavaScript code recently.

Cartoon of two coworkers coding; one struggles with evaluations, the other iterates quickly through model updates and test cases.

Apr 16, 2025

Google Unveils Gemini 2.5, MCP Gains Momentum, Behind Sam Altman’s Fall and Rise, LLMs That Understand Misspellings

The Batch AI News and Insights: I’ve noticed that many GenAI application projects put in automated evaluations (evals) of the system’s output probably later — and rely on humans to manually examine and judge outputs longer — than they should.

Black toddler sneakers with white soles on wooden floor, featuring Velcro strap and soft inner lining for comfort.

Apr 09, 2025

Inside the Mind of Claude, Llama 4’s Mixture of Vision-Language Experts, More Open Multimodal Models, Neural Net for Tabular Data

The Batch AI News and Insights: I am so sorry that the U.S. is letting down our friends and allies.

Cartoon of a relaxed man saying “Relax! I’m lazy prompting!” while lounging under a beach umbrella near a stressed coworker at a desk.

Apr 02, 2025

Open Voice-to-Voice With Vision, ChatGPT Creates Emotional Bonds, Human Action in 3D, Web Scrapers Caught in Maze

The Batch AI News and Insights: Contrary to standard prompting advice that you should give LLMs the context they need to succeed, I find it’s sometimes faster to be lazy and dash off a quick, imprecise prompt and see what happens.

Cartoon of a man playing violin saying “I’m fine-tuning!” while a woman at her desk covers her ears, replying “Did you try prompting?”

Mar 26, 2025

Compact Vision-Language with Open Weights, Faster Learning, Diffusion in Few Steps, LLMs Aid Tutors

The Batch AI News and Insights: Fine-tuning small language models has been gaining traction over the past half year.

AYA Vision architecture diagram showing vision encoder, multimodal merging, and LLM backbone for AI-powered image processing.

Mar 19, 2025

Inside Google’s Co-Scientist, Copyright Office Weighs Generated Works, Multilingual (and Good at All of Them), Diffusion for Materials Design

The Batch AI News and Insights: Last Friday on Pi Day, we held AI Dev 25, a new conference for AI Developers.

Illustration of a programmer at a computer displaying PyTorch code, while a smiling colleague gives a thumbs-up in approval.

Mar 12, 2025

DeepSeek-R1 Uncensored, QwQ-32B Puts Reasoning in Smaller Model, Phi-4-multimodal Takes Spoken Input, Training AI May Not Be Fair Use

The Batch AI News and Insights: Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it.

Diagram of an RQ-Transformer speech system with Helium and Depth Transformers for audio processing.

Mar 05, 2025

GPT-4.5 Goes Big, Claude 3.7 Reasons, Alexa+ Goes Agentic, Generating Text Like an Image

The Batch AI News and Insights: Continuing our discussion on the Voice Stack, I’d like to explore an area that today’s voice-based systems mostly struggle with: Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and the turn-taking paradigm of communication.

Diagram comparing direct audio generation with a foundation model vs. a voice pipeline using STT, LLM, and TTS.

Feb 26, 2025

Meta Reads Minds, Big AI Spending Climbs, Deepfakes Appropriate Celeb Likenesses, Reasoning in Vectors

The Batch AI News and Insights: The Voice Stack is improving rapidly. Systems that interact with users via speaking and listening will drive many new applications.