What if AI becomes as ubiquitous as the internet, but runs locally and transparently on our devices?
Fascinating TED talk by @thomwolf on open source AI and its future impact.
Imagine this for AI: instead of black box models running in distant data centers, we get transparent AI that runs locally on our phones and laptops, often without needing internet access. If the original team moves on? No problem - resilience is one of the beauties of open source. Anyone (companies, collectives, or individuals) can adapt and fix these models.
This is a compelling vision of AI's future that solves many of today's concerns around AI transparency and centralized control.
Is this the best tool to extract clean info from PDFs, handwriting and complex documents yet?
Open source olmOCR just dropped and the results are impressive.
Tested the free demo with various documents, including a handwritten Claes Oldenburg letter. The speed is impressive: 3000 tokens/second on your own GPU - that's 1/32 the cost of GPT-4o ($190/million pages). Game-changer for content extraction and digital archives.
To achieve this, Ai2 trained a 7B vision language model on 260K pages from 100K PDFs using "document anchoring" - combining PDF metadata with page images.
Best part: it actually understands document structure (columns, tables, equations) instead of just jumbling everything together like most OCR tools. Their human eval results back this up.
๐ Just launched: A toolkit of 20 powerful AI tools that journalists can use right now - transcribe, analyze, create. 100% free & open-source.
Been testing all these tools myself and created a searchable collection of the most practical ones - from audio transcription to image generation to document analysis. No coding needed, no expensive subscriptions.
Some highlights I've tested personally: - Private, on-device transcription with speaker ID in 100+ languages using Whisper - Website scraping that just works - paste a URL, get structured data - Local image editing with tools like Finegrain (impressive results) - Document chat using Qwen 2.5 72B (handles technical papers well)
Sharing this early because the best tools come from the community. Drop your favorite tools in the comments or join the discussion on what to add next!
Trying something new to keep you ahead of the curve: The 5 AI stories of the week - a weekly curation of the most important AI news you need to know. Do you like it?
๐ฏ Perplexity drops their FIRST open-weight model on Hugging Face: A decensored DeepSeek-R1 with full reasoning capabilities. Tested on 1000+ examples for unbiased responses.
Will we soon all have our own personalized AI news agents? And what does it mean for journalism?
Just built a simple prototype based on the Hugging Face course. It lets you get customized news updates on any topic.
Not perfect yet, but you can see where things could go: we'll all be able to build personalized AI agents that curate & analyze news for each of us. And users who could decide to build custom news products for their needs, such as truly personalized newsletters or podcasts.
The implications for both readers & news organizations are significant. To name a few: - Will news articles remain the best format for informing people? - What monetization model will work for news organizations? - How do you create an effective conversion funnel?
๐ Multimodal > OpenGVLab released InternVideo 2.5 Chat models, new video LMs with long context > AIDC released Ovis2 model family along with Ovis dataset, new vision LMs in different sizes (1B, 2B, 4B, 8B, 16B, 34B), with video and OCR support > ColQwenStella-2b is a multilingual visual retrieval model that is sota in it's size > Hoags-2B-Exp is a new multilingual vision LM with contextual reasoning, long context video understanding
๐ฌ LLMs A lot of math models! > Open-R1 team released OpenR1-Math-220k large scale math reasoning dataset, along with Qwen2.5-220K-Math fine-tuned on the dataset, OpenR1-Qwen-7B > Nomic AI released new Nomic Embed multilingual retrieval model, a MoE with 500 params with 305M active params, outperforming other models > DeepScaleR-1.5B-Preview is a new DeepSeek-R1-Distill fine-tune using distributed RL on math > LIMO is a new fine-tune of Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct on Math
๐ฃ๏ธ Audio > Zonos-v0.1 is a new family of speech recognition models, which contains the model itself and embeddings
๐ผ๏ธ Vision and Image Generation > We have ported DepthPro of Apple to transformers for your convenience! > illustrious-xl-v1.0 is a new illustration generation model
RAG techniques continuously evolve to enhance LLM response accuracy by retrieving relevant external data during generation. To keep up with current AI trends, new RAG types incorporate deep step-by-step reasoning, tree search, citations, multimodality and other effective techniques.
3. Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (CoRAG) -> Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (2501.14342) Retrieves information step-by-step and adjusts it, also deciding how much compute power to use at test time. If needed it reformulates queries.
โญ๏ธ The AI Energy Score project just launched - this is a game-changer for making informed decisions about AI deployment.
You can now see exactly how much energy your chosen model will consume, with a simple 5-star rating system. Think appliance energy labels, but for AI.
Looking at transcription models on the leaderboard is fascinating: choosing between whisper-tiny or whisper-large-v3 can make a 7x difference. Real-time data on these tradeoffs changes everything.
166 models already evaluated across 10 different tasks, from text generation to image classification. The whole thing is public and you can submit your own models to test.
Why this matters: - Teams can pick efficient models that still get the job done - Developers can optimize for energy use from day one - Organizations can finally predict their AI environmental impact
If you're building with AI at any scale, definitely worth checking out.
๐ฅ Video AI is taking over! Out of 17 papers dropped on Hugging Face today, 6 are video-focused - from Sliding Tile Attention to On-device Sora. The race for next-gen video tech is heating up! ๐ฌ๐
๐ข SmolLM2 paper released! Learn how the ๐ค team built one of the best small language models: from data choices to training insights. Check out our findings and share your thoughts! ๐ค๐ก
This week in open AI was ๐ฅ Let's recap! ๐ค merve/january-31-releases-679a10669bd4030090c5de4d LLMs ๐ฌ > Huge: AllenAI released new Tรผlu models that outperform DeepSeek R1 using Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) based on Llama 3.1 405B ๐ฅ > Mistral AI is back to open-source with their "small" 24B models (base & SFT), with Apache 2.0 license ๐ฑ > Alibaba Qwen released their 1M context length models Qwen2.5-Instruct-1M, great for agentic use with Apache 2.0 license ๐ฅ > Arcee AI released Virtuoso-medium, 32.8B LLMs distilled from DeepSeek V3 with dataset of 5B+ tokens > Velvet-14B is a new family of 14B Italian LLMs trained on 10T tokens in six languages > OpenThinker-7B is fine-tuned version of Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on OpenThoughts dataset
VLMs & vision ๐ > Alibaba Qwen is back with Qwen2.5VL, amazing new capabilities ranging from agentic computer use to zero-shot localization ๐ฅ > NVIDIA released new series of Eagle2 models with 1B and 9B sizes > DeepSeek released Janus-Pro, new any-to-any model (image-text generation from image-text input) with MIT license > BEN2 is a new background removal model with MIT license!
Audio ๐ฃ๏ธ > YuE is a new open-source music generation foundation model, lyrics-to-song generation
Small but mighty: 82M parameters, runs locally, speaks multiple languages. The best part? It's Apache 2.0 licensed! This could unlock so many possibilities โจ
