Multi-robot collaboration,Grok 3 , smallest video language model, Generative AI Model for Gameplay, AI co-scientist, Mistral Saba, Fiverr Go, Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio, Pikaswaps & more

Multi-robot collaboration,Grok 3 , smallest video language model, Generative AI Model for Gameplay, AI co-scientist, Mistral Saba, Fiverr Go, Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio, Pikaswaps & more

Hey there! Welcome back to AI Brews - a concise roundup of this week's major developments in AI.

In today’s issue (Issue #94):

1. AI Pulse: Weekly News at a Glance

2. Weekly Spotlight: Noteworthy Reads and Open-source Projects

3. AI Toolbox: Product Picks of the Week

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🗞️🗞️ AI Pulse: Weekly News at a Glance

1. xAI unveiled an early preview of Grok 3 reasoning model, which topped the Chatbot Arena leaderboard. Grok 3, with a context window of 1 million tokens, has leading performance across both academic benchmarks and real-world user preferences. The model is available for free now through X and Grok.com [Details].

2. Figure introduced Helix, a generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model that unifies perception, language understanding, and learned control to overcome multiple longstanding challenges in robotics. Video below shows collaborative grocery storage. A single set of Helix neural network weights runs simultaneously on two robots as they work together to put away groceries neither robot has ever seen before [Details].

3. Microsoft introduced Muse, the first World and Human Action Model (WHAM). It’s a generative AI model of a video game that can generate game visuals, controller actions, or both. Microsoft is open sourcing the weights and sample data [Details].

4. Hugging Face released SmolVLM2, lightweight multimodal models designed to analyze video content. The 2.2B model is the go-to choice for vision and video tasks, while the 500M and 256M models represent the smallest video language models ever released [Details].

5. Google introduced AI co-scientist, a multi-agent AI system built with Gemini 2.0 as a virtual scientific collaborator to help scientists generate novel hypotheses and research proposals [Details].

6. Phind, the AI search engine has been updated to go beyond text answers to include images, diagrams, interactive widgets, cards, and other rich visual outputs within the answer itself [Details].

7. StepFun released Step-Video-T2V and Step-Audio. Step-Video-T2V is a state-of-the-art (SoTA) text-to-video pre-trained model with 30 billion parameters and the capability to generate videos up to 204 frames. Step-Audio is a production-ready open-source model family for intelligent and natural speech interaction [Details]

8. Perplexity AI launched a Deep Research tool that performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report. It’s free for up to 5 queries per day for non-subscribers and 500 queries per day for Pro users [Details].

9. Sakana AI introduced AI CUDA Engineer, the first comprehensive agentic framework for fully automatic CUDA kernel discovery and optimization [Details].

10. Pika launched Pikaswaps, a new feature to replace anything in your videos using photos you upload, or scenes you describe. Pika also launched an official iOS app [Link].

11. OpenAI introduced SWE-Lancer, a new benchmark of over 1,400 freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork, valued at $1 million USD total in real-world payouts. Sonnet 3.5 performs best, followed by o1 and then GPT-4o [Details]

12. Mistral released Mistral Saba, a 24B parameter model trained on curated datasets from across the Middle East and South Asia. It supports Arabic and many Indian-origin languages, and is particularly strong in South Indian-origin languages such as Tamil [Details].

13. Google released PaliGemma 2 Mix, an upgraded vision-language model in the Gemma family.PaliGemma 2 mix can solve tasks such as short and long captioning, optical character recognition (OCR), image question answering, object detection and segmentation [Details].

14. Fiverr launched Fiverr Go, to enable freelancers doing voice-over, graphic design, and certain related work the ability to train AI on their content and to charge customers for access [Details].

15. Meta announced LlamaCon, a developer conference for 2025, exploring the potential of Llama [Details].

16. LangChain released LangMem SDK, a library that helps your agents learn and improve through long-term memory [Details].

17. Perplexity AI released R1 1776, a DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model that has been post-trained to remove censorship [Details].

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🔦 Weekly Spotlight: Noteworthy Reads and Open-source Projects

1. The Ultra-Scale Playbook: Training LLMs on GPU Clusters - a free, open-source book by Hugging Face.

2. OmniParser V2: Turning Any LLM into a Computer Use Agent.

3. Animate Anyone 2: High-Fidelity Character Image Animation with Environment Affordance.

4. Arch: an intelligent (edge and LLM) proxy designed for agentic applications - to help you protect, observe, and build agentic tasks by simply connecting (existing) APIs.

5. Mcp.run: Host, discover, publish, and manage Model Context Protocol servlets for LLMs + agents.

6. Aide: Open Source AI-native code editor. It is a fork of VS Code, and integrates tightly with the leading agentic framework on swebench-lite

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🔍 🛠️ AI Toolbox: Product Picks of the Week

1. Trupeer: Let AI turn your simple screen recordings into polished videos and detailed guides.

2. Beatoven.ai: AI composer for crafting background music

3. MGX (MetaGPT X): AI agent development team by MetaGPT

4. Proxy 1.0 : AI-powered digital assistant that explores the web and executes tasks through simple conversation.

Last week’s issue

Thanks for reading and have a nice weekend! 🎉 Mariam.