AI & RoboticsNews

Baidu delivers new LLMs ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 undercutting DeepSeek, OpenAI on cost — but they’re not open source (yet)

March 18, 2025
Over the weekend, Chinese web search giant Baidu announced the launch of two new AI models, ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1, a multimodal language model and reasoning model, respectively. Baidu claims they offer state-of-the-art performance on a variety of metrics, besting DeepSeek’s non-reasoning V3 and OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 (how do you like the close name match Baidu chose as well?) on several third-party…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Inching towards AGI: How reasoning and deep research are expanding AI from statistical prediction to structured problem-solving

March 17, 2025
AI has evolved at an astonishing pace. What seemed like science fiction just a few years ago is now an undeniable reality. Back in 2017, my firm launched an AI Center of Excellence. AI was certainly getting better at predictive analytics and many machine learning (ML) algorithms were being used for voice recognition, spam detection, spell checking (and other applications) — but it was early. We…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Netflix Games loses its vice-president of generative AI

March 13, 2025
Five months after Netflix Games announced that generative AI in its game development studios would be a major focus for them, driven by the promotion of Mike Verdu to the vice president in charge of that technology, Verdu has apparently left Netflix Games (confirmed to…
AI & RoboticsNews

Google’s native multimodal AI image generation in Gemini 2.0 Flash impresses with fast edits, style transfers

March 13, 2025
Google’s latest open source AI model Gemma 3 isn’t the only big news from the Alphabet subsidiary today.No, in fact, the spotlight may have been stolen by Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash with native image generation, a new experimental model available for free to users of Google AI Studio and to developers through Google’s Gemini API.It marks the first time a major U.S. tech company has shipped…
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AI & RoboticsNews

Sony testing AI to drive PlayStation characters

March 12, 2025
As a company and first-party platform, PlayStation and Sony have not shied away from using AI as part of their value proposal to consumers. While competitor Microsoft has made a big show about using it for game ideation and prototyping, Sony has instead focused on using AI and machine-learning for frame generation and hardware uses, largely staying away from experimenting with its acclaimed…
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