News/Open-source
New AI Tool Enables Real-Time Face-Swapping on Webcams
Rapid advancements in AI-powered face swapping technology are raising concerns about potential misuse and fraud as tools become more accessible to the general public. Introducing Deep-Live-Cam: A new open-source AI tool has emerged that enables real-time face swapping on webcams, sparking both excitement and apprehension in the tech community. Deep-Live-Cam can apply a face from a single photo to a live webcam video, accurately mimicking pose, lighting, and facial expressions. The software has quickly gained viral attention on social media platforms, showcasing its capabilities and ease of use. Available as a free, open-source project on GitHub, Deep-Live-Cam combines existing technologies...
read Aug 13, 2024How Open-Source ML Library GGML Empowers Efficient AI Development
Introduction to ggml: ggml is an open-source machine learning library focused on Transformer inference, written in C and C++ with a growing community of developers. The library is similar to PyTorch and TensorFlow but is still in early development stages with rapidly changing fundamentals. ggml has gained popularity alongside projects like llama.cpp and whisper.cpp, and is used by various on-device LLM projects such as ollama, jan, and LM Studio. Key advantages of ggml: The library offers several benefits that make it an attractive choice for developers working on machine learning projects. Minimalism is a core feature, with the entire library...
read Aug 12, 2024Attention-Free AI Model ‘Falcon Mamba’ Launches on Hugging Face
The development of Falcon Mamba, a groundbreaking attention-free language model, marks a significant advancement in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. Introducing Falcon Mamba: Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi has released Falcon Mamba, the first strong attention-free 7B model, under the TII Falcon License 2.0. The model is open access and available within the Hugging Face ecosystem for research and application purposes. Falcon Mamba addresses the sequence scaling limitations of traditional transformer models without compromising performance. The model is based on the original Mamba architecture, with additional RMS normalization layers for stable training at scale....
read Aug 12, 2024Meta Announces Llama 3.1 Impact Grants Program to Support Open Source AI
Meta's Llama 3.1 Impact Grants program aims to support innovative applications of open source AI, building on the success of last year's initiative to address global challenges in education, the environment, and open innovation. Expanding AI accessibility: Meta is committed to making AI benefits widely available through open source technology, seeking to extend opportunities to more communities worldwide. The company believes AI can significantly enhance human productivity, creativity, and quality of life while driving economic growth and advancements in various fields. By offering open source AI models, Meta aims to democratize access to cutting-edge technology for individuals and organizations globally....
read Aug 12, 2024OpenDevin Launches, Offers Open-Source Platform for Making AI Agents
OpenDevin, a new open-source platform for developing AI software agents, has been introduced by a team of researchers and contributors from academia and industry. This platform aims to create AI agents capable of interacting with the world in ways similar to human developers, potentially advancing the field of artificial intelligence and software development. Platform capabilities and design: OpenDevin allows for the implementation of new AI agents that can write code, interact with command lines, and browse the web, mimicking the actions of human software developers. The platform provides a sandboxed environment for safe code execution, ensuring that AI agents can...
read Aug 12, 2024How to Try Open-Source AI Image Generation Tool Flux.1
Flux.1, a new open-source AI image generator, has emerged as a potential rival to Midjourney, offering high-quality results and increased accessibility for users with varying technical capabilities. The big picture: Flux.1, developed by Black Forest Labs, is making waves in the AI image generation space with its open-source nature and ability to run on consumer-grade hardware, potentially democratizing access to high-quality generative AI tools. Flux.1 comes in three versions: Pro, Dev, and Schnell, catering to different user needs and hardware capabilities. The model's ability to run locally on high-performance laptops sets it apart from competitors that rely on cloud-based processing....
read Aug 8, 2024LG Releases South Korea’s First Open-Source AI Model
LG's introduction of Exaone 3.0, South Korea's first open-source AI model, marks a significant milestone in the country's artificial intelligence sector and presents a challenge to global tech giants in the field of language AI. The big picture: LG AI Research's launch of Exaone 3.0 represents South Korea's entry into the competitive open-source AI arena, potentially reshaping the global AI landscape and demonstrating the country's growing capabilities in artificial intelligence technology. Exaone 3.0 is a 7.8 billion parameter model that excels in both Korean and English language tasks, positioning it as a versatile tool for various applications. The model's open-source...
read Aug 8, 2024Open-Source AI Image Generator ‘Flux’ Just Launched — Here’s How to Get Access
The AI image generation landscape is evolving rapidly with the introduction of Flux, a new open-source model from startup Black Forest Labs that's drawing comparisons to industry leaders like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. Key features and availability: Flux offers a range of options for users, from commercial licenses to faster, lightweight models suitable for personal use. The model is available in three versions: Pro (with a commercial license), Dev, and Schnell (mid-weight and fast models). Users can access Flux through various platforms, including NightCafe, Poe, Based Labs, Hugging Face, and Fal.ai. For those preferring local operation, Flux can be downloaded...
read Aug 4, 2024Open-Source Speech Recognition Model ‘Medusa’ Just Dropped, Outperforms Whisper
Whisper-Medusa, a new open-source AI model developed by aiOla, combines OpenAI's Whisper technology with aiOla's innovations to create a faster and more efficient automatic speech recognition tool. This development promises significant improvements in speech-to-text technology and has implications for numerous industries. Technological advancements and key features: Whisper-Medusa outperforms its predecessor, OpenAI's Whisper, by operating 50% faster without compromising accuracy: The model predicts ten tokens at a time, compared to Whisper's one-at-a-time approach, resulting in a significant speed boost for speech prediction and generation runtime. aiOla currently offers Whisper-Medusa as a 10-head model, with plans to release a 20-head version maintaining...
read Aug 3, 2024NTIA Recommends Monitoring AI Risks While Supporting Open-Weight Models for Innovation
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has released a report supporting the widespread availability of powerful AI models, known as open-weight models, to promote innovation and accessibility. However, the report also calls for active monitoring of potential risks and outlines steps for collecting evidence, evaluating it, and taking action if necessary. Key recommendations: The report recommends that the U.S. government refrain from restricting the availability of open model weights for currently available systems while actively monitoring for potential risks: The government should develop an ongoing program to collect evidence of risks and benefits, evaluate that evidence, and act on...
read Aug 3, 2024How Zuckerberg’s Open-Source AI Push Could Reshape Tech
Mark Zuckerberg's recent essay advocating for open-source AI development has sparked significant discussion in the tech industry, highlighting the potential benefits and challenges of making advanced AI models more accessible. Key arguments for open-source AI: Zuckerberg presents several compelling reasons for supporting open-source AI development, emphasizing its potential to democratize access and improve safety: Open-source AI can reduce costs for developers, with Zuckerberg claiming that running inference on Llama 3.1 405B on private infrastructure is approximately 50% cheaper than using closed models like GPT-4. The approach promotes transparency and wider scrutiny, potentially enhancing the safety of AI systems as they...
read Aug 2, 2024How to Prevent the Misuse of Open-Source AI Models
The rise of open source AI models and the need for tamperproofing safeguards to prevent misuse are highlighting the complex challenges and opportunities surrounding the development and deployment of powerful AI systems. Key Takeaways: Researchers have developed a new training technique that could make it harder to remove safety restrictions from open source AI models like Meta's Llama 3, which are designed to prevent the models from generating harmful or inappropriate content. The technique involves replicating the modification process used to remove safeguards and then altering the model's parameters to ensure that attempts to make the model respond to problematic...
read Aug 1, 2024Black Forest Labs’ ‘Flux’ Is the Lates Open-Source Text-to-Image Model
Flux by Black Forest Labs sets a new standard for open-source text-to-image models with its impressive 12B parameters and Midjourney-like aesthetics. Introducing Flux: Black Forest Labs, the team behind Stable Diffusion, has released Flux, the largest state-of-the-art open-source text-to-image model to date: Flux pushes the boundaries of creativity and performance, delivering high-quality visuals reminiscent of Midjourney. The model boasts an impressive 12B parameters, setting a new standard for open-source text-to-image models. Three Variations of Flux: BFL has released three versions of the model, each catering to different user needs and licensing requirements: FLUX.1 [dev]: The base model, open-sourced with a...
read Aug 1, 2024Google’s Gemma 2 2B is a Small Model with Big Impact
Google's Gemma 2 2B represents a significant breakthrough in AI efficiency, offering performance on par with industry leaders despite its compact size. This development could potentially reshape the AI landscape, making advanced capabilities more accessible and deployable. Gemma 2 2B challenges the notion that bigger is better in AI: With just 2.6 billion parameters, Google's new language model achieves results comparable to or surpassing models like GPT-3.5 and Mistral 8x7B, which have around ten times more parameters. Independent testing by LMSYS saw Gemma 2 2B score 1130 in their evaluation arena, slightly outperforming GPT-3.5-Turbo-0613 (1117) and Mixtral-8x7B (1114). The model...
read Aug 1, 2024Biden Administration Calls for Increased Monitoring of Open-Weight AI Models
The Biden administration is calling for increased monitoring of open-weight AI models to assess potential risks and inform future regulations, while acknowledging the current lack of capacity to effectively respond to these risks. Key focus areas for monitoring open-weight models: The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) suggests focusing on three main areas to address the risks posed by open-weight AI models: Collecting evidence on the capabilities of the models to monitor specific risks Evaluating and comparing indicators of these risks Adopting policies that target the identified risks Defining open-weight models and their unique challenges: Open-weight models are foundation models...
read Jul 31, 2024Writer’s Specialized AI Models for Healthcare, Finance Are Very Good and Open-Source
The launch of specialized AI models by Writer aims to revolutionize the adoption of artificial intelligence in the highly regulated healthcare and financial services industries, addressing concerns about accuracy, safety, and compliance. Breaking new ground in domain-specific AI: Writer's Palmyra-Med-70b and Palmyra-Fin-70b models are tailored specifically for healthcare and finance, respectively, and claim to outperform larger, general-purpose AI models in domain-specific tasks: The healthcare model, Palmyra-Med-70b, achieved an average accuracy of 85.9% across medical benchmarks in zero-shot attempts, surpassing competitors like Med-PaLM-2. Palmyra-Fin-70b is the first AI model to pass the challenging CFA Level III exam, demonstrating its advanced capabilities...
read Jul 31, 2024Galileo Benchmark Shows Open-Source AI Models Challenging Proprietary Dominance
Galileo's latest benchmark reveals open-source AI models are rapidly catching up to their proprietary counterparts, potentially democratizing advanced AI and accelerating innovation across industries. Shifting AI landscape: The second annual Hallucination Index from Galileo evaluated 22 leading large language models, revealing that the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models has narrowed significantly in just eight months: Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet outperformed offerings from OpenAI, which dominated last year's rankings, indicating a changing of the guard in the AI arms race. Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash emerged as the most cost-effective option, delivering strong results at a fraction of the price...
read Jul 31, 2024Zyphra Launches Open-Source Small Language Model Zamba2
The recently released Zamba2-2.7B is a cutting-edge small language model that delivers superior performance and efficiency, underscoring the growing prominence and potential of SLMs in the AI landscape. Key Takeaways from Zamba2-2.7B Release: Zyphra's latest model, Zamba2-2.7B, sets a new standard for small language models, offering impressive capabilities and efficiency: Zamba2-2.7B achieves twice the speed and 27% reduced memory overhead compared to other models, matching the performance of larger 7B models. The model is trained on a substantial dataset of approximately 3 trillion tokens derived from Zyphra's proprietary datasets, ensuring high-quality and relevant training data. Advanced techniques such as interleaved...
read Jul 31, 2024Takeaways from the Zuck-Huang Chat at SIGGRAPH this Week
The CEOs of NVIDIA and Meta recently discussed the future of open-source AI and virtual assistants, envisioning AI becoming as ubiquitous as websites and social media for businesses. Democratizing AI Creation: Meta launched AI Studio, a platform designed to make AI development accessible to millions of creators and small businesses. AI Studio allows users to create, share, and discover AI characters, potentially opening up AI development to a wider audience. Zuckerberg believes that in the future, every business will have an AI, just like they have email addresses, websites, and social media accounts today. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-cmMcMZoZ4[/embed] NVIDIA's AI Advancements: NVIDIA showcased...
read Jul 30, 2024Meta’s SAM 2 Model A Big Step for Object Segmentation in Videos
The Meta Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) represents a significant advancement in object segmentation for both images and videos, with the potential to revolutionize video segmentation and enable seamless application across various image and video use cases. Key features and capabilities: SAM 2 is the first unified model for real-time, promptable object segmentation in images and videos, offering improved accuracy and performance compared to existing solutions: SAM 2 achieves better video segmentation performance than current methods while requiring three times less interaction time. The model can segment any object in any video or image without the need for custom...
read Jul 29, 2024Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Advocate for Open-Source AI Development to Drive Innovation and Trust
The open-source approach to AI development will drive innovation and benefit society, argue two prominent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Martin Casado and Ion Stoica make a case for keeping AI models transparent and modifiable, contending that this approach can foster rapid progress without compromising security. Key arguments for open-source AI: Casado and Stoica believe that an open-source framework is essential for realizing AI's full potential: Open-source models allow for greater collaboration among researchers and developers, accelerating the pace of innovation and enabling more rapid improvements to AI systems. Transparency in AI development can help build public trust by allowing for greater...
read Jul 28, 2024Weekly Recap: Open-Source AI Models, UBI and Domestic Policy
The open-source AI revolution gains momentum as Meta's Llama 3.1 narrows the gap with proprietary models, signaling a strategic shift towards commoditizing foundational AI technologies to capture value in adjacent markets. Open-source AI progress and challenges: Meta's release of Llama 3.1 marks a significant milestone in open-source AI, matching the performance of closed-source models on key benchmarks and prompting questions about the future of AI development: Meta's "commoditize your complement" approach aims to make large language models (LLMs) more generic and accessible, potentially reducing the market value of core AI models while positioning Meta to profit from the surrounding ecosystem....
read Jul 27, 2024Releases of High Profile Open-Source AI Models Represent The AI Race’s Biggest Shift Yet
The AI race is entering a new phase as the focus shifts from foundational models to the products they power, with Meta and other tech giants well-positioned to capitalize on this transition. Open source driving down AI costs: Meta's release of Llama 3.1, an open-source AI model, is narrowing the performance gap between open and closed-source AI while significantly reducing operating costs compared to models like OpenAI's GPT-4. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, is leading a campaign to drive down the cost of accessing foundational AI models, drawing parallels to the success of open standards like Linux in the early 2000s....
read Jul 27, 2024Open Source AI Sparks Debate at Y Combinator Gathering
Open source AI is sparking excitement and debate among tech founders, venture capitalists, and policymakers as a potential disruptor to Big Tech's dominance in the AI race. Key players convene at Y Combinator event: Startup incubator program Y Combinator hosted a gathering of founders, investors, and US policymakers to discuss the implications of open source AI for the tech industry: FTC Chairperson Lina Khan and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter emphasized the importance of open source AI in fostering competition and preventing Big Tech from controlling the market. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan brought on policy expert Luther Lowe to facilitate...
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