#open-source AI

#open-source AI

If old sci-fi shows are anything to go by, we're all using our computers wrong. We're still typing with our fingers, like cave people, instead of talking out loud the way the future was supposed to be. Have you ever seen Picard touch a keyboard? Of course not. And it's odd because our computers are all capable of turning speech into text by default. The problem? It just doesn't work very well. Or, at least, it didn't.

Chinese AI firm DeepSeek has made yet another splash with the release of V3.2, the latest iteration in its V3 model series. Launched Monday, the model, which builds on an experimental V3.2 version announced in October, comes in two versions: "Thinking," and a more powerful "Speciale." DeepSeek said V3.2 pushes the capabilities of open-source AI even further. Like other DeepSeek models, it's a fraction of the cost of proprietary models, and the underlying weights can be accessed via Hugging Face.

That question has become more pressing. During the company's third-quarter earnings announcement, it predicted a weaker holiday shopping season than expected, citing President Donald Trump's tariffs and their negative impact on the home furnishings category. As a result, Pinterest's fourth-quarter revenue is expected to come in between $1.31 billion and $1.34 billion, while analysts were estimating $1.34 billion, on average. The news sent the stock tumbling by more than 21% on Wednesday.

That's now changing with OlmoEarth, a new open-source, no-code platform that runs powerful AI models trained on millions of Earth observations-from satellites, radar, and environmental sensors, including open data from NASA, NOAA, and the European Space Agency-to analyze and predict planetary changes in real time. It was developed by Ai2, the Allen Institute for AI, a Seattle-based nonprofit research lab founded in 2014 by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

European roboticists today released a powerful open-source artificial intelligence model that acts as a brain for industrial robots -helping them grasp and manipulate things with new dexterity. The new model, SPEAR-1, was developed by researchers at the Institute for Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence and Technology (INSAIT) in Bulgaria. It may help other researchers and startups build and experiment with smarter hardware for factories and warehouses.

Andrej Karpathy, a former OpenAI researcher and Tesla's former director of AI, calls his latest project the "best ChatGPT $100 can buy." Called "nanochat," the open-source project, released yesterday for his AI education startup EurekaAI, shows how anyone with a single GPU server and about $100 can build their own mini-ChatGPT that can answer simple questions and write stories and poems.

Chinese startup DeepSeek has released its largest AI model to date, a 685-billion-parameter model that industry observers say could intensify competition with US players. The model, called DeepSeek V3.1, was made available on the open-source platform Hugging Face this week with little publicity. Despite the quiet rollout, early benchmark results reportedly suggest the model performs on par with proprietary offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.

A chaotic identity verification experiment is underway, raising concerns about who is managing sensitive data involved in the process.