#open-source-ai

#open-source-ai

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.

In late July 2024, Lina Khan, then the chair of the US Federal Trade Commission, gave a speech at an event hosted by the San Francisco startup accelerator Y Combinator in which she positioned herself as an advocate for open source artificial intelligence. The event took place as California lawmakers were considering a landmark bill called SB 1047 that would have imposed new testing and safety requirements on AI companies. Critics of the legislation, which was later vetoed by California governor Gavin Newsom, argued it would hamper the development and release of open source AI models.

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.

Reflection, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open-source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek.

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.

Open-source technologies have great potential to help government increase productivity, support decision-making, and deliver better public services. These fellowships will offer an innovative way to match AI experts with the real world challenges our public services are facing.

Chinese firms like RedNote are deploying open-source LLMs not just as models but as instruments of ecosystem control and geopolitical leverage. Meanwhile, Western firms remain committed to proprietary architectures.

Countries must ensure they are not impeding open source platforms, as Yann LeCun advocates for collaborative international regulation of open-source AI.

The study indicates that two-thirds of organizations believe that open source AI is cheaper to deploy than proprietary models, highlighting its cost-effectiveness.