Archive
Tag: AI Models
OpenClaw Won. Big Tech Is Now Playing Its Game.
The definition of an AI agent has evolved rapidly since the term first entered the zeitgeist. The earliest versions were chatbots with better manners: systems that answered questions, drafted text, and waited for the next prompt. Tool use and function calling took them a step further, allowing models to query databases or call APIs, but […]
Web IQ Is Microsoft Rebuilding Search Around the Machines
Search engines learned what a good result looked like by observing how people behaved. A click followed by a long page stay signaled satisfaction, while a quick bounce back to the search results signaled a miss. Microsoft built its Bing search engine on those patterns. But in the AI era, there’s a type of user […]
Microsoft Debuts MAI-Thinking-1, Its First In-House Reasoning Model
For most of the generative AI era, Microsoft has been the most prominent buyer of someone else’s intelligence. Its Copilot stack runs on OpenAI’s GPT models. Azure customers reach for frontier reasoning through the partnership. The arrangement has worked, and it has also been a structural dependency that the company has spent the last year […]
Don’t Believe the Hype: AI Capabilities May Not Create Real-World Value
Kevin Scott always has something to say on the eve of Microsoft Build. The company’s chief technology officer shares his read on where technology is headed, typically in step with whatever the company is about to announce. This year, I joined executives, developers, and my fellow journalists in a downtown San Francisco bar as Scott […]
Ai2 Brings $152M Federally Backed AI Computing Cluster Online
The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) said Thursday that its federally backed AI computing cluster is now online, marking the first milestone of a $152 million program to build open AI models for scientific research. The project, called the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure for Science (NSF OMAI), is backed by the U.S. National Science Foundation […]
Ai2’s MolmoAct 2 Is the Open Robot Model Built for the Real World
In the race to build robots that can work reliably in the physical world, proprietary models have held a clear advantage. However, that edge is narrowing. The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) on Thursday released its next-generation MolmoAct model, which outperforms popular rival, Physical Intelligence’s (PI) π0.5, across simulations, zero-shot real-world tasks, and third-party evaluations. […]
Microsoft Has a Faster, Cheaper Version of Its Best Image Model
Microsoft isn’t slowing down in its push to develop its own lineup of homegrown AI models. On Tuesday, the company announced a variation of its text-to-image model called MAI-Image-2-Efficient. While both provide photorealistic and expressive images with reliable in-image text, the new model is designed to be 22 percent faster and four times more efficient. […]
Microsoft Debuts MAI-Transcribe-1 Speech-to-Text Model That Tops Whisper, GPT, Gemini Flash
Microsoft’s AI division has been notably active in building out its first-party portfolio. It has developed everything from foundation models and vision capabilities to speech and image generation and diagnostic orchestration. Now, the company is adding another piece: MAI-Transcribe-1, a multilingual speech-to-text model that’s now available in public preview on Microsoft Foundry. MAI-Transcribe-1 is trained […]
Anthropic’s Demand Problem Is a Good Problem—Until It Isn’t
Has Anthropic’s “Fail Whale” moment arrived? The company announced this week on social media that, due to growing demand for Claude, users will run through their five-hour session limits much faster during peak hours. Notably, it comes days after Anthropic touted a “limited-time promotion” that doubled the usage limit for those who used Claude outside […]
Ai2 Launches MolmoWeb to Challenge Closed Web Agents with Open Source
The race to build AI agents that can actually use the web is no longer confined to Big Tech or Big AI. On Tuesday, the Allen Institute for AI stepped into the arena with MolmoWeb, an open visual web agent designed to navigate and control a browser much like a human would. Paired with MolmoWebMix—a […]