Vector institute introduced The Matrix: a foundation world model for generating infinite-length, hyper-realistic videos with real-time, frame-level control:

- Infinite-length video generation
- 720p high-quality rendering
- Real-time, frame-level control at 16 FPS
- Generalization to real-world video control.

Key Innovation: A brand new technique called the shift-window denoise process model, enabling auto-regressive generation for diffusion and consistency models in real-time.

Special thanks to project leader Ruili Feng and the entire Matrix team for their dedication and hard work over the year-long project.

Paper.
Code & Playable Demo: Coming soon.

OpenAI has discussed powering AI in Samsung devices, similar to a deal the AI developer has with Apple

The discussions are part of a multipronged attack by OpenAI on Google, which is Samsung’s most important partner in using the Android mobile operating system and distributing Google’s mobile apps.

OpenAI also has discussed or reached deals with a slew of website publishers and apps—including Conde Nast and Priceline—to use the company’s conversational AI so that readers or customers can interact with the sites and apps in the same conversational tone they use with ChatGPT.

Nice paper from Alibaba on building open reasoning models.

They propose Marco-o1 which is a reasoning model built for open-ended solutions.

"Marco-o1 is powered by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning, Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), reflection mechanisms, and innovative reasoning strategies—optimized for complex real-world problem-solving tasks."

⚡️❗️ Breaking Ground in BCI: Science (Neuralink's Competitor) Unveils Revolutionary Biohybrid Neural Technology

Science, a neurotechnology company founded by former Neuralink President Max Hodak, has revealed a revolutionary approach to brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that could fundamentally transform how we interact with the human brain.

Unlike traditional BCIs, including those developed by Neuralink, Science's innovative biohybrid approach utilizes living neurons instead of conventional electrodes.

The company has developed a unique technology where specially engineered neurons, derived from stem cells, are integrated with electronics before being implanted into the brain. The key innovation lies in keeping the neuron cell bodies within the device while allowing their axons and dendrites to naturally grow into the brain tissue, forming new connections with existing neurons.

This breakthrough approach offers several revolutionary advantages:

1. Natural Integration:
- A single implant of one million neurons can create over a billion synaptic connections
- The device occupies less than a cubic millimeter
- Forms genuine chemical synapses with brain cells

2. Versatility:
- Capability to use various neuron types (dopaminergic, cholinergic, glutamatergic)
- Ability to stimulate the brain using natural neurotransmitters
- Superior signal quality with lower power consumption

3. Scalability Potential:
- Technology can be scaled to millions of neurons
- Theoretical bandwidth comparable to the corpus callosum (the structure connecting brain hemispheres)

The development team is addressing several technical challenges:

1. Immunological Compatibility:
- Need to create immune-invisible cells
- Current personalized cell creation process is costly ($1M+) and time-consuming (months)

2. Cell Viability:
- Neurons must survive glycemic shock
- Protection from hypoxia is essential
- Proper glial support required
- Cells must mature within an active electronic device

Science has already published their first paper demonstrating this technology's capabilities.

While their biohybrid approach is still in early development, its potential is immense. It could solve the fundamental limitations of traditional BCIs - brain tissue damage during electrode implantation and limited long-term stability.

This development represents a significant departure from conventional BCI approaches, including those of Neuralink and other competitors. While Neuralink has focused on developing advanced electrode arrays, Science's biohybrid approach could potentially offer a more natural and sustainable solution for brain-computer integration.

The implications of this breakthrough extend beyond just technological advancement. It opens new possibilities for treating neurological conditions, restoring lost brain functions, and creating more natural brain-computer interfaces. If the technical challenges can be overcome, this technology could form the foundation for the next generation of neuroprosthetics and therapeutic devices.

This innovation underscores the rapid advancement in neurotechnology, with companies like Science and Neuralink pushing the boundaries of what's possible in brain-computer interfacing. The competition between these companies, led by visionary entrepreneurs like Max Hodak, continues to drive innovation in this crucial field, potentially bringing us closer to a future where seamless brain-computer integration becomes a reality.

Science's approach represents not just an incremental improvement but a paradigm shift in how we think about brain-computer interfaces, potentially offering a more biocompatible and sustainable solution for long-term neural interfacing.

Perceptron: AI That Lives in the Physical World

Imagine a modern factory floor. Dozens of cameras, microphones, and sensors monitor processes. Robots assemble products. But each system operates in isolation: one monitors quality through video, another listens to equipment sounds, a third tracks sensor data, and a fourth controls robots.

Perceptron aims to unite this into a single "brain" that:

• Simultaneously analyzes all data streams. If something goes wrong, it will notice it through video, sound, and sensor readings
• Works in real-time — instantly responding to any deviations
• Learns from experience and transfers knowledge between different tasks
• Speaks human language: can explain to operators what went wrong and why

In essence, instead of a set of disparate systems, we get a unified "smart assistant" that simultaneously sees, hears, and feels everything happening around it.

It's like moving from separate programs for text, spreadsheets, and presentations to a unified office suite. Except here, we're talking about managing the physical world.

The company has already attracted investments from major funds and experts. It will be interesting to see if they can create such a universal "physical" AI.

Ai2 introduced Tülu 3 a set of SOTA instruct models with fully open data, eval code, and training algorithms.

8B model
70B model
Try it out

A lot of gems and insights in this fresh unreleased slide-deck by HuggingFace.

Production uses for open and closed source AI

Anthropic has just announced a universal bridge between AI systems and various data sources the Model Context Protocol (MCP).

This open-source standard promises to revolutionize how AI assistants interact with enterprise data systems, development environments, and content repositories.

The Model Context Protocol represents a universal bridge between AI systems and various data sources. Instead of requiring custom implementations for each new data connection, MCP provides a standardized way for AI assistants to access and utilize organizational data securely.

Key Components

The initial release includes three major elements:

1. The core Model Context Protocol specification and SDKs
2. Local MCP server support integrated into Claude Desktop applications
3. An open-source repository featuring pre-built MCP servers

The protocol launches with pre-built MCP servers for popular enterprise systems including:
- Google Drive
- Slack
- GitHub
- Git
- Postgres
- Puppeteer

Major players are already embracing the technology:
- Block and Apollo have integrated MCP into their systems
- Development tools companies including Zed, Replit, Codeium, and Sourcegraph are actively working on MCP implementation
- Claude 3.5 Sonnet has demonstrated exceptional capabilities in building MCP server implementations.

❗️Neuralink announced the approval and launch of a new feasibility trial to extend BCI control using the N1 Implant to an investigational assistive robotic arm.

This builds on their ongoing PRIME Study, which helps people with quadriplegia control digital devices through thought alone.

Now, they're taking a crucial step forward - from digital to physical control. Participants who are already enrolled in PRIME will have the opportunity to join CONVOY and potentially control an assistive robotic arm using just their thoughts.

This feasibility trial marks a pivotal moment in brain-computer interface technology. While PRIME focuses on restoring "digital freedom" - letting users control computers and smartphones mentally - CONVOY aims to restore physical independence through robotic assistance.

Andrew Ng announced new open-source Python package: aisuite

This makes it easy for developers to use large language models from multiple providers.

Open-source code with instructions.

You can connect Claude to an internet search engine using MCP

Here's how you can do it too in under 5 minutes:

1. U will need to download the latest version of our Claude desktop app here. To use Brave Web Search specifically, you will need to sign up for a free API key here.

2. Open up your Claude Desktop configuration file:

- macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json - Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json

3. Then, just add this to that file and save it:

{
"mcpServers": {
"brave-search": {
"command": "npx",
"args": ["-y", "@modelcontextprotocol/server-brave-search"],
"env": {
"BRAVE_API_KEY": "ADD_YOUR_API_KEY_HERE"
}
}
}
}

4. Restart your Claude desktop app for the changes to load.

You can check that the server has been configured properly if you navigate to "Claude" > "Settings" in the top bar and check the Developer tab in this window that pops up.

5. After that, just ask Claude to make a web search for you!

The server tools automatically get loaded in to the system prompt so that Claude knows it has access to them.

If you want to improve on this server, explore more servers, or make your own integrations, go check out GitHub repository.

Cursor agent with the 0.43.3 update is crazy.

You can just let it code while you go to the beach.

OpneAI’s long awaited Sora video model may have leaked on HuggingFace.

Google introduced Health AI Developer Foundations is a game-changer for healthcare AI innovation

It provides open-weight models and resources to help developers build healthcare AI tools faster and more efficiently.

The initial focus is on imaging applications in radiology, dermatology, and pathology, with models pre-trained on large, diverse datasets for powerful performance.

Whether it's chest X-rays, skin conditions, or pathology slides, these models offer a robust starting point for creating AI solutions with minimal additional data and compute.

This suite builds on community feedback and is available for download via platforms like Vertex AI Model Garden and Hugging Face.

This initiative could democratize AI development, enabling creators to innovate for real-world healthcare challenges—improving diagnostics, broadening access, and easing clinician workloads.

Web3 x AI Market Map 2024

Web3 and AI are converging to create a new "supercycle" of technological development. AI serves as the brain of the system, handling decision-making and automation, while Web3 forms the economic foundation, enabling decentralized value exchange.

Key Trends of 2024:

1. The Age of Smart Agents
- AI agents are now creating real economic value
- Agents trade with each other, manage assets, and even launch their own projects
- Platforms have emerged where anyone can create a personal AI agent in minutes.

2. Five Layers of the New Economy

🔵 Compute: Decentralized networks providing AI processing power
🔵 Data: Transparent systems for collecting and validating information
🔵 Model: Creating and training AI on blockchain
🔵 Interface: Tools for system interaction
🔵 Applications: End products for users

3. Practical Applications

- Finance: AI manages investments and analyzes risks
- Gaming: Smart characters with unique personalities
- Creativity: AI creates music and art in the metaverse
- Social Networks: New level of AI-powered interaction

AI2 released OLMo 2, fully open language model to date, including a family of 7B and 13B models trained up to 5T tokens.

OLMo 2 outperforms other fully open models and competes with open-weight models like Llama 3.1 8B.

Model.

Try out an OLMo 2 demo on Playground.

Meta introduced Sparsh is the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors + many tasks.

The family of models was pre-trained on a large dataset of 460K+ tactile images using SSL.

HuggingFace released SmolVLM, a smol 2B VLM built for on-device inference that outperforms all models at similar GPU RAM usage and tokens throughputs.

SmolVLM can be fine-tuned on a Google collab and be run on a laptop.

Or process millions of documents with a consumer GPU.

Demo.
Model.
Fine-tuning script.

👀Total Stablecoin Value Tops Terra-Era Peak to Near $200 Billion

The total market capitalization for stablecoins has swollen 46% this year to a record of about $190 billion on Sunday, according to DeFiLlama data.

Tether, which issues the world’s largest stablecoin USDT, has seen its token’s circulation soar to nearly $133 billion, accounting for 70% of the total stablecoin market. The company wants to broaden usage of USDT by pushing into new industries including commodities. It recently announced the funding of its first crude oil transaction in the Middle East

Meanwhile, Stripe Inc., the $70 billion fintech giant, in October said it plans to buy stablecoin startup Bridge for $1.1 billion in one of the largest-ever acquisitions of a digital-asset startup. Other traditional finance firms including PayPal Holdings Inc. have also ventured into the sector.

The recent stablecoin surge coincides with a crypto rally spurred by Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential race. Once an industry skeptic, Trump won over the sector with pledges to put in place more favorable policies.

The overall value of the digital-assets market has risen by nearly a trillion dollars since the election, according to data from CoinGecko.

Alibaba released a preview of QwQ /kwju:/ — an open model designed to advance AI reasoning capabilities.

LLM-brained GUI Agents

Great survey on LLM-brained GUI agents, including techniques and applications.