Another chapter in the expansion of Silicon Valley tech giants! Elon Musk's xAI company today announced the acquisition of Hotshot, a startup focused on AI-powered video generation. This strategic acquisition will inject new vitality into xAI's multimodal AI technology. Hotshot CEO Aakash Sastry officially announced the news on the X platform, but did not disclose the specific transaction amount. Previously backed by investors including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and SV Angel...

Microsoft has open-sourced Magma, a multimodal AI agent designed to enhance shopping experiences and improve robotic control. This powerful tool offers new possibilities for interaction and automation.

Microsoft recently open-sourced a new multimodal AI Agent foundation model called "Magma" on its official website. This novel AI boasts the ability to traverse both the digital and physical worlds, processing various data types such as images, videos, and text simultaneously. Unlike traditional AI assistants, Magma's unique capability lies in its psychological prediction function, allowing for more accurate understanding of the intentions and future behavior of individuals or objects within videos. Magma's applications are vast; users can leverage this AI for a wide range of tasks.

Recently, the successful launch of the VLM-R1 project has brought new hope to this field. This project represents the successful migration of the R1 Method from the DeepSeek team into visual language models, indicating that AI's understanding of visual content will enter a whole new phase. The inspiration for VLM-R1 comes from last year's open-source R1 Method by DeepSeek, which leverages GRPO (Generative Reward Processing Optimization) reinforcement.

Recently, the Microsoft Research team, in collaboration with researchers from several universities, released a multimodal AI model called 'Magma'. This model is designed to process and integrate various types of data, including images, text, and videos, to perform complex tasks in both digital and physical environments. As technology continues to advance, multimodal AI agents are being widely applied in fields such as robotics, virtual assistants, and user interface automation. Previous AI systems typically focused on visual-language understanding or robotic operations, making it difficult to combine the two.

Recently, Alibaba has welcomed a heavyweight figure in the field of AI. According to industry insiders, a top global artificial intelligence scientist has officially joined Alibaba and will focus on the research and application of foundational large models for AI To C business in the future. This scientist has over 20 years of experience in both industry and academia, with significant achievements in the field of multimodal AI, having led the publication of over a hundred top papers on large models.

Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute announces the launch of the native multimodal world model Emu3. This model is based on next-token prediction technology and does not rely on diffusion models or combinatorial methods to achieve understanding and generation across text, image, and video modalities. Emu3 surpasses existing well-known open-source models such as SDXL, LLaVA, and OpenSora in tasks like image generation, video generation, and visual language understanding, showcasing exceptional performance.

Apple Inc. recently launched a significant update for its multimodal AI model MM1, upgrading it to version MM1.5. This upgrade represents more than just a simple change in version number; it is a comprehensive enhancement of capabilities, showcasing the model's stronger performance across various fields. The core upgrade of MM1.5 lies in its innovative data processing methods. The model utilizes a data-centric training approach, carefully selecting and optimizing the training dataset. Specifically, MM1.5 employs high-definition OCR data and synthetic image descriptions, along with optimizations.

Recently, Japan-based startup Rhymes AI unveiled their first artificial intelligence model — Aria. The company claims that Aria is the world's first open-source multimodal mixture of experts (MoE) model. This model not only possesses the capability to handle various input modalities but also claims to be on par with, or even superior to, several well-known commercial models. The design philosophy of Aria aims to provide exceptional understanding and processing capabilities across diverse input forms including text, code, images, and videos.

Recently, Apple's AI research team launched their next-generation family of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) - MM1.5. This series of models can integrate various data types such as text and images, showcasing new capabilities of AI in understanding complex tasks. Tasks like visual question answering, image generation, and multimodal data interpretation can be better addressed with the help of these models. A major challenge for multimodal models is how to achieve effective interaction between different data types. Previous models often struggled in this aspect.

Meta has recently confirmed that photos and videos taken by users using Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses may be used to train its AI models. This practice has raised concerns as users may not be aware that they are providing Meta with a substantial amount of images for training its AI models, which could include their home interiors, family members, or personal documents. Emil Vazquez, Meta's policy communications manager, stated that in regions where multimodal AI is available, ...

Recently, the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) released Molmo, a brand new open source multimodal AI model family that performs exceptionally well, even surpassing OpenAI's GPT-4o, Anthropic's Claude 3.5, and Google's Gemini 1.5 in several third-party benchmark tests. Molmo not only accepts user-uploaded images for analysis but has also been trained using '1000 times less data than its competitors.'

Recently, an open source multimodal AI model named Molmo has drawn widespread attention in the industry. This AI system, based on Qwen2-72B and leveraging OpenAI's CLIP as the visual processing engine, is challenging the dominance of traditional commercial models with its outstanding performance and innovative features. Molmo's standout characteristic is its efficient performance. Despite its relatively small size, it can compete with competitors that are ten times larger in processing capability. This 'small but exquisite' design philosophy not only enhances the model's

Recently, edge computing chip and software startup SiMa.ai announced the launch of its new product—MLSoC Modalix chip, further solidifying its position in the edge AI market. SiMa.ai has just completed a $70 million funding round, with investors including industry giants like Dell Technologies Capital.

Salesforce has released an open source multimodal AI model named xGen-MM, designed to simultaneously understand and generate various data types such as text and images, significantly changing the way AI research and applications are conducted. The model performs exceptionally well in multiple benchmark tests, demonstrating strong performance compared to similar open source models, and includes pretrained models, datasets, and fine-tuning code. The largest model boasts 4 billion parameters and can handle 'interleaved data,' enabling multitasking, such as answering questions about multiple images at once. The diverse options available in the model reflect the potential of AI.