Ever wanted 45 min with one of AIās most fascinating minds? Was with @thomwolf at HumanX Vegas. Sharing my notes of his Q&A with the pressācompletely changed how I think about AIās future:
1ļøā£ The next wave of successful AI companies wonāt be defined by who has the best model but by who builds the most useful real-world solutions. "We all have engines in our cars, but thatās rarely the only reason we buy one. We expect it to work well, and thatās enough. LLMs will be the same."
2ļøā£ Big players are pivoting: "Closed-source companiesāOpenAI being the firstāhave largely shifted from LLM announcements to product announcements."
3ļøā£ Open source is changing everything: "DeepSeek was open source AIās ChatGPT moment. Basically, everyone outside the bubble realized you can get a model for freeāand itās just as good as the paid ones."
4ļøā£ Product innovation is being democratized: Take Manus, for exampleāthey built a product on top of Anthropicās models thatās "actually better than Anthropicās own product for now, in terms of agents." This proves that anyone can build great products with existing models.
Weāre entering a "multi-LLM world," where models are becoming commoditized, and all the tools to build are readily availableājust look at the flurry of daily new releases on Hugging Face.
Thom's comparison to the internet era is spot-on: "In the beginning you made a lot of money by making websites... but nowadays the huge internet companies are not the companies that built websites. Like Airbnb, Uber, Facebook, they just use the internet as a medium to make something for real life use cases."
Honored to be named among their 12 pioneers and power players in the news industry in the 2025 Tech Trends Report from Future Today Strategy Group.
Incredible group to be part of - each person is doing groundbreaking work at the intersection of AI and journalism. Worth following them all: they're consistently sharing practical insights on building the future of news.
Take the time to read this report, it's packed with insights as always. The news & information section's #1 insight hits hard: "The most substantive economic impact of AI to date has been licensing payouts for a handful of big publishers. The competition will start shifting in the year ahead to separate AI 'haves' that have positioned themselves to grow from the 'have-nots.'"
This AI-driven divide is something I've been really concerned about. Now is the time to build more than ever!
Diffusion models are widely used for image and video generation but remain underexplored in text generation, where autoregressive models (ARMs) dominate. Unlike ARMs, which produce tokens sequentially, diffusion models iteratively refine noise through denoising steps, offering greater flexibility and speed. Recent advancements show a shift toward using diffusion models in place of, or alongside, ARMs. Researchers also combine strengths from both methods and integrate autoregressive concepts into diffusion.
Here are 5 new implementations of diffusion models:
1. Mercury family of diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) by Inception Labs -> https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/news It applies diffusion to text and code data, enabling sequence generation 10x faster than today's top LLMs. Now available Mercury Coder can run at over 1,000 tokens/sec on NVIDIA H100s.
3. LLaDA -> Large Language Diffusion Models (2502.09992) Shows diffusion models' potential in replacing ARMs. Trained with pre-training and SFT, LLaDA masks tokens, predicts them via a Transformer, and optimizes a likelihood bound. LLaDA matches key LLM skills, and surpasses GPT-4o in reversal poetry.
5. General Interpolating Discrete Diffusion (GIDD) -> Generalized Interpolating Discrete Diffusion (2503.04482) A flexible noising process with a novel diffusion ELBO enables combining masking and uniform noise, allowing diffusion models to correct mistakes, where ARMs struggle.
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in AI models by breaking down complex problems into step-by-step logical sequences. It continues proving its effectiveness, especially in top-performing reasoning models. However, there are other similar methods, that expand CoT and can be used for different purposes. Here are 9 of them:
4. Chain-of-RAG ->https://huggingface.co/papers/2501.14342 Creates retrieval chains, instead of retrieving all info at once. It can dynamically adjust its search process and its parameters like step number
9. Chain(s)-of-Knowledge -> https://www.turingpost.com/p/cok Enhance LLMs by dynamically pulling in external knowledge to improve accuracy and reduce errors
What if AI becomes as ubiquitous as the internet, but runs locally and transparently on our devices?
Fascinating TED talk by @thomwolf on open source AI and its future impact.
Imagine this for AI: instead of black box models running in distant data centers, we get transparent AI that runs locally on our phones and laptops, often without needing internet access. If the original team moves on? No problem - resilience is one of the beauties of open source. Anyone (companies, collectives, or individuals) can adapt and fix these models.
This is a compelling vision of AI's future that solves many of today's concerns around AI transparency and centralized control.
Is this the best tool to extract clean info from PDFs, handwriting and complex documents yet?
Open source olmOCR just dropped and the results are impressive.
Tested the free demo with various documents, including a handwritten Claes Oldenburg letter. The speed is impressive: 3000 tokens/second on your own GPU - that's 1/32 the cost of GPT-4o ($190/million pages). Game-changer for content extraction and digital archives.
To achieve this, Ai2 trained a 7B vision language model on 260K pages from 100K PDFs using "document anchoring" - combining PDF metadata with page images.
Best part: it actually understands document structure (columns, tables, equations) instead of just jumbling everything together like most OCR tools. Their human eval results back this up.
š Just launched: A toolkit of 20 powerful AI tools that journalists can use right now - transcribe, analyze, create. 100% free & open-source.
Been testing all these tools myself and created a searchable collection of the most practical ones - from audio transcription to image generation to document analysis. No coding needed, no expensive subscriptions.
Some highlights I've tested personally: - Private, on-device transcription with speaker ID in 100+ languages using Whisper - Website scraping that just works - paste a URL, get structured data - Local image editing with tools like Finegrain (impressive results) - Document chat using Qwen 2.5 72B (handles technical papers well)
Sharing this early because the best tools come from the community. Drop your favorite tools in the comments or join the discussion on what to add next!
Agents seem to be everywhere and this collection is for a deep dive into the theory and practice:
1. "Agents" Google's whitepaper by Julia Wiesinger, Patrick Marlow and Vladimir Vuskovic -> https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-agents Covers agents, their functions, tool use and how they differ from models
3. "AI Engineer Summit 2025: Agent Engineering" 8-hour video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7BzTxVVMuw Experts' talks that share insights on the freshest Agent Engineering advancements, such as Google Deep Research, scaling tips and more
5. "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents", 3rd Edition, book by David L. Poole and Alan K. Mackworth -> https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.html Agents' architectures, how they learn, reason, plan and act with certainty and uncertainty
7. The Turing Post articles "AI Agents and Agentic Workflows" on Hugging Face -> https://huggingface.co/Kseniase We explore agentic workflows in detail and agents' building blocks, such as memory and knowledge
Trying something new to keep you ahead of the curve: The 5 AI stories of the week - a weekly curation of the most important AI news you need to know. Do you like it?
šÆ Perplexity drops their FIRST open-weight model on Hugging Face: A decensored DeepSeek-R1 with full reasoning capabilities. Tested on 1000+ examples for unbiased responses.
Will we soon all have our own personalized AI news agents? And what does it mean for journalism?
Just built a simple prototype based on the Hugging Face course. It lets you get customized news updates on any topic.
Not perfect yet, but you can see where things could go: we'll all be able to build personalized AI agents that curate & analyze news for each of us. And users who could decide to build custom news products for their needs, such as truly personalized newsletters or podcasts.
The implications for both readers & news organizations are significant. To name a few: - Will news articles remain the best format for informing people? - What monetization model will work for news organizations? - How do you create an effective conversion funnel?
We've noticed a huge interest in test-time scaling (TTS), so we decided to explore this concept further. Test-time compute (TTC) refers to the amount of computational power used by an AI model when generating a response. Many researchers are now focused on scaling TTC, as it enables slow, deep "thinking" and step-by-step reasoning, which improves overall models' performance.
āļø The AI Energy Score project just launched - this is a game-changer for making informed decisions about AI deployment.
You can now see exactly how much energy your chosen model will consume, with a simple 5-star rating system. Think appliance energy labels, but for AI.
Looking at transcription models on the leaderboard is fascinating: choosing between whisper-tiny or whisper-large-v3 can make a 7x difference. Real-time data on these tradeoffs changes everything.
166 models already evaluated across 10 different tasks, from text generation to image classification. The whole thing is public and you can submit your own models to test.
Why this matters: - Teams can pick efficient models that still get the job done - Developers can optimize for energy use from day one - Organizations can finally predict their AI environmental impact
If you're building with AI at any scale, definitely worth checking out.
š„ Video AI is taking over! Out of 17 papers dropped on Hugging Face today, 6 are video-focused - from Sliding Tile Attention to On-device Sora. The race for next-gen video tech is heating up! š¬š
