Author HubMatthias Bastian

Online journalist Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER. He believes that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the relationship between humans and computers.
AI research

Deepseek's $5.6M Chinese LLM wonder shakes up the AI elite

AI research

Apple AI researchers question OpenAI's claims about o1's reasoning capabilities

AI research

Study reveals major reasoning flaws in smaller AI language models

Ad
AI in practice
Short

HeyGen, an AI video startup, has raised $60 million in a Series A funding round. The company is now valued at more than $500 million. The round was led by Benchmark. HeyGen lets companies create, localize and personalize videos without a camera or crew, using virtual avatars. According to the startup, it has been profitable since the second quarter of 2023 and has grown its annual revenue from one million to more than $35 million. Its customers include small businesses as well as Fortune 500 companies. HeyGen plans to use the fresh capital to expand its product offerings and invest in corporate security, AI ethics, trust and safety.

Ad
Ad
Ad
Ad
AI in practice
Short

According to Clément Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, more founders are looking to sell their AI startups. Delangue says he is currently receiving inquiries from about ten founders a week who are interested in being acquired. Hugging Face itself recently announced the acquisition of Argilla for $10 million. This is the fourth acquisition for the New York startup, which raised $235 million from investors last year and is valued at $4.5 billion. Argilla develops software that allows people to collaboratively improve data sets to train artificial intelligence. Argilla's 13 employees will become part of Hugging Face, but will continue to operate independently under the same name.

AI in practice
Short

Microsoft has released a set of vision models called Florence 2. Florence 2 is a prompt-based vision model designed for computer vision and image processing tasks such as image description, object recognition, localization, and segmentation. According to Microsoft, Florence 2 can outperform other specialized and larger vision models in some tasks. To train Florence, Microsoft created the FLD-5B dataset, which contains 5.4 billion annotations for 126 million images. The models come in two sizes, with 0.23B and 0.77B parameters, and are available on Hugging Face for commercial use under the MIT license.

Image: Microsoft
Ad
Ad
AI in practice
Short

McDonald's is ending its AI experiment for drive-through orders after a two-year trial in more than 100 restaurants. The fast-food giant, which launched the automated order taking (AOT) in partnership with IBM, will shut it down on July 26, 2024. The goal was to speed up drive-through service and streamline operations. Despite the setback, McDonald's still believes in the potential of voice recognition for food ordering. The company plans to find a new partner for more extensive research by the end of the year. IBM says it is also in talks with other fast-food chains. It appears that the two companies are not parting on good terms with this project.

Google News

Bank details

IBAN: DE87 1203 0000 1086 0070 75
Account holder: DEEP CONTENT GbR
Purpose: Support THE DECODER
AI in practice

Meta's LibGen controversy reveals how desperate AI companies are for quality training data

AI in practice

The great AI scaling debate continues into 2025

AI research

Deepseek's $5.6M Chinese LLM wonder shakes up the AI elite

Google News