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Matthias Bastian

Matthias is the co-founder and publisher of THE DECODER, exploring how AI is fundamentally changing the relationship between humans and computers.
Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Apr 23, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: xAI adds real-time vision, multilingual audio and real-time search to Grok

xAI has rolled out three new features for its Grok voice assistant: Grok Vision, multilingual audio output, and real-time search in voice mode. According to the company, all three features are now available to iOS users. Android users with a SuperGrok subscription also get access to multilingual audio and real-time search. Grok Vision allows the assistant to provide live commentary on whatever appears on the smartphone screen. Google and OpenAI have been offering similar features for some time, using language models to interpret on-screen content in real time. The update is part of a broader push by xAI—Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up—to compete with companies like Google and OpenAI. xAI recently introduced a new reasoning model called Grok 3 mini.

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Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Apr 23, 2025
AI in practice
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Read full article about: OpenAI adds Washington Post content to ChatGPT

Articles from the Washington Post will now appear in ChatGPT responses under a new content licensing agreement between the two companies. The integration includes coverage of politics, world affairs, business, and technology, with direct source citations provided in answers. "We’re all in on meeting our audiences where they are," said Peter Elkins-Williams, director of global partnerships at The Washington Post. The partnership follows a broader trend of exclusive licensing deals between media outlets and AI companies. Here's my usual caveat: Such arrangements can reduce media diversity, posing risks to democratic discourse and the open Web. Journalism scholar Jeff Jarvis has called these payments to publishers "pure lobbying."

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Matthias Bastian
Matthias Bastian View the LinkedIn Profile of Matthias Bastian
Apr 21, 2025
AI research
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Read full article about: Go read this to learn how reinforcement learning makes LLMs better at reasoning

AI researcher Sebastian Raschka has published a new analysis that looks at how reinforcement learning is used to improve reasoning in large language models (LRMs). In a blog post, he describes how algorithms are used in combination with training methods such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). Raschka focuses on DeepSeek-R1, a model trained using verifiable rewards instead of human labels, to explain in detail how reinforcement learning can improve problem-solving performance.

While reasoning alone isn’t a silver bullet, it reliably improves model accuracy and problem-solving capabilities on challenging tasks (so far). And I expect reasoning-focused post-training to become standard practice in future LLM pipelines.

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