THE DECODER

Tesla has updated its Optimus humanoid robot with a new hand design that features 22 degrees of freedom, plus three more in the forearm.

The 7-billion-parameter language model Teuken-7B is now available on Hugging Face, offering support for all 24 official European Union languages.

1/ Elon Musk's AI startup xAI plans to release a standalone chatbot app in December to compete with established providers like ChatGPT. Currently, xAI's chatbot Grok is only available to subscribers of Musk's social media platform X. 2/ To keep up with the competition, xAI has invested heavily in infrastructure, including a data center with 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. The startup is valued at $50 billion, but lags far behind its competitors in terms of revenue. 3/ xAI's Grok-2 language model is technically on par with GPT-4 and Claude 3, but unlike ChatGPT's search, it obtains new information only from X posts, not from the Internet.

1/ Amazon is developing a new multimodal AI system called Olympus that excels at video analysis, aiming to compensate for its limitations in text processing compared to competitors. 2/ Olympus can perform advanced tasks like precisely tracking basketball movements in sports footage, potentially appealing to sports analytics firms, media companies, and industrial applications. 3/ Amazon is reportedly working on large text models with up to two trillion parameters, which it plans to combine with a smaller visual processing model to create Olympus, though the exact technical details remain undisclosed.

1/ Alibaba has introduced QwQ-32B-Preview, a new AI model with 32.5 billion parameters that outperforms OpenAI's o1 models in certain benchmarks, particularly in logical reasoning and problem-solving tasks. 2/ The model's self-checking ability, which involves planning answers in advance and verifying conclusions, enhances its accuracy but results in slower performance compared to traditional language models. Its limitations include language switching, loops, and tasks requiring 'common sense'. 3/ Alibaba is not alone in this space; the Chinese company DeepSeek has also recently presented a "reasoning model" that rivals OpenAI's o1, which was introduced just two months ago.

Cradle, a protein engineering AI startup based in Amsterdam and Zurich, has raised $73 million in Series B funding. The round was led by investment firm IVP, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures and Kindred Capital.

AI startup /dev/agents has secured $56 million in funding to create an operating system for AI agents.

1/ Microsoft has released TinyTroupe, an open-source library that simulates human behavior in virtual environments using large language models like GPT-4. 2/ TinyTroupe enables the creation of AI agents called TinyPersons, each with unique personalities and goals, that can interact and perform tasks in virtual TinyWorld environments. 3/ The library can be used to test the impact of advertising, evaluate systems such as search engines or chatbots with simulated user input, and generate synthetic data for machine learning purposes.

Anthropic has updated its AI assistant Claude to better match different writing styles. The system can now analyze text samples to learn and replicate specific writing patterns.

Nvidia has introduced Fugatto, a new AI music editor that can create barking trumpets or meowing saxophones.