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, 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.'

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.

["1. Hugging Face has launched a new open source multimodal AI model IDEFIX.","2. IDEFIX is built on the Flamingo visual language model and supports image-text inputs.","3. IDEFIX performs exceptionally well in image-text understanding tasks."]