On December 18th, at the Volcano Engine FORCE Power Conference, Volcano Engine President Tan Dai unveiled the new Doubao Visual Understanding Model. This model processes both text and image-related information simultaneously, providing more accurate answers. The new model excels in content recognition, understanding, and reasoning capabilities, featuring more nuanced visual description abilities, which brings stronger intelligent processing capabilities to enterprise users. Tan Dai revealed at the conference that the Doubao Visual Understanding Model has achieved significant technological breakthroughs and has also seen a dramatic reduction in pricing.

Elon Musk's xAI has finally fulfilled its promise from August by officially launching the API interface for its flagship AI model, Grok. However, this long-awaited API version feels somewhat rushed and basic. Currently, the xAI API only offers a model named "grok-beta." In terms of pricing, input tokens are charged at $5 per million tokens (approximately 750,000 words), while output tokens are charged at $15 per million tokens.

Zhipu AI announced today that since being showcased at KDD 2024, its flagship language model GLM-4-Plus and the first dynamic video understanding model GLM-4V-Plus have received widespread recognition, achieving outstanding results on authoritative evaluation lists, breaking the monopoly of foreign models in the top three and positioning themselves at the international elite level.

iFlytek has announced a major upgrade to the Spark API platform. This upgrade includes the Spark Max model and the 4.0 Ultra model, which have improved generation speeds by 70%, while also achieving significant breakthroughs in key performance areas such as logical reasoning, creativity, and online search. The upgraded Spark Max and 4.0 Ultra models demonstrate faster speeds and greater accuracy in logical reasoning, especially in handling complex tasks, providing detailed reasoning processes.

Kimi Smart Assistant, a subsidiary of Beijing Yue's Dark Side Technology Co., Ltd., recently announced that its Kimi API now supports online search functionality. This marks a significant enhancement in the interactive experience, allowing users to retrieve information from the Internet via the API. This update to the Kimi API enables developers to leverage this feature, allowing applications to 'surf the web' by automatically performing online searches and providing answers when encountering questions during conversations.

NVIDIA has collaborated with several universities to introduce NVEagle, a large visual language model capable of chatting using images. NVEagle can analyze image content and provide accurate answers, such as identifying individuals in images, like Jensen Huang. The model significantly enhances the understanding of visual information by transforming images into visual tokens and combining them with text embeddings. In addressing the challenges of high-resolution image processing, the research team has constructed models like Eagle-X5-7B and Eagle-X by exploring various visual encoders and fusion strategies.

Google has launched the Gemini API's Gemini1.5Flash free plan, offering 1.5 billion free tokens every day, including 15 requests per minute, 1 million tokens per minute, and 1 million tokens per hour of context caching services, along with fully free tuning capabilities. This initiative aims to lower the barriers for developers to utilize AI technology, supporting the development of innovative applications. For small and medium-sized development teams, this will significantly reduce costs and provide convenience in R&D. This move is expected to attract more developers, driving growth.

OpenAI has announced that third-party developers can fine-tune the newly introduced multimodal large model GPT-4o. This feature allows developers to adjust the model's behavior based on specific needs, such as changing the tone, following instructions, or improving the accuracy of technical tasks. Fine-tuning can achieve significant performance improvements with only a small amount of training data and is easy to operate. OpenAI is providing developers with a free allowance of 1 million tokens daily until September 23, as well as a daily free allowance of 2 million tokens for the GPT-4o mini model.

Zhipu AI announces that the LLM GLM-4-Long, which supports ultra-long context lengths, is now available on the open platform bigmodel.cn. This model is designed specifically for processing long texts and can read the equivalent of two copies of 'Dream of the Red Chamber' or 125 papers in one go. It is widely applied in scenarios such as translating long documents, global analysis of financial reports, extracting key information, and building chatbots with ultra-long memory.

OpenAI has announced the launch of GPT-4o mini, offering daily free fine-tuning with 2 million training tokens until September 23rd, aimed at advancing AI technology and fostering developer innovation. This model boasts performance on par with GPT-4o but is priced at only 1/20th of the latter, with significant advantages in training costs, context length, and intelligence levels. After the free period, services will continue to be offered at discounted rates. The fine-tuning capabilities of GPT-4o mini will be initially available to enterprise clients and specific developer tiers, with future expansion planned.

Recently, leading artificial intelligence company OpenAI announced the launch of fine-tuning capabilities for its new small-scale model, GPT-4o mini, aimed at enhancing the model's performance in specific application scenarios. This move will provide developers and enterprise users with more customized AI solutions. According to official OpenAI news, from today until September 23, users can fine-tune GPT-4o mini for free up to 2 million training tokens per day. Any excess will be charged at $3.0

TiTok is a compact one-dimensional tokenizer that can represent 256×256 images with as few as 32 discrete tokens. As a result, it significantly accelerates the sampling process (for example, it is 410 times faster than DiT-XL/2) while achieving competitive generation quality.

AI2 recently released an open source dataset named Dolma, which contains 3 trillion tokens. Dolma's data will serve as the foundation for AI2's developing Open Language Model OLMo, expected to launch in early 2024. The Dolma dataset comes from a wide range of sources, including web content, academic publications, code, and books, making it the largest publicly available dataset of its kind.