Anthropic Introduced 'Claude 3.7 Sonnet' and 'Claude Code'

Anthropic released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, its most advanced AI model, this week. According to the company: • "Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the first hybrid reasoning model on the market, can produce near-instant responses or extended, step-by-step thinking that is made visible to the user." • "API users also have fine-grained control over how long the model can think for." • "Claude 3.7 Sonnet shows particularly strong improvements in coding and front-end web development." Reasoning models like o3-mini, R1, Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, and xAI’s Grok 3 (Think) use more time and computing power before answering questions. Claude 3.7 Sonnet is now available on all Claude plans—including Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise—and the Anthropic API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI. Extended thinking mode is available on all surfaces except the free Claude tier. Its price is the same as its predecessors (the company skipped a number): $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens, which include thinking tokens. That makes it more expensive than OpenAI’s o3-mini ($1.10 per 1 million input tokens/$4.40 per 1 million output tokens), and DeepSeek’s R1 (55 cents per 1 million input tokens/$2.19 per 1 million output tokens), but o3-mini and R1 are strictly reasoning models — not hybrids like Claude 3.7 Sonnet. In addition, Anthropic introduced, as a preview, Claude Code, a command line tool for agentic coding. The company said: "Early testing demonstrated Claude’s leadership in coding capabilities across the board: Cursor noted Claude is once again best-in-class for real-world coding tasks, with significant improvements in areas ranging from handling complex codebases to advanced tool use. Cognition found it far better than any other model at planning code changes and handling full-stack updates. Vercel highlighted Claude’s exceptional precision for complex agent workflows, while Replit has successfully deployed Claude to build sophisticated web apps and dashboards from scratch, where other models stall. In Canva’s evaluations, Claude consistently produced production-ready code with superior design taste and drastically reduced errors."  

YouTube Integrated AI Video Generator for Its Shorts' Creators

Researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington Trained a Model Similar to OpenAI’s o1 and DeepSeek’s R1

GitHub Announced Its Latest AI Feature "Vision for Copilot"

Hugging Face Cloned OpenAI’s Agent “Open Deep Research” and Made It Open-Source

Hugging Face cloned OpenAI’s agent “Open Deep Research” within 24 hours after its launch, and it was freely available to open-source developers. This agent autonomously browses the web and creates research reports. The code, posted publicly on GitHub, received great responses from developers. It also opened positions for engineers to help expand the project's capabilities. Hugging Face‘s researchers said, "While powerful LLMs are now freely available in open-source, OpenAI didn’t disclose much about the agentic framework underlying Deep Research. So we embarked on a 24-hour mission to reproduce their results and open-source the needed framework along the way!" A core component of Hugging Face's reproduction was the open-source "smolagents" library, which uses what they call "code agents" rather than JSON-based agents. The developers behind Open Deep Research built off of the work of others, which shortens development times. They used web browsing and text inspection tools borrowed from Microsoft Research's Magnetic-One agent project in late 2024.

Linda McMahon, Trump's Education Secretary Pick, Had Her Confirmation Hearing

Linda McMahon, President Trump's education secretary pick, had her confirmation hearing on Thursday. The event came amid Trump's statement that he'd like to immediately dismantle the Department of Education, which primarily facilitates the $1.7 trillion student-loan portfolio. More than 40 million student loan borrowers hold federal loans, and the department's Federal Student Aid office works with student loan servicers to manage borrowers' loan repayment. "I told Linda, 'Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.' I want her to put herself out of a job," Trump told reporters on February 4, adding on February 12 that he wanted the Department of Education to be closed "immediately." Q: "Why nominate Linda McMahon to be the Education Department Secretary if you're going to get rid of the Education Department?" President Donald Trump: "I told Linda, 'Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job.' I want her to put herself out of a job." pic.twitter.com/PreB1Zx4p3 — CSPAN (@cspan) February 4, 2025 When announcing McMahon as his education secretary pick in November, Trump posted on Truth Social that one of his goals for her was to "send Education BACK TO THE STATES." Trump and some GOP lawmakers have said that education can be managed locally and that a federal agency isn't needed. Trump has also signed an executive order to "promote patriotic education" in public schools and eliminate ideologies that don't align with his politics. Eliminating any federal agency requires congressional approval, and while some Republican lawmakers have introduced legislation to eliminate the Department of Education, there hasn't yet been enough support to make that happen. During the hearing, McMahon, a former business executive who led the Small Business Administration during Trump’s first term, told ranking member Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) that she would continue Pell Grants, which help the neediest students pay for college, and wished to see them expanded for short-term workforce programs. She also told Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that Title I funds for low-income school districts and IDEA funds for students with disabilities, both appropriated by Congress, would remain.

Meta Announces LlamaCon Developer Conference Scheduled on April 29

ByteDance Demoed a Model that Generates Realistic Deepfake Videos

Elon Musk’s xAI Released Its Latest Flagship Model, Grok 3

OpenAI' Board Rejected Elon Musk Group's $97.4 Billion Unsolicited Offer

The OpenAI’s Board of Directors rejected yesterday the Elon Musk investment group’s unsolicited offer of $97.4 billion to gain control of the AI company. In a statement, Bret Taylor, the chairman of the OpenAI board, said, "OpenAI is not for sale, and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Musk’s latest attempt to disrupt his competition." Bret Taylor was referring to Mr. Musk’s own AI company, xAI. OpenAI sent a letter on Friday to Marc Toberoff, the lawyer representing Musk, saying that the offer was "not in the best interests of OpenAI’s mission,” which is to build artificial intelligence that benefits “all of humanity." Toberoff said in a statement sent to The New York Times: “This comes as no surprise, given that Altman and Board chair, Taylor, already rejected Musk’s $97 billion bid while stating they had not yet received it. But we are surprised to see the Board, which has strict fiduciary duties to carefully consider the bid in good faith on behalf of the charity, use the same kind of deflective double-talk Altman used in testifying to the Senate.” Elon Musk also filed a lawsuit in federal court last year to block OpenAI’s restructuring plans. This week, Robert Bonta, California’s attorney general, said that the state was scrutinizing OpenAI’s plan to shift to a for-profit structure. xAI raised $6 billion in December, saying it would use the money to build infrastructure and accelerate research and development. BlackRock, Fidelity, Sequoia Capital, and other investors participated in the funding.

Mistral Upgrades Its AI Assistant Interface and Releases a Mobile App

French AI start-Mistral significantly upgraded its web assistant interface, Le Chat, released a mobile app on iOS and Android and introduced a Pro tier for $14.99 monthly. The company’s flagship models, Mistral Large, and the multimodal Pixtral Large, were available for commercial use through an API or cloud, such as Azure AI Studio, Amazon Bedrock, and Google’s Vertex AI. It also released several open-weight models under the Apache 2.0 license. Mistral is trying to position itself as a credible alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, or Microsoft Copilot. Mistral stated that Le Chat runs on “the fastest inference engines on the planet,” which can answer up to 1,000 words per second. It also claims that it generates much better images than ChatGPT or Grok, as it relies on Black Forest Labs’ Flux Ultra, one of the leading image-generation models.

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