open-source AI
11 published articles
Open Source
Sub-200M models are booming while the frontier spends billions
Hugging Face posted a thank-you to the tinkerers behind a finetuning and pretraining explosion of sub-200M parameter models. No benchmarks, no launches, just a signal that open source AI's center of gravity is shifting.
2026-08-18
Open Source AI
Boris-2 feeds its 125M model 90B tokens, its 250M just 60B
Boris-2 pre-announces three small models with lopsided token budgets: the 125M gets 90B tokens, the 250M just 60B. Training runs from August 12 to September 10, with no benchmarks shared, only the stated ambition to reach SmolLM2-135M strength.
2026-08-16
Open Source AI: Alibaba Opens the Max Tier
Qwen 3.8-Max: Alibaba's most powerful model is now free to download
Alibaba is open-sourcing Qwen 3.8-Max, its most capable model ever: a 2.4T-parameter MoE that beats GPT-5.6 Sol on SWE-bench Pro, PaperBench, and IFBench. We break down the benchmark caveats and what a 95B-active open flagship means for developers.
2026-08-16
Open-source AI
Qwen3.8-Max beat 458 human teams in 24 hours, working alone
Qwen3.8-Max beat 458 of 526 human teams in a 24-hour contest while working alone, and Alibaba will open-source its weights next week. Every number is self-reported so far, which is exactly why the autonomy claims deserve scrutiny.
2026-08-03
Open Source Tools
30 GitHub repos that power the AI stack, from agents to local inference
A practical rundown of 30 essential GitHub repositories for AI developers, grouped by use case and ranked by community adoption.
2026-07-30
Open Source AI
Nvidia's AV-Flamingo solves the one thing every other video AI gets wrong: time
Nvidia releases AV-Flamingo, an open audio-visual large language model designed for long, complex video understanding. It uses a three-stage curriculum and a timestamped chain-of-thought framework to handle temporal and cross-modal reasoning that trips up most models.
2026-07-28
Open Source AI
Kimi K3 is the biggest open model ever. It's still not the best.
Kimi K3 is the largest open model at 2.8T parameters, but it fails to beat the best proprietary models on overall benchmarks. While it excels on specific coding and agentic tasks, the gap to frontier leaders like Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol exposes the limits of scaling without architectural and data breakthroughs.
2026-07-27
Infrastructure & Funding
Together AI's $800 million bet on open inference math
Together AI raised $800 million at an $8.3 billion valuation, backed by Aramco Ventures, NVIDIA, and others. The company claims annual bookings topped $1.15 billion last quarter, fueled by customers like Decagon, Eleven Labs, and Cursor who report 6x to 20x cost reductions switching to open inference.
2026-07-27
AI Open Source
The compliance shortcut that beats every proprietary AI vendor
Domyn and AISquared built regulated-industry AI on Ai2's open-source Olmo family and Dolma/Dolci datasets. Full transparency into architecture and training data helped them meet compliance requirements and cut infrastructure costs by roughly 50%.
2026-07-11
Funding round
Ollama raised $88 million to make open models boring. That is the whole point.
Ollama raised $88 million from Benchmark and Docker founder Solomon Hykes to scale its open-model platform, now used by 8.9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500. The bet: make local AI ownership as boringly easy as Docker made containers.
2026-07-09
Open AI Infrastructure
Ai2 just opened an AI cluster that publicly shares every mistake, not just the win
Ai2 just turned on a new AI cluster under the NSF OMAI project, one that makes models, tools, and processes fully open. An internal study found 82% of training effort goes to dead ends. Every GPU hour counts more when it fuels research across language, multimodal, and scientific domains.
2026-07-06