🚀 Just launched: A toolkit of 20 powerful AI tools that journalists can use right now - transcribe, analyze, create. 100% free & open-source.
Been testing all these tools myself and created a searchable collection of the most practical ones - from audio transcription to image generation to document analysis. No coding needed, no expensive subscriptions.
Some highlights I've tested personally: - Private, on-device transcription with speaker ID in 100+ languages using Whisper - Website scraping that just works - paste a URL, get structured data - Local image editing with tools like Finegrain (impressive results) - Document chat using Qwen 2.5 72B (handles technical papers well)
Sharing this early because the best tools come from the community. Drop your favorite tools in the comments or join the discussion on what to add next!
Agents seem to be everywhere and this collection is for a deep dive into the theory and practice:
1. "Agents" Google's whitepaper by Julia Wiesinger, Patrick Marlow and Vladimir Vuskovic -> https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-agents Covers agents, their functions, tool use and how they differ from models
3. "AI Engineer Summit 2025: Agent Engineering" 8-hour video -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7BzTxVVMuw Experts' talks that share insights on the freshest Agent Engineering advancements, such as Google Deep Research, scaling tips and more
5. "Artificial Intelligence: Foundations of Computational Agents", 3rd Edition, book by David L. Poole and Alan K. Mackworth -> https://artint.info/3e/html/ArtInt3e.html Agents' architectures, how they learn, reason, plan and act with certainty and uncertainty
7. The Turing Post articles "AI Agents and Agentic Workflows" on Hugging Face -> https://huggingface.co/Kseniase We explore agentic workflows in detail and agents' building blocks, such as memory and knowledge
Trying something new to keep you ahead of the curve: The 5 AI stories of the week - a weekly curation of the most important AI news you need to know. Do you like it?
🎯 Perplexity drops their FIRST open-weight model on Hugging Face: A decensored DeepSeek-R1 with full reasoning capabilities. Tested on 1000+ examples for unbiased responses.
Will we soon all have our own personalized AI news agents? And what does it mean for journalism?
Just built a simple prototype based on the Hugging Face course. It lets you get customized news updates on any topic.
Not perfect yet, but you can see where things could go: we'll all be able to build personalized AI agents that curate & analyze news for each of us. And users who could decide to build custom news products for their needs, such as truly personalized newsletters or podcasts.
The implications for both readers & news organizations are significant. To name a few: - Will news articles remain the best format for informing people? - What monetization model will work for news organizations? - How do you create an effective conversion funnel?
We've noticed a huge interest in test-time scaling (TTS), so we decided to explore this concept further. Test-time compute (TTC) refers to the amount of computational power used by an AI model when generating a response. Many researchers are now focused on scaling TTC, as it enables slow, deep "thinking" and step-by-step reasoning, which improves overall models' performance.
⭐️ The AI Energy Score project just launched - this is a game-changer for making informed decisions about AI deployment.
You can now see exactly how much energy your chosen model will consume, with a simple 5-star rating system. Think appliance energy labels, but for AI.
Looking at transcription models on the leaderboard is fascinating: choosing between whisper-tiny or whisper-large-v3 can make a 7x difference. Real-time data on these tradeoffs changes everything.
166 models already evaluated across 10 different tasks, from text generation to image classification. The whole thing is public and you can submit your own models to test.
Why this matters: - Teams can pick efficient models that still get the job done - Developers can optimize for energy use from day one - Organizations can finally predict their AI environmental impact
If you're building with AI at any scale, definitely worth checking out.
🔥 Video AI is taking over! Out of 17 papers dropped on Hugging Face today, 6 are video-focused - from Sliding Tile Attention to On-device Sora. The race for next-gen video tech is heating up! 🎬🚀
RAG techniques continuously evolve to enhance LLM response accuracy by retrieving relevant external data during generation. To keep up with current AI trends, new RAG types incorporate deep step-by-step reasoning, tree search, citations, multimodality and other effective techniques.
3. Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (CoRAG) -> Chain-of-Retrieval Augmented Generation (2501.14342) Retrieves information step-by-step and adjusts it, also deciding how much compute power to use at test time. If needed it reformulates queries.
📢 SmolLM2 paper released! Learn how the 🤗 team built one of the best small language models: from data choices to training insights. Check out our findings and share your thoughts! 🤏💡
With the phenomenon of DeepSeek-R1's top reasoning capabilities, we all saw the true power of RL. At its core, RL is a type of machine learning where a model/agent learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment to maximize a reward. RL learns through trial and error, receiving feedback in the form of rewards or penalties.
Here's a list of free sources that will help you dive into RL and how to use it:
2. Hugging Face Deep Reinforcement Learning Course -> https://huggingface.co/learn/deep-rl-course/unit0/introduction You'll learn how to train agents in unique environments, using best libraries, share your results, compete in challenges, and earn a certificate.
4. "Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control" books, video lectures and course material by Dimitri P. Bertsekas from ASU -> https://web.mit.edu/dimitrib/www/RLbook.html Explores approximate Dynamic Programming (DP) and RL with key concepts and methods like rollout, tree search, and neural network training for RL and more.
8. Concepts: RLHF, RLAIF, RLEF, RLCF -> https://www.turingpost.com/p/rl-f Our flashcards easily explain what are these four RL approaches with different feedback
Small but mighty: 82M parameters, runs locally, speaks multiple languages. The best part? It's Apache 2.0 licensed! This could unlock so many possibilities ✨
🚀 The open source community is unstoppable: 4M total downloads for DeepSeek models on Hugging Face, with 3.2M coming from the +600 models created by the community.
Yes, DeepSeek R1's release is impressive. But the real story is what happened in just 7 days after:
- Original release: 8 models, 540K downloads. Just the beginning...
- The community turned those open-weight models into +550 NEW models on Hugging Face. Total downloads? 2.5M—nearly 5X the originals.
The reason? DeepSeek models are open-weight, letting anyone build on top of them. Interesting to note that the community focused on quantized versions for better efficiency & accessibility. They want models that use less memory, run faster, and are more energy-efficient.
When you empower builders, innovation explodes. For everyone. 🚀
The most popular community model? @bartowski's DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B-GGUF version — 1M downloads alone.
7 Open-source Methods to Improve Video Generation and Understanding
AI community is making great strides toward achieving the full potential of multimodality in video generation and understanding. Last week studies showed that working with videos is now one of the main focuses for improving AI models. Another highlight of the week is that open source, once again, proves its value. For those who were impressed by DeepSeek-R1, we’re with you!
Today, we’re combining these two key focuses and bringing you a list of open-source methods for better video generation and understanding:
Reminder: Don’t. Use. ChatGPT. As. A. Calculator. Seriously. 🤖
Loved listening to @sasha on Hard Fork—it really made me think.
A few takeaways that hit home: - Individual culpability only gets you so far. The real priority: demanding accountability and transparency from companies. - Evaluate if generative AI is the right tool for certain tasks (like search) before using it.
