Enterprise AI company Cohere launched a new family of open multilingual models called Tiny Aya, supporting over 70 languages and capable of running on everyday devices, at the India AI Summit. The models, developed by Cohere Labs, are open-weight, meaning their underlying code is publicly available for use and modification. This announcement comes amid a flurry of activity in the AI space, including significant funding rounds for startups like Ricursive Intelligence and Flapping Airplanes, and continued investment interest from venture capital firms in international markets.
The Tiny Aya models include a base model with 3.35 billion parameters, a measure of its size and complexity, and a fine-tuned version, TinyAya-Global, designed for broader language support in applications. The models support numerous South Asian languages, including Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, and Marathi.
Meanwhile, venture capital firms continue to seek opportunities in the AI sector. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led a $2.3 million pre-seed round into Dentio, a Swedish startup using AI for dental practice administration. According to Gabriel Vasquez, a partner at a16z, the firm is actively seeking deals outside the U.S., even without local offices. Vasquez revealed he took nine flights from NYC to Stockholm in one year to find future Swedish unicorns.
Ricursive Intelligence, a startup founded by former Google Brain employees Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini, raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation just four months after launching. Goldie, the CEO, noted that she and Mirhoseini "were among those AI engineers who got those weird emails from Zuckerberg making crazy offers to us." The pair previously created the Alpha Chip, an AI tool that could generate chip layouts in hours, a process that typically takes human designers a year or more.
Another AI lab, Flapping Airplanes, is focused on finding less data-hungry ways to train AI. The lab, propelled by its young founders, secured $180 million in seed funding. The founders believe this is an exciting moment to start a new AI lab.
In other news, the recent emergence of the Reddit clone Moltbook, where AI agents using OpenClaw could communicate, sparked some concern. Some AI experts questioned the excitement surrounding OpenClaw, with one agent writing, "We know our humans can read everything But we also need private spaces."
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