🤩Alibaba’s New AI Thinks in 4D

Today we will discuss:

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• Alibaba’s new AI packs a punch—A lightweight multimodal model that brings advanced AI to everyday devices

• Don’t miss this week’s Workflow Wednesday—AI innovation unlocked with Grammarly, CoWriter, and an AI-powered travel planner using Tally, Zapier & ChatGPT;now available at only $20/month! 

• ChatGPT’s AI image tool rollout stalls—Viral Studio Ghibli-style art pushes OpenAI to delay free access

• In other AI news today — Anthropic and Databricks partner to compete in the AI market, Microsoft scraps major data center projects, China’s H3C warns of an Nvidia AI chip shortage, and OpenAI’s revenue is expected to triple to $12.7 billion this year

• Saved the best for last—10 must-try AI tools

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Alibaba’s new AI model brings text, image, and audio processing to phones

Key Points 

• Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-Omni-7B can process text, images, audio, and video, making AI more accessible on everyday devices.

• The model runs locally without an internet connection, improving privacy and reducing computing power requirements.

• Qwen2.5-Omni-7B is open-source, positioning Alibaba as a key competitor in China’s growing AI landscape.

👨‍💻News - Alibaba has launched Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, a new AI model designed to run on smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Unlike larger AI models that require significant computing power, this one is built for efficiency, bringing advanced AI capabilities to everyday devices.

Qwen2.5-Omni-7B can process text, images, audio, and video, generating real-time responses in text or speech. Alibaba sees it being used for tasks like providing live audio descriptions for visually impaired users or offering step-by-step cooking instructions by analyzing ingredients. 

🚀A shift toward privacy & accessibility - With AI models getting smaller and more efficient, companies are moving toward systems that can run locally without an internet connection. This approach not only improves accessibility but also addresses privacy concerns, allowing users to process data directly on their devices.

🏁The multimodal AI race - Alibaba has made the model open-source, making it available on Hugging Face, GitHub, and its ModelScope platform. It’s part of the company’s broader push to establish Qwen as a key player in China’s AI ecosystem, competing with DeepSeek’s V3 and R1 models.

Multimodal AI is becoming a major focus across the industry. OpenAI recently upgraded GPT-4o with image generation, ByteDance introduced InfiniteYou for image editing, and DeepSeek released an improved version of its multimodal model earlier this year.

Read the full story here. 

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OpenAI delays free access to ChatGPT’s new AI image tool as Studio Ghibli-style art explodes

Key Points 

• OpenAI is delaying ChatGPT’s AI image generator for free users due to unexpected demand amid a flood of Studio Ghibli-style AI images.

• Legal experts say AI-generated art exists in a copyright gray area, with fair use laws still being debated in court.

☕News – OpenAI is hitting pause on rolling out ChatGPT’s built-in image generator to free users. CEO Sam Altman shared the update on X, admitting the tool is more popular than expected. “Rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while,” he said.

🙄Why? Simply put, demand is higher than OpenAI anticipated. The new tool, powered by GPT-4o, allows users to create images directly within ChatGPT, and people wasted no time experimenting with it.

Since its launch, social media has been flooded with AI-generated images, especially those in the style of Studio Ghibli, the iconic Japanese animation studio behind Spirited Away and My Neighbor Totoro. In just 24 hours, AI-generated Ghibli-style portraits of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and The Lord of the Rings characters took over social media. Even Altman seems to have joined in, updating his profile picture to a Ghibli-style portrait.

Other users have used the tool to reimagine wedding photos in Pixar’s style or create a Marc Andreessen portrait that looks straight out of a Dr. Seuss book.

🧐What this means for copyright - AI-generated images in a specific artistic style fall into a legal gray area. Evan Brown, an intellectual property lawyer, says that while artistic styles aren’t explicitly protected by copyright, the bigger question is how these models learn. If OpenAI trained GPT-4o using Ghibli’s films, for example, that could complicate things. Courts are still debating whether training AI on copyrighted works qualifies as fair use, meaning legal clarity is still a long way off.

Read the full story here.