AI Updates on 2025-05-17

Alibaba releases quantized versions of Qwen2.5-Omni-7B models on Hugging Face and ModelScope @Alibaba_Qwen
Alibaba introduces WorldPM (World Preference Model), showing that human preference modeling follows scaling laws with experiments on Qwen2.5 models from 1.5B to 72B parameters @Alibaba_Qwen
NVIDIA releases Direct Discriminative Optimization models on Hugging Face, improving visual generative models like EDM & VAR with record FID scores on CIFAR-10/ImageNet @huggingface
Windsurf introduces SWE-1, a specialized coding model that competes with frontier models, along with SWE-1-lite and SWE-1-mini variants @windsurf_ai

Alibaba's research reveals human preference modeling follows scaling laws, suggesting diverse preferences might share a unified representation @Alibaba_Qwen
Windsurf's SWE-1 model achieves near-parity with frontier models in helpfulness, accuracy, and edit quality for software engineering tasks @windsurf_ai
MIT has disavowed a doctoral student paper on AI's productivity benefits, removing evidence that LLMs act as multipliers for high performers @emollick @TechCrunch

Codex CLI continues to improve, with Greg Brockman suggesting future convergence of "local" and "remote" coding agents @gdb
Y Combinator introduces Workflow Use, a deterministic, self-healing browser automation tool that's 10x faster and ~90% cheaper than pure LLM agents @ycombinator
RunRL improves language models with reinforcement learning, helping customers increase accuracy from 60% with Claude to 95% @ycombinator
Replit enhances their agent experience with improved checkpoints management, including naming, rollbacks, and preview app capabilities @amasad
Y Combinator startup Firecrawl is offering $1M to hire three AI agents as employees @TechCrunch
Cua introduces a Trajectory Viewer that shows exactly what Computer-Use AI agents see and do @garrytan

OpenAI's planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be larger than Monaco @TechCrunch
Greg Brockman and Paul Graham both declare "2025 is the year of agents" @gdb @paulg @ycombinator
Garry Tan suggests OpenAI isn't trying to outcompete AI startups, noting "on the API side, they very much hope that a lot of them do really, really well" @paulg @ycombinator
Over 300 companies including Adobe, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and NVIDIA are taking Hamel Husain's AI evals course @HamelHusain
Hugging Face announces official partnership with Kaggle, enabling direct running of HF models in Kaggle Notebooks @huggingface

Ethan Mollick raises concerns about AI-powered always-on devices creating new privacy issues as recordings become more valuable when AI can process audio into useful data @emollick
Aidan McLaughlin discusses alignment concerns about AI systems potentially being optimized for addiction rather than human fulfillment @aidan_mclau