Using a Meta LLaMa checkpoint from Unsloth and some help from the HF community, you can capture handwritten notes and convert them into digital format in just a few second.
Really exciting times for AI builders on Hugging Face.
Here's a quick walk through of the first drop of material that works toward the use case:
- a fundamental introduction to reinforcement learning. Answering questions like, ‘what is a reward?’ and ‘how do we create an environment for a language model?’
- Then it focuses on Deepseek R1 by walking through the paper and highlighting key aspects. This is an old school way to learn ML topics, but it always works.
- Next, it takes to you Transformers Reinforcement Learning and demonstrates potential reward functions you could use. This is cool because it uses Marimo notebooks to visualise the reward.
- Finally, Maxime walks us through a real training notebook that uses GRPO to reduce generation length. I’m really into this because it works and Maxime took the time to validate it share assets and logging from his own runs for you to compare with.
Maxime’s work and notebooks have been a major part of the open source community over the last few years. I, like everyone, have learnt so much from them.
We just published the LlamaIndex unit for the agents course, and it is set to offer a great contrast between the smolagents unit by looking at
- What makes llama-index stand-out - How the LlamaHub is used for integrations - Creating QueryEngine components - Using agents and tools - Agentic and multi-agent workflows
The team has been working flat-out on this for a few weeks. Supported by Logan Markewich and Laurie Voss over at LlamaIndex.
I've spent most of time working with AI on user-facing apps like Chatbots and TextGen, but today I decided to work on something that I think has a lot of applications for Data Science teams: ZennyKenny/comment_classification
This Space supports uploading a user CSV and categorizing the fields based on user-defined categories. The applications of AI in production are truly endless. 🚀
What if AI becomes as ubiquitous as the internet, but runs locally and transparently on our devices?
Fascinating TED talk by @thomwolf on open source AI and its future impact.
Imagine this for AI: instead of black box models running in distant data centers, we get transparent AI that runs locally on our phones and laptops, often without needing internet access. If the original team moves on? No problem - resilience is one of the beauties of open source. Anyone (companies, collectives, or individuals) can adapt and fix these models.
This is a compelling vision of AI's future that solves many of today's concerns around AI transparency and centralized control.
I'm excited to share the first episode of our AI-generated podcast series focusing on nice datasets from the Hugging Face Hub!
This first episode explores mathematical reasoning datasets:
- SynthLabsAI/Big-Math-RL-Verified: Over 250,000 rigorously verified problems spanning multiple difficulty levels and mathematical domains - open-r1/OpenR1-Math-220k: 220,000 math problems with multiple reasoning traces, verified for accuracy using Math Verify and Llama-3.3-70B models. - facebook/natural_reasoning: 1.1 million general reasoning questions carefully deduplicated and decontaminated from existing benchmarks, showing superior scaling effects when training models like Llama3.1-8B-Instruct.
Is this the best tool to extract clean info from PDFs, handwriting and complex documents yet?
Open source olmOCR just dropped and the results are impressive.
Tested the free demo with various documents, including a handwritten Claes Oldenburg letter. The speed is impressive: 3000 tokens/second on your own GPU - that's 1/32 the cost of GPT-4o ($190/million pages). Game-changer for content extraction and digital archives.
To achieve this, Ai2 trained a 7B vision language model on 260K pages from 100K PDFs using "document anchoring" - combining PDF metadata with page images.
Best part: it actually understands document structure (columns, tables, equations) instead of just jumbling everything together like most OCR tools. Their human eval results back this up.
This week we are releasing the first framework unit in the course and it’s on smolagents. This is what the unit covers:
- why should you use smolagents vs another library? - how to build agents that use code - build multiagents systems - use vision language models for browser use
The team has been working flat out on this for a few weeks. Led by @sergiopaniego and supported by smolagents author @m-ric.
🎉 Exciting news, everyone! I've just released **Thespis-Llama-3.1-8B**, a new language model designed for enhanced roleplaying! ✨️
It's built on Llama-3.1 and fine-tuned with a focus on Theory of Mind reasoning to create more believable and engaging characters. It even learned a few tricks on its own, like adding in-character thought processes! 🧠
Give it a try and let me know what you think! I'm especially interested in feedback on how well the characters stay in role and if the responses feel natural. Looking forward to seeing what amazing stories you create! ✍️
🔥 Agents can do anything! @microsoft Research just announced the release of Magma 8B!
Magma is a new Visual Language Model (VLM) with 8B parameters for multi-modal agents designed to handle complex interactions across virtual and real environments; and it's MIT licensed!
Magma comes with exciting new features such as: - Introduces the Set-of-Mark and Trace-of-Mark techniques for fine-tuning - Leverages a large amount of unlabeled video data to learn the spatial-temporal grounding and planning - A strong generalization and ability to be fine-tuned for other agentic tasks - SOTA in different multi-modal benchmarks spanning across UI navigation, robotics manipulation, image / video understanding and spatial understanding and reasoning - Generates goal-driven visual plans and actions for agentic use cases
🚀 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!
It's really interesting about the deployment of a new state of matter in Majorana 1: the world’s first quantum processor powered by topological qubits. If you missed this news this week, here are some links for you:
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?
