PAPERTECH
Digital Newspaper
Issue #01
Friday, 6 June 2025
© 2025 PAPERTECH
DAILY DOSE OF TECH UPDATES!
Anthropic's Claude 4 Series: A New Benchmark in AI Coding
Anthropic's Claude 4 series sets a new standard in AI coding. Claude Opus 4 leads with top performance, scoring 72.5% on coding benchmarks and handling long, complex tasks autonomously. Claude Sonnet 4 offers fast, efficient support, powering GitHub Copilot. Both models support advanced memory and tool use, enhancing developer workflows. Though their context window is smaller than some rivals, Claude 4's strong coding accuracy and agentic abilities make it a breakthrough AI for software development.
India's First AI Lab in Space
Hyderabad-based startup TakeMe2Space is building MOI-TD, India's first AI lab in space. The lab aims to demonstrate AI's utility in space by assisting with environmental monitoring, weather pattern analysis, and Earth's surface change tracking. The mission successfully validated its subsystems, including computer infrastructure and sensors, laying the foundation for space-based computing.
NVIDIA & Stanford's AI Cartoons
New Tom and Jerry episodes, earlier unwritten and un-animated, are ready to be aired thanks to AI. NVIDIA and Stanford unveiled a technique called Text-Time Training (TTT), enabling the generation of one-minute animated cartoons with strong temporal and spatial coherence. This method opens new possibilities for AI in entertainment and education.
OpenAI Expands Stargate Project Worldwide with "OpenAI for Countries"
OpenAI has launched a major new initiative called "OpenAI for Countries," aiming to help governments around the world build their own AI infrastructure and set tools for local needs. This move expands the reach of OpenAI's massive $500 billion Stargate project, which began in the United States, to democratically aligned nations globally.
Through this program, OpenAI will partner with countries to set up local data centers and create versions of ChatGPT tailored to local languages and cultures. The goal is to improve public services like healthcare and education using AI, with funding shared between OpenAI and participating governments. By investing in local talent and tools globally, OpenAI hopes to strengthen democratic values and ensure that the benefits of AI are widely shared, while also reinforcing U.S. leadership in the technology sector.
Microsoft Announces Major Layoffs Despite Strong Earnings, Shifts Focus to AI
Major tech companies like Google, Amazon, IBM, and CrowdStrike are joining Microsoft in cutting jobs in AI dev industry during 2025. Over 61,000 tech jobs have been eliminated compared to previous year, alongside automation with automation-related shifts in cloud model transition, and streamlined management to focus efficient and long-term profitability.
This wave of layoffs marks a paradigm shift from labor-intensive operations to leaner, AI-driven business models. Companies are prioritizing not just cost reduction but strategic repositioning for decision-making and to reduce reliance on large workforces, signaling a new era where efficiency and adaptability matter more than sheer headcount.
Research Corner
SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos
Meta's Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM 2) is a breakthrough in computer vision, analyzing real-time object segmentation in images and videos with remarkable accuracy. Unlike its predecessor, SAM 2 can accurately track and adjust object boundaries even when they disappear or reappear, while operating up to six times faster than SAM 1. Trained on over 600,000 masklet triplets, its enhanced versatility opens new possibilities for video editing, autonomous vehicles, medical imaging, and augmented reality.
Emergent Social Conventions in AI Communication
Researchers from City University of London, and the IT University of Copenhagen demonstrated that AI agents can spontaneously develop social norms similar to those in human society, highlighting the social potential of AI systems and offering insights into AI safety and ethics.
Emerging Properties in Unified Multimodal Pretraining
A new open-source unified neural EuOAS model is setting a benchmark in unified multimodal pretraining by demonstrating remarkable emerging properties in both understanding and generating content across text, images, and video. Trained on trillions of intersected multimodal tokens, its architecture and large-scale, carefully curated data enable it to outperform previous open models in tasks like few-shot learning, visual commonsense reasoning, and compositional mathematical reasoning.
AI That Teaches Itself: Absolute Zero Reasoner Sets New Benchmark in Machine Intelligence
In a landmark leap for artificial intelligence, researchers have unveiled the Absolute Zero Reasoner (AZR) - an AI model that starts with zero human data, inventing its own tasks to achieve state-of-the-art results in math and coding. Unlike traditional systems that require vast human-labeled datasets, AZR autonomously generates its own curriculum, essentially teaching itself through a bootstrapping process. The model not only outperforms previous zero-data approaches but also demonstrates powerful cross-domain transfer, with self-reasoning and novel problem-solving capabilities. Experts say AZR's self-directed evolution marks a pivotal moment in AI, hinting at a future where machines could learn autonomously across domains, though it also raises fresh questions about AI safety and alignment as these systems become increasingly autonomous.
Beacon.li Secures $7M Series A Funding
Beacon.li, an AI startup, has raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Multiling Investor, with participation from Athera Venture Partners, JAFCO Asia, and several angel investors. The company plans to use the funds to expand its AI product assistant and grow its presence in India and the US.
MaxIQ Raises $7.8M in Seed Funding
MaxIQ, an AI-driven platform designed to unify and streamline sales and marketing workflows, has raised $7.8 million in seed funding. Led by Dell Technologies Capital with participation from Iron Pillar, Auulah, MaxIQ aims to eliminate fragmented workflows by providing a single system for deal qualification, forecasting, and customer lifecycle management, helping companies boost efficiency and revenue growth.
WestBridge-Backed Otipy Shuts Operations Amid Cash Crunch
Otipy, a Delhi-NCR-based subscription-based grocery provider, has ceased operations as of May 17, 2025, affecting around 500 employees and numerous gig workers. The shutdown was communicated to employees during a townhall meeting by cofounder and CEO Varun Khurana, who cited the inability to secure further funding as a primary reason for the closure.
Wix acquires Hour One to boost AI video and media tools
Wix.com Ltd. has acquired Hour One, a generative AI media creation startup founded in 2019, to enhance its AI-powered digital experiences and reduce reliance on third-party providers. According to Wix's COO Ronny Elkayam, this strategic acquisition reinforces the company's position as a leader in generative AI while providing access to Hour One's proprietary cloud infrastructure that integrates AI inference with advanced 3D rendering for scalable, high-quality video content creation.