Orange Partners With OpenAI To Access Pre-Release AI Models - 1

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Orange Partners With OpenAI To Access Pre-Release AI Models

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert

The French telecommunications giant Orange partnered with OpenAI to access pre-release AI models, becoming the first telecom company to reach this type of deal in Europe.

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • Orange becomes the first European telecom to get direct access to OpenAI’s models
  • The French giant signed a multi-year partnership to grow and expand AI services
  • Orange signed another deal with Meta and OpenAI to develop AI models to translate African languages.

According to Reuters , Steve Jarrett, Chief AI Officer at Orange Group confirmed yesterday a multi-year deal between both companies during an interview with the news agency.

“OpenAI’s models are the most popular. And so it made financial sense for us to have a direct billing relationship”, said Jarrett to Reuters. “We have the ability to have access to pre-release versions of their models. We have the ability to influence the road map… Those models are all served from secure infrastructure that’s hosted in Europe.”

With this new deal, Orange takes the lead and becomes Europe’s first telecom firm to get direct access to OpenAI’s latest models.

Orange also signed another agreement with Meta and OpenAI to develop AI models to translate African languages.

According to CNBC , the French company wants to develop custom AI models that can process and understand Western African languages like Wolof and Pulaar—spoken by 16 million people—and also consider the local context and culture as these companies’ AI models are more powerful in English and trained primarily with American information.

Orange takes the lead in Europe in adopting OpenAI technologies in the telecom market and expanding its potential, not only to commercial clients but also to universities, startups, and governments.

OpenAI has recently announced multiple partnerships with other large European companies like BBVA —with presence in Europe, Latin America, and the U.S.—, and recently reached a $157 billion valuation.

Non-Profit Organization Ai2 Releases New LLM Competitive With Meta’s Llama - 2

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Non-Profit Organization Ai2 Releases New LLM Competitive With Meta’s Llama

  • Written by Andrea Miliani Former Tech News Expert

The nonprofit research organization The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) launched OLMo 2, the second family of its open language model, with highly competitive tools and capabilities comparable to leading models in the market such as Meta’s Llama 3.1.

In a Rush? Here are the Quick Facts!

  • Ai2 launched OLMo 2 yesterday, an advanced and open-source language model
  • The organization describes it as “the best fully open language model to date”
  • OLMo 2 competes with other open-source models like Meta’s Llama 3.1

Ai2, founded by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen in 2014, described this model as “the best fully open language model to date.”

“We introduce OLMo 2, a new family of 7B and 13B models trained on up to 5T tokens,” wrote the organization in an announcement on its website. “These models are on par with or better than equivalently sized fully open models, and competitive with open-weight models such as Llama 3.1 on English academic benchmarks.”

OLMo 2 is the result of an upgrade to the previous versions of models released throughout the year—Ai2 announced its first model, OLMo, in February—focusing on improving critical aspects like training stability, pretraining, state-of-the-art post-training, and performance through an evaluation framework.

The new model is currently only available in English, and there’s an online demo available to the public to test OLMo 2.

According to TechCrunch , OLMo 2 meets the criteria to be considered an open-source AI as its data and tools are publicly available and ready to be tested.

Ai2 shared data proving this new model can outperform other popular models with similar structures.

“We find that OLMo 2 7B and 13B are the best fully-open models to-date, often outperforming open-weight models of equivalent size,” states the document shared by the organization. “Not only do we observe a dramatic improvement in performance across all tasks compared to our earlier OLMo 0424 model but, notably, OLMo 2 7B outperforms LLama-3.1 8B and OLMo 2 13B outperforms Qwen 2.5 7B despite its lower total training FLOPs.”

Alibaba released the new Qwen 2.5 models , considered by Ai2 for comparison, in September.