The training side: building datasets, synthetic data, pre- and post-training methods, compute and training cost.
Google DeepMind published results from a preregistered randomised controlled trial in Sierra Leone. Over eight weeks, students using Guided Learning improved maths scores by 0.258 standard deviations over controls, equivalent to around 1.2–1.7 years of conventional progress.
Google Research open-sourced its hydrological modelling framework on GitHub under Apache 2.0, enabling national weather and hydrology agencies to integrate AI flood forecasting. The Python package uses PyTorch and an LSTM architecture, can train or fine-tune on Caravan data, and includes interactive tutorial notebooks and videos.
Mistral AI signed a definitive agreement this week to acquire Physics AI pioneer Emmi AI, strengthening its AI transformation services for industrial companies. Founded in Austria, Emmi AI has over 30 researchers and engineers focusing on large engineering models that replace days of computation with real-time simulation and build digital twins. Its co-founders and team will join Mistral's Science and Applied AI teams in May.
Google released Empirical Research Assistance (ERA), a research tool using Gemini to write and optimise scientific code. Its paper was published in Nature today, and the tool is available to scientists worldwide as part of Gemini for Science.
Google Research described how scientists use Empirical Research Assistance (ERA) to advance research in four areas: epidemic forecasting, cosmology, carbon monitoring and neuroscience.
Google DeepMind published a paper proposing Decoupled DiLoCo, splitting large-scale training into decoupled compute islands that communicate through asynchronous data streams, isolating local hardware failures.
Mistral AI launched Forge, a system for enterprises to build frontier-class AI models on proprietary knowledge, supporting pre-training, post-training and reinforcement learning. It handles dense and MoE architectures and, when needed, multimodal inputs, with training and governance on companies' own infrastructure.
Google introduced urban flash-flood forecasts on Flood Hub, using a new AI approach to predict risks in urban areas up to 24 hours ahead.
Google Research launched Groundsource, using Gemini to extract structured historical disaster data from global news. Its first open dataset contains 2.6 million urban flash-flood records across over 150 countries, spanning 2000 to the present.
Google Research released WAXAL, a large open speech dataset initially covering 27 sub-Saharan African languages spoken by more than 100 million people, under CC-BY-4.0.