Next Week in The Sequence:

We start a new series about RAG! For the high performance hackers, our engineering series will dive into Llama.cpp. In research we will dive into Deliberative Alignment, one of the techniques powering GPT-03. The opinion edition will debate open endedness AI methods for long term reasoning and how far those can go.

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📝 Editorial: NVIDIA AI Software Party at a Hardware Show

The name NVIDIA is immediately associated with computing hardware and, in the world of AI, GPUs. But that is changing so rapidly. In several editions of this newsletter, we have highlighted NVIDIA’s rapidly growing AI software stack and aspirations. This was incredibly obvious last week at CES which is, well, mostly a hardware show!

NVIDIA unveiled not only a very clear vision for the future of AI but an overwhelming series of new products, many of which were AI software-related. Take a look for yourself.

NVIDIA NIM Microservices

NVIDIA’s NIM (NVIDIA Inference Microservices) is a significant leap forward in the integration of AI into modern software systems. Built for the new GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs, NIM offers pre-built containers powered by NVIDIA's inference software, including Triton Inference Server and TensorRT-LLM. These microservices enable developers to incorporate advanced AI capabilities into their applications with unprecedented ease, reducing deployment times from weeks to just minutes. With NIM, NVIDIA is effectively turning the once-daunting process of deploying AI into a seamless, efficient task—an essential advancement for industries looking to accelerate their AI adoption.

AI Blueprints

For developers seeking a head start, NVIDIA introduced AI Blueprints, open-source templates designed to streamline the creation of AI-powered solutions. These blueprints provide customizable foundations for applications like digital human generation, podcast creation, and video production. By offering pre-designed architectures, NVIDIA empowers developers to focus on innovation and customization rather than reinventing the wheel. The result? Faster iteration cycles and a smoother path from concept to deployment in AI-driven industries.

Cosmos Platform

NVIDIA’s Cosmos Platform takes AI into the realm of robotics, autonomous vehicles, and vision AI applications. By integrating advanced models with powerful video data processing pipelines, Cosmos enables AI systems to reason, plan, and act in dynamic physical environments. This platform isn’t just about data processing; it’s about equipping AI with the tools to operate intelligently in real-world scenarios. Whether it’s guiding a robot through a warehouse or enabling an autonomous vehicle to navigate complex traffic, Cosmos represents a new frontier in applied AI.

Isaac GR00T Blueprint

Robotic training just got a major upgrade with NVIDIA’s Isaac GR00T Blueprint. This innovative tool generates massive volumes of synthetic motion data using imitation learning, leveraging the capabilities of NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform. By producing millions of lifelike motions, Isaac GR00T accelerates the training process for humanoid robots, enabling them to learn complex tasks more effectively. It’s a groundbreaking approach to solving one of robotics’ biggest challenges—efficiently generating diverse, high-quality training data at scale.

DRIVE Hyperion AV Platform

NVIDIA’s DRIVE Hyperion AV Platform saw a significant evolution with the addition of the NVIDIA AGX Thor SoC. Designed to support generative AI models, this new iteration enhances functional safety and boosts the performance of autonomous driving systems. By combining cutting-edge hardware with advanced AI capabilities, Hyperion delivers a robust platform for developing the next generation of autonomous vehicles, capable of handling increasingly complex environments with confidence and precision.

AI Enterprise Software Platform

NVIDIA’s commitment to enterprise AI is reflected in its AI Enterprise Software Platform, now available on AWS Marketplace. With NIM integration, this platform equips businesses with the tools needed to deploy generative AI models and large language models (LLMs) for applications like chatbots, document summarization, and other NLP tasks. This offering streamlines the adoption of advanced AI technologies, providing organizations with a comprehensive, reliable foundation for scaling their AI initiatives.

RTX AI PC Features

At the consumer level, NVIDIA announced RTX AI PC Features, which bring AI foundation models to desktops powered by GeForce RTX 50 Series GPUs. These features are designed to support the next generation of digital content creation, delivering up to twice the inference performance of prior GPU models. By enabling FP4 computing and boosting AI workflows, RTX AI PCs are poised to redefine productivity for developers and creators, offering unparalleled performance for AI-driven tasks.

That is insane for the first week of the year! NVIDIA is really serious about its AI software aspirations. Maybe Microsoft, Google and Amazon need to get more aggressive about their GPU initiatives. Just in case…

🔎 AI Research

rStar-Math

In the paper "rStar-Math: Guiding LLM Reasoning through Self-Evolution with Process Preference Reward," researchers from Tsinghua University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Alibaba Group propose rStar-Math, a novel method for enhancing LLM reasoning abilities by employing self-evolution with a process preference reward (PPM). rStar-Math iteratively improves the reasoning capabilities of LLMs by generating high-quality step-by-step verified reasoning trajectories using a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) process.

BoxingGym

In the paper "BoxingGym: Benchmarking Progress in Automated Experimental Design and Model Discovery," researchers from Stanford University introduce a new benchmark for evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform scientific reasoning. The benchmark, called BoxingGym, consists of 10 environments drawn from various scientific domains, and the researchers found that current LLMs struggle with both experimental design and model discovery.

Cosmos World

In the paper "Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI," researchers from NVIDIA introduce Cosmos World Foundation Models (WFMs). Cosmos WFMs are pre-trained models that can generate high-quality 3D-consistent videos with accurate physics, and can be fine-tuned for a wide range of Physical AI applications.

DOLPHIN

In the paper "DOLPHIN: Closed-loop Open-ended Auto-research through Thinking, Practice, and Feedback," researchers from Fudan University and the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory propose DOLPHIN, a closed-loop, open-ended automatic research framework2. DOLPHIN can generate research ideas, perform experiments, and use the experimental results to generate new research idea.

Meta Chain-of-Thoguht

In the paper "Towards System 2 Reasoning in LLMs: Learning How to Think With Meta Chain-of-Thought" researchers from SynthLabs.ai and Stanford University propose a novel framework called Meta Chain-of-Thought (Meta-CoT), which enhances traditional Chain-of-Thought by explicitly modeling the reasoning process. The researchers present empirical evidence of state-of-the-art models showing in-context search behavior, and discuss methods for training models to produce Meta-CoTs, paving the way for more powerful and human-like reasoning in AI.

LLM Test-Time Compute and Meta-RL

In a thoughtful blog post title "Optimizing LLM Test-Time Compute Involves Solving a Meta-RL Problem" from CMU explain that optimizing test-time compute in LLMs can be viewed as a meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) problem where the model learns to learn how to solve queries. The authors outline a meta-RL framework for training LLMs to optimize test-time compute, leveraging intermediate rewards to encourage information gain and improve final answer accuracy.

🤖 AI Tech Releases

NVIDIA Nemotron Models

NVIDIA released Llama Nemotron LLM and Cosmos Nemotron vision-language models.

Phi-4

Microsoft open sourced its Phi-4 small model.

ReRank 3.5

Cohere released its ReRank 3.5 model optimized for RAG and search scenarios.

Agentic Document Workfows

LlamaIndex released Agentic Document Workflow, an architecture for applying agentic tasks to documents.

🛠 AI Reference Implementations

Beyond RAG

Salesfoce discusses an enriched index technique that improved its RAG solutions.

📡AI Radar

• NVIDIA released AI agentic blueprints for popular open source frameworks.

• NVIDIA unveiled Project DIGITS, an AI supercomputer powered by the Blackwell chip.

• NVIDIA announced a new family of world foundation models for its Cosmos platform.

• Anthropic might be raising at a monster $60 billion valuation.

• Hippocratic AI raised a massive $141 million round for its healthcare LLM.

• Cohere announced North, its Microsoft CoPilot competitor.

• OpenAI might be getting back to robotics.

• Gumloop raised $17 million for its workflow automation platform.