Open Source AI News & Updates

Google Launches Open-Source Gemini CLI Tool for Developer Terminals

Google has launched Gemini CLI, an open-source agentic AI tool that runs locally in developer terminals and connects Gemini AI models to local codebases. The tool allows developers to make natural language requests for code explanation, feature writing, debugging, and other tasks beyond coding. Google is offering generous usage limits and open-sourcing the tool under Apache 2.0 license to encourage adoption and compete with similar tools from OpenAI and Anthropic.

OpenAI Delays Release of First Open-Source Reasoning Model Due to Unexpected Research Breakthrough

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company's first open-source model in years will be delayed until later this summer, beyond the original June target. The delay is attributed to an unexpected research breakthrough that Altman claims will make the model "very very worth the wait," with the open model designed to compete with other reasoning models like DeepSeek's R1.

Mistral Launches Magistral Reasoning Models to Compete with OpenAI and Google

French AI lab Mistral released Magistral, its first family of reasoning models that work through problems step-by-step like OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro. The release includes two variants: Magistral Small (24B parameters, open-source) and Magistral Medium (closed, available via API), though benchmarks show they underperform compared to leading competitors. Mistral emphasizes the models' speed advantages and multilingual capabilities for enterprise applications.

EleutherAI Creates Massive Licensed Dataset to Train Competitive AI Models Without Copyright Issues

EleutherAI released The Common Pile v0.1, an 8-terabyte dataset of licensed and open-domain text developed over two years with multiple partners. The dataset was used to train two AI models that reportedly perform comparably to models trained on copyrighted data, addressing legal concerns in AI training practices.

Hugging Face Releases Lightweight Open-Source Robotics AI Model SmolVLA

Hugging Face has released SmolVLA, a 450 million parameter open-source AI model for robotics that can run on consumer hardware like MacBooks. The model is designed to democratize access to vision-language-action capabilities for robotics and outperforms larger models in both virtual and real-world environments. SmolVLA features an asynchronous inference stack that allows robots to respond more quickly by separating action processing from sensory input processing.

Hugging Face launches open-source humanoid robots HopeJR and Reachy Mini

Hugging Face announced two new open-source humanoid robots: HopeJR, a full-size robot with 66 degrees of freedom priced at $3,000, and Reachy Mini, a desktop unit costing $250-$300. The company aims to democratize robotics by making affordable, open-source alternatives to prevent dominance by big players with "dangerous black-box systems."

DeepSeek Releases Efficient R1 Distilled Model That Runs on Single GPU

DeepSeek released a smaller, distilled version of its R1 reasoning AI model called DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B that can run on a single GPU while maintaining competitive performance on math benchmarks. The model outperforms Google's Gemini 2.5 Flash on certain tests and nearly matches Microsoft's Phi 4, requiring significantly less computational resources than the full R1 model. It's available under an MIT license for both academic and commercial use.

DeepSeek Releases Updated R1 Reasoning Model with MIT License on Hugging Face

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has released an updated version of its R1 reasoning AI model on Hugging Face under a permissive MIT license, allowing commercial use. The updated model contains 685 billion parameters, making it a substantial upgrade that requires significant computational resources to run.

Hugging Face Releases Open Source Computer-Using AI Agent

Hugging Face has released Open Computer Agent, a freely available cloud-hosted AI agent that can operate a Linux virtual machine with preinstalled applications including Firefox. The agent can handle simple tasks like web searches but struggles with more complex operations and CAPTCHA tests, demonstrating both the progress and limitations of current open-source agentic systems.

Anthropic Issues DMCA Takedown for Claude Code Reverse-Engineering Attempt

Anthropic has issued DMCA takedown notices to a developer who attempted to reverse-engineer and release the source code for its AI coding tool, Claude Code. This contrasts with OpenAI's approach to its competing Codex CLI tool, which is available under an Apache 2.0 license that allows for distribution and modification, gaining OpenAI goodwill among developers who have contributed dozens of improvements.