This week in new AI premieres

Each week, Quartz rounds up product launches, updates, and funding news from AI startups and companies.

Here’s what’s happening this week in the ever-expanding artificial intelligence industry.

AI Workery Mentor, Sage

Workera, an AI-powered platform used by companies to measure employee skills, has launched Sage, which it says is “the world’s first AI mentor for enterprises.”

With Sage, individuals and organizations can get answers tailored to their needs, goals and skill levels. For example, students can use an AI mentor for guidance and encouragement, while managers can use Sage to analyze talent and get recommendations for improving employee development.

Allen Institute for a multimodal model of artificial intelligence, Molmo

The Allen Institute for AI has launched a family of cutting-edge multimodal models called Molmo. The Molmo family includes “the most open and efficient multimodal model today and the most efficient,” Ai2 said.

Molmo can “understand” a wide range of images, from recognizing everyday objects to reading complex charts and menus. Models can also “point to what they perceive” on screens, such as visual and interactive features that users see in the real world.

According to Ai2, Molmo is “creative” and can “brainstorm” designs and even tell jokes and stories.

Molmo training, tuning and other data is available as open models.

“Multimodal AI models are typically trained on billions of images. Instead, we focused on leveraging extremely high-quality data, but at a scale 1,000 times smaller,” Ani Kembhavi, senior director of research at Ai2, said in a statement. “This creates models that are as powerful as the best proprietary systems, but with fewer hallucinations and much faster training, making our model much more accessible to the community.”

Boston Dynamics robot, Spot

Boston Dynamics (HYMTF) announced updates to its Spot robot and Orbit robot fleet management software.

Spot’s new capabilities include acoustic vibration detection, enabling operators to detect bearing damage early and avoid failure, and visual semantic context that improves the way it “sees.”

Harmonic raised a $75 million Series A funding round

Harmonic, an artificial intelligence company developing mathematical superintelligence, announced that it has raised a $75 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Index Ventures also had “significant participation” in the round, leading to a post-money valuation of $325 million.

The company was founded in 2023 by Robinhood (HOOD) CEO Vlad Tenev and Tudor Achim.

According to Harmonic, mathematical superintelligence, or MSI for short, is “artificial intelligence with mathematical abilities superior to those of humans.” The company says MSI can address the limitations of other AI systems by using formal verification to eliminate hallucinations and overcoming data barriers with synthetic data.

Harmonic has a state-of-the-art mathematical model called Aristotle, which it claims has scored 90% on its leading formal mathematics benchmark MiniF2F.

“We believe that mathematical superintelligence is the next step in the development of artificial intelligence,” Tenev said in a statement. “We are excited to work with Sequoia, Index and many other great investors to accelerate the emergence of AI models that are accurate and truth-seeking.”

For the latest information, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.