NederlandsLanguage model
A language model is an AI model trained on vast amounts of text, so it can understand, write and translate text. The chatbots you know run on a language model.
A language model is an AI model that has learned from vast amounts of text. That lets it answer questions, write and summarise texts, translate and produce programming code. The well-known chatbots run on a language model. With a large language model, or LLM, both the model itself and the amount of text it was trained on are very large.
How does it work?
At its core, a language model learns to predict the next piece of text. It reads a passage, guesses what comes next and checks how far off it was. This happens billions of times. That is how it picks up patterns in language, but also in the knowledge contained in those texts. The text is chopped into small pieces, the tokens, and the model works with those pieces.
What the model has learned is stored in its parameters: billions of numbers. An answer usually emerges piece by piece, with each new piece depending on what is already there. Some models work differently. Mercury 3, from the American company Inception, first makes a rough version of the whole text and sharpens it in a few rounds. According to the company, that makes it four to eight times as fast as comparable models (link).
Why it matters
Language models are the engine behind almost all AI news. They form the basis of AI agents that carry out tasks on their own. They are also used in science, for example to design proteins or devise experiments.
Training such a model takes a lot of computing power, and a great deal of work goes into reducing that. Microsoft AI has finished the first training phase of its base model MAI-Base-2. According to the company, the model reaches the same level as a strong Chinese model with 4 to 12 times less computation (link). Researchers measure how good a language model is with fixed tests, the benchmarks.
Articles about Language model
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New AI memory condenses a whole stack of documents into 16 tokens for each question
Researchers from Stanford and other institutions built Memorilla, a memory that condenses a whole collection of documents into 16 tokens for each question. In their own tests, a language model usually scores better with it than with all the text, and answers much faster. Exact names are sometimes lost.
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Baidu releases large AI model ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, but not for Europe
The Chinese tech company Baidu has released a large AI model that developers can train further themselves. It is built to be fast and economical, and Baidu says it scores well in tests. The licence does not apply in the EU, the United Kingdom and South Korea.
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Unsloth shrinks a large open AI model from Alibaba and, by its own tests, makes it more accurate than other versions
Unsloth has released new, smaller versions of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, a large open AI model from Alibaba. By its own tests, they score 15 per cent higher on average than other shrunken versions. This lets more people run the model on their own computers.
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Tencent releases Hy4: an open AI model that understands images and operates a computer
China's Tencent has released Hy4, a large language model that understands images for the first time and can operate a computer on its own. According to Tencent, it makes things up far less often than the previous version. The model files will be freely available in the coming days.
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Open AI model predicts how RNA folds, trained on 21 million examples
Researchers from China present structRFM in Nature, an AI model that learns how RNA molecules fold. In tests, it matches Google DeepMind's AlphaFold3, according to its makers. Data, model and code are freely available.
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Xpeng's small open AI model locates objects better than GPT-6 Astra
Carmaker Xpeng and several universities have released GroundingPI, an open AI model that helps robots and cars see exactly where things are. On 34 tests it scores slightly higher on average than OpenAI's much larger GPT-6 Astra, according to its makers.
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AI makes hacking easier, but it also helps the defenders
Smart AI agents that read and write code themselves make hacking easier, especially open models whose safety limits are easy to remove. But the same AI also finds security flaws before attackers do. A cat-and-mouse game, with recent examples in the Netherlands and Belgium.
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Google DeepMind gives AI agent chemistry skills: drug design work cut from days to an hour
Google DeepMind has released chemistry skills for its AI platform Antigravity. In a demonstration, an AI agent used them to do in about an hour work on new medicines that, according to Google, usually takes chemists days. The designs still have to be tested in the lab.
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Chinese company releases free AI model for chemistry, trained on its own lab work
The Chinese company Deep Principle has released Hydrogen-1.0, an AI model for chemistry and materials research that anyone can download. It also learned from failed experiments in the company's own lab. The results have so far been measured by the company itself.
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Tencent lets AI build its own tools for protein research and mathematics
Tencent has presented the second version of its research AI, Hyra. It delivers not only solutions but also tools that can be used again later. Models for proteins and molecules are already public, so other researchers can now test them themselves.
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Newest AI model can read the inside of other AI and write it itself
Researchers at MIT had OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra read and adjust the numbers that small AI networks are made of, without any training. It even wrote networks that play a computer game well. The researchers call these very early results.
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Meituan releases LongCat-2.5: a multimodal agent model with 1.6 trillion parameters, trained on Chinese chips
On 2 November the Chinese company Meituan released LongCat-2.5, a large AI model that handles text and images and can carry out long programming tasks on its own. According to Meituan, it was trained entirely on Chinese chips and comes close to Claude Opus 5 in tests.
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Diagnostic AI AMIE tested with real patients in a GP practice for the first time
Google's medical AI AMIE held conversations with 100 real patients at a US GP practice before their appointment with the doctor. Not a single conversation had to be stopped for safety reasons. The study is in The Lancet; larger trials are the next step.
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Robot with a super-fast camera finds a better way to make perovskite solar cells
Researchers at Osaka University built a robot platform that films, in milliseconds, how the layer of a perovskite solar cell forms. Using machine learning they found a better method; their cell converts 24.4 per cent of sunlight into electricity.
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Developer builds a complete processor inside the weights of an AI language model
Developer Divyansh Agrawal built a complete processor inside the weights of the language model Qwen 3.5. In his tests, the model now calculates almost without errors, with no outside tool. It is still a slow experiment, but everything is online for anyone to see.
