Skylum Launches AI-Powered Luminar Neo

A logo of Adobe Inc. is pictured at the company's office in
Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, Ireland October 19, 2021. REUTERS/
Tom Bergin
A logo of Adobe Inc. is pictured at the company's office in Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, Ireland October 19, 2021. REUTERS/ Tom Bergin
TT
20

Skylum Launches AI-Powered Luminar Neo

A logo of Adobe Inc. is pictured at the company's office in
Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, Ireland October 19, 2021. REUTERS/
Tom Bergin
A logo of Adobe Inc. is pictured at the company's office in Citywest Business Campus, Saggart, Ireland October 19, 2021. REUTERS/ Tom Bergin

Software maker Skylum released a new version of its Luminar Neo photo editing tool that uses artificial intelligence to handle what used to be mundane but time-consuming tasks, reported the German News Agency.

According to the CNET website, the new version of Luminar Neo can automatically remove power lines in backgrounds or erase dark blotches caused by dust on your camera's image sensor. It can also create a depth map that lets you apply changes to scene elements depending on whether they're in the foreground, middle distance or background.

The software's new AI tools, which were trained with real-world data, are an example of tasks that are out of the reach of traditional data processing algorithms, the website added.

AI technology, which uses techniques based on human brains, is widely used to spruce up smartphone shots. Luminar Neo, however, shows the spread of these approaches to heavy-duty PC tools, too.

Skylum has put AI front and center with its Luminar software, which is designed to let photographers quickly jazz up their shots without lots of fiddling. That doesn't guarantee it'll stay ahead of Adobe, the gorilla of photo editing, though.



OpenAI Releases Open-Weight Reasoning Models Optimized for Running on Laptops

The OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. (Reuters)
The OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. (Reuters)
TT
20

OpenAI Releases Open-Weight Reasoning Models Optimized for Running on Laptops

The OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. (Reuters)
The OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken, February 3, 2023. (Reuters)

OpenAI said on Tuesday it has released two open-weight language models that excel in advanced reasoning and are optimized to run on laptops with performance levels similar to its smaller proprietary reasoning models.

An open-weight language model's trained parameters or weights are publicly accessible, which can be used by developers to analyze and fine-tune the model for specific tasks without requiring original training data.

"One of the things that is unique about open models is that people can run them locally. People can run them behind their own firewall, on their own infrastructure," OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman said in a press briefing.

Open-weight language models are different from open-source models, which provide access to the complete source code, training data and methodologies.

The landscape of open-weight and open-source AI models has been highly contested this year. For a time, Meta's Llama models were considered the best, but that changed earlier this year when China's DeepSeek released a powerful and cost-effective reasoning model, while Meta struggled to deliver Llama 4.

The two new OpenAI models are the first open models OpenAI has released since GPT-2, which was released in 2019.

OpenAI's larger model, gpt-oss-120b, can run on a single GPU, and the second, gpt-oss-20b, is small enough to run directly on a personal computer, the company said.

OpenAI said the models have similar performance to its proprietary reasoning models called o3-mini and o4-mini, and especially excel at coding, competition math and health-related queries.

The models were trained on a text-only dataset which in addition to general knowledge, focused on science, math and coding knowledge. OpenAI did not release benchmarks comparing the open-weight models to competitors' models such as the DeepSeek-R1 model.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI, currently valued at $300 billion, is currently raising up to $40 billion in a new funding round led by Softbank Group.