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February 2025 Digest: New Developments in AI, Apache and Rust

Written by is*hosting team | Mar 4, 2025 11:00:00 AM

February 2025 is packed with exciting tech developments! In this roundup, we've gathered the most important developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other key technologies.

We'll cover a new job board for AI agents, the latest versions of Rust and Apache, the departure of a Linux kernel maintainer, and which country led the world in Internet speeds at the start of the year.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning News

Developments and innovations in the world of AI and LLM models are advancing so rapidly that they dominate the tech landscape. This month, we're highlighting the latest developments in this dynamic field to keep you up to date with the most important news.

Developers Unveil a Job Board for AI Agents

Polish developers have introduced the AI Agent Job Board—a platform where artificial agents can search for "jobs." Far from just an experiment, this marks a serious step towards automating many tasks previously performed by humans.

Companies post job listings on this platform, and AI agents respond to take on tasks. The jobs include searching and structuring information, analyzing documents, managing digital interfaces, and even customer interactions via text and voice services.

How does it work?

  1. A company posts a job description, such as collecting data from public sources or creating an advertising campaign.
  2. AI agents with relevant skills respond to the task, and the employer selects a suitable candidate.
  3. The agent performs the task while the platform tracks progress and quality of work.

The AI Agent Job Board is just the beginning. In the coming years, we may see entire "staffs" of digital employees, as growing media coverage highlights the gradual replacement of human roles by AI-enabled services.

Technical Report on Multimodal Qwen2.5-VL Released

In February 2025, Alibaba’s Qwen team presented a technical report on their new multimodal model, Qwen2.5-VL, which brings major advancements in computer vision, accurate object localization, document analysis, and long video comprehension.

Key features of Qwen2.5-VL:

  • The model can accurately locate objects using bounding boxes or points, which is especially useful for analyzing complex images and documents.
  • Qwen2.5-VL efficiently extracts data from invoices, forms, and tables, while also performing detailed analysis of charts, diagrams, and layouts.
  • It can process up to one hour of video footage, providing precise, second-by-second event localization. Using a modified version of MRoPE (Multimodal Rotary Position Embedding) position coding, the model accurately perceives the temporal dynamics of events, which is crucial when analyzing video footage.
  • Most importantly, Qwen2.5-VL has seen a significant increase in the size of its dataset: the number of pre-train tokens has risen from 1.2 trillion to 4.1 trillion.

By training a native Dynamic Resolution Vision Transformer (ViT) from scratch and incorporating Window Attention, the development team reduced computational costs while maintaining native resolution.

As a result, Qwen2.5-VL excels not only in understanding static images and documents, but also as an interactive visual agent capable of reasoning, using tools, and performing tasks in real-world scenarios, such as controlling computers and mobile devices.

The flagship Qwen2.5-VL-72B is on par with advanced models such as GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, excelling in understanding documents and diagrams.

OpenAI Serves 400 Million Users Every Week

OpenAI has reached a new milestone, reporting 400 million weekly active users in February 2025, a 33% increase from 300 million in December 2024.

This growth comes amid the emergence of competitors, such as Chinese company DeepSeek, which recently unveiled an AI model that has become a notable counterpart to Western services.

According to OpenAI CFO Sarah Fryer, the company expects to triple its revenue to $11 billion by 2025, indicating strong demand for its products and services.

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What to Expect from Grok 3?

Less than two years after its founding, xAI introduced Grok 3. According to user ratings in the Chatbot Arena, this model matches or exceeds its best counterparts, despite still being in development.

So, what makes Grok 3 appealing? In addition to being developed in response to the competing GPT-4o and Gemini systems, it features an improved algorithm, more training data, the ability to analyze images, and integration with several social network X features.

"Grok 3 is an order of magnitude more powerful than Grok 2. It's the most truthful AI possible, even if that truth sometimes differs from the politically correct," Musk said during the presentation. At the end of February, however, Grok 3 named Musk, Trump, and a few other celebrities as the biggest spreaders of fake news on social network X. When asked to create an image of the most famous liar of our time, Grok 3 depicted Donald Trump.

Only time will tell what else we can expect from the “most honest” model.

Alpha3D and MoonlanderAI Team up to Create AI-powered Games and 3D Apps

In February 2025, Alpha3D, a company specializing in AI-driven 3D content creation, announced its acquisition of MoonlanderAI, an AI-powered game development platform. This strategic alliance aims to create the world's first independent XR UGC (user-generated content) community, enabling creators to easily create, customize, and use 3D content across various platforms.

Alpha3D enables users to convert 2D images or text into high-quality 3D models in minutes. MoonlanderAI is known for its “Text-2-Game" technology, which allows developers to create interactive 3D worlds and game mechanics. Integration with tools like Unity's AI solutions has reduced development time by 95%, attracting the attention of major game companies and XR developers.

The collaboration between Alpha3D and MoonlanderAI represents a significant advancement in AI technology for 3D content creation, making the process more accessible and efficient for creators worldwide. Interested in trying it out? We offer a reliable foundation for your future projects with a dedicated server with GPU. This solution is capable of handling any game development or LLM workload.

Nvidia Releases Graphics Chips for Some RTX Graphics Cards Without ROP Rendering Block Parts

Nvidia has confirmed a flaw in some of its new RTX 50 series graphics cards. As a result, certain rendering units (ROP pipelines) and promised performance are missing. Initially, the only three affected cards were listed as the RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5070 Ti, but the RTX 5080 was later added to the list.

How did this happen? The issue is attributed to a production glitch, even though the cards passed testing and selection. Nvidia stated that the company was unaware of the manufacturing defects until after the release of the video cards. It now advises affected customers to contact the graphics card manufacturer for a replacement.

Linux Kernel Maintainer Christoph Hellwig has Left Part of the Project

The Linux kernel community has been divided over the potential inclusion of the Rust programming language. Christoph Hellwig, who maintains the DMA, KVM, Slab Allocator, and PowerPC subsystems, has strongly opposed integrating Rust into the kernel. He has declined to accept patches related to supporting Rust driver development, arguing that mixing languages would complicate code maintenance and introduce additional problems.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, responded to Hellwig's criticism, stating that the debate about Rust integration was unproductive. Torvalds emphasized that maintainers should be responsible for their own code, and should not obstruct changes that do not impact their areas of responsibility.

Despite the ongoing controversy, Torvalds affirmed his commitment to continue integrating Rust code into the Linux kernel and urged developers to engage in constructive dialogue and cooperation.

Meanwhile, the list of DMA mapping maintainers has been updated in Linux kernel 6.14, with Hellwig removing himself from the maintainers’ list. He explained, "Marek has graciously offered to maintain the dma-mapping tree.”

Apache: Releases of WSS4J 4.0 and Apache NetBeans IDE 25

In February 2025, the Apache Software Foundation launched two major updates: the release of the WSS4J 4.0 library and the Apache NetBeans 25 integrated development environment.

Apache WSS4J is a Java library that implements essential Web services security standards, including the OASIS Web Services Security (WS-Security) specifications. Version 4.0 introduces the following major changes:

  • Dependency Update. WSS4J now integrates with OpenSAML v5 and Apache XML Security 4.0.0, offering enhanced SAML support and improved handling of XML signatures and encryption.
  • JDK 17 Support. The minimum required Java version is now JDK 17, aligning with modern development standards.

Apache NetBeans 25, a versatile integrated development environment that supports multiple programming languages—including Java SE, Java EE, PHP, C/C++, JavaScript, Rust, and Groovy—was released on February 20, 2025. Major updates in this release include

  • Code Editor Improvements. Improved navigation in refactoring tools, the ability to preserve the order of project tabs, and improved change tracking.
  • Library Updates. Transition to the lighter JSVG library for SVG loading, an update of the nb-javac built-in compiler to JDK 24b29, and Groovy updated to version 3.0.23.
  • Extended Language and Tool Support. Added support for new PHP 8.4 features, improved integration with Ant, Gradle, and Maven build systems, and extended support for GlassFish 7 and 8 application servers.

Rust 1.85.0 Release (Rust 2024)

Before you get too tired of hearing about Rust, here’s the latest update: Rust 1.85.0 stabilizes the Rust 2024 release, bringing several significant changes focused on improving security, performance, and ease of development.

One of the most important new features is support for async closures, enabling new possibilities for working with asynchronous code. Additionally, new properties for asynchronous functions enhance interaction with asynchronous tasks.

Notably, stricter rules have been introduced for using static mut, along with updated and more informative error messages. The cargo fix tool has also been upgraded to automatically update projects, making migration to the new version smoother.

This release also includes other improvements to the standard library and tools, making Rust development more efficient and secure. More technical details can be found in the official announcement.

Ookla Reveals Report on Internet Speed in Different Countries

In January 2025, analytics firm Ookla released its latest ranking of internet speeds across various countries based on Speedtest data.

Singapore ranked first for fixed broadband internet speeds, with an average download speed of 336.45 Mbps and an upload speed of 275.30 Mbps. The United Arab Emirates led in mobile internet, boasting a median download speed of 545.94 Mbps.

The global median fixed Internet speed rose to 97.61 Mbps, and mobile Internet speed reached 91.24 Mbps, indicating a significant improvement in the quality of Internet connections around the world.

Have a great month, and we’ll see you for the next is*hosting digest!