Discover
Last Week in AI

248 Episodes
Reverse
Our 209th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/16/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
OpenAI has decided not to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, instead opting to become a public benefit corporation influenced by legal and civic discussions.
Trump administration meetings with Saudi Arabia and the UAE have opened floodgates for AI deals, leading to partnerships with companies like Nvidia and aiming to bolster AI infrastructure in the Middle East.
DeepMind introduced Alpha Evolve, a new coding agent designed for scientific and algorithmic discovery, showing improvements in automated code generation and efficiency.
OpenAI pledges greater transparency in AI safety by launching the Safety Evaluations Hub, a platform showcasing various safety test results for their models.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:41) News Preview
(00:02:26) Response to listener comments
Applications & Business
(00:03:00) OpenAI says non-profit will remain in control after backlash
(00:13:23) Microsoft Moves to Protect Its Turf as OpenAI Turns Into Rival
(00:18:07) TSMC’s 2nm Process Said to Witness ‘Unprecedented’ Demand, Exceeding 3nm Due to Interest from Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, & Many Others
(00:21:42) NVIDIA’s Global Headquarters Will Be In Taiwan, With CEO Huang Set To Announce Site Next Week, Says Report
(00:23:58) CoreWeave in Talks for $1.5 Billion Debt Deal 6 Weeks After IPO
Tools & Apps
(00:26:39) The Day Grok Told Everyone About ‘White Genocide’
(00:32:58) Figma releases new AI-powered tools for creating sites, app prototypes, and marketing assets
(00:36:12) Google’s bringing Gemini to your car with Android Auto
(00:38:49) Google debuts an updated Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model ahead of I/O
(00:45:09) Hugging Face releases a free Operator-like agentic AI tool
Projects & Open Source
(00:47:42) Stability AI releases an audio-generating model that can run on smartphones
(00:50:47) Freepik releases an ‘open’ AI image generator trained on licensed data
(00:54:22) AM-Thinking-v1: Advancing the Frontier of Reasoning at 32B Scale
(01:01:29) BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Dataset
Research & Advancements
(01:05:40) DeepMind claims its newest AI tool is a whiz at math and science problems
(01:12:31) Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data
(01:19:44) How far can reasoning models scale?
(01:26:47) HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health
Policy & Safety
(01:34:10) Trump administration officially rescinds Biden’s AI diffusion rules
(01:37:08) Trump’s Mideast Visit Opens Floodgate of AI Deals Led by Nvidia
(01:44:04) Scaling Laws For Scalable Oversight
(01:49:43) OpenAI pledges to publish AI safety test results more often
Our 208th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/02/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
OpenAI showcases new integration capabilities in their API, enhancing the performance of LLMs and image generators with updated functionalities and improved user interfaces.
Analysis of OpenAI's preparedness framework reveals updates focusing on biological and chemical risks, cybersecurity, and AI self-improvement, while tone down the emphasis on persuasion capabilities.
Anthropic's research highlights potential security vulnerabilities in AI models, demonstrating various malicious use cases such as influence operations and hacking tool creation.
A detailed examination of AI competition between the US and China reveals China's impending capability to match the US in AI advancement this year, emphasizing the impact of export controls and the importance of geopolitical strategy.
Timestamps + Links:
Tools & Apps
(00:02:57) Anthropic lets users connect more apps to Claude
(00:08:20) OpenAI undoes its glaze-heavy ChatGPT update
(00:15:16) Baidu ERNIE X1 and 4.5 Turbo boast high performance at low cost
(00:19:44) Adobe adds more image generators to its growing AI family
(00:24:35) OpenAI makes its upgraded image generator available to developers
(00:27:01) xAI’s Grok chatbot can now ‘see’ the world around it
Applications & Business:
(00:28:41) Thinking Machines Lab CEO Has Unusual Control in Andreessen-Led Deal
(00:33:36) Chip war heats up: Huawei 910C emerges as China’s answer to US export bans
(00:34:21) Huawei to Test New AI Chip
(00:40:17) ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent stockpile billions worth of Nvidia chips
(00:43:59) Speculation mounts that Musk will raise tens of billions for AI supercomputer with 1 million GPUs: Report
Projects & Open Source:
(00:47:14) Alibaba unveils Qwen 3, a family of ‘hybrid’ AI reasoning models
(00:54:14) Intellect-2
(01:02:07) BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report
(01:05:33) Meta AI Introduces Perception Encoder: A Large-Scale Vision Encoder that Excels Across Several Vision Tasks for Images and Video
Research & Advancements:
(01:06:42) The Leaderboard Illusion
(01:12:08) Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?
(01:18:38) Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example
(01:24:40) Sleep-time Compute: Beyond Inference Scaling at Test-time
Policy & Safety:
(01:28:23) Every AI Datacenter Is Vulnerable to Chinese Espionage, Report Says
(01:32:27) OpenAI preparedness framework update
(01:38:31) Detecting and Countering Malicious Uses of Claude: March 2025
(01:46:33) Chinese AI Will Match America's
Our 207th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/14/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
OpenAI introduces GPT-4.1 with optimized coding and instruction-following capabilities, featuring variants like GPT-4.1 Mini and Nano, and a million-token context window.
Concerns arise as OpenAI reduces resources for safety testing, sparking internal and external criticisms.
XAI's newly launched API for Grok 3 showcases significant capabilities comparable to other leading models.
Meta faces allegations of aiding China in AI development for business advantages, with potential compliances and public scrutiny looming.
Timestamps + Links:
Tools & Apps
(00:03:13) OpenAI’s new GPT-4.1 AI models focus on coding
(00:08:12) ChatGPT will now remember your old conversations
(00:11:16) Google’s newest Gemini AI model focuses on efficiency
(00:14:27) Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, launches an API for Grok 3
(00:18:35) Canva is now in the coding and spreadsheet business
(00:20:31) Meta’s vanilla Maverick AI model ranks below rivals on a popular chat benchmark
Applications & Business
(00:25:46) Ironwood: The first Google TPU for the age of inference
(00:34:15) Anthropic rolls out a $200-per-month Claude subscription
(00:37:17) OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence reportedly valued at $32B
(00:40:20) Mira Murati’s AI startup gains prominent ex-OpenAI advisers
(00:42:52) Hugging Face buys a humanoid robotics startup
(00:44:58) Stargate developer Crusoe could spend $3.5 billion on a Texas data center. Most of it will be tax-free.
Projects & Open Source
(00:48:14) OpenAI Open Sources BrowseComp: A New Benchmark for Measuring the Ability for AI Agents to Browse the Web
Research & Advancements
(00:56:09) Sample, Don't Search: Rethinking Test-Time Alignment for Language Models
(01:03:32) Concise Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
(01:09:37) Going beyond open data – increasing transparency and trust in language models with OLMoTrace
(01:15:34) Independent evaluations of Grok-3 and Grok-3 mini on our suite of benchmarks
Policy & Safety
(01:17:58) OpenAI countersues Elon Musk, calls for enjoinment from ‘further unlawful and unfair action’
(01:24:33) OpenAI slashes AI model safety testing time
(01:27:55) Ex-OpenAI staffers file amicus brief opposing the company’s for-profit transition
(01:32:25) Access to future AI models in OpenAI’s API may require a verified ID
(01:34:53) Meta whistleblower claims tech giant built $18 billion business by aiding China in AI race and undermining U.S. national security
Our 206th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/07/2025
Try out the Astrocade demo here! https://www.astrocade.com/
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
Meta releases LlAMA-4, a series of advanced large language models, sparking debate on performance and release timing, with models featuring up to 2 trillion parameters for different configurations and applications.
Amazon's AGI Lab debuts NOVA Act, an AI agent for web browser control, boasting competitive benchmarking against OpenAI's and Anthropic's best agents.
OpenAI's image generation capabilities and ongoing financing developments, notably a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, highlight significant advancements and strategic shifts in the tech giant’s operations.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps
(00:01:46) Meta releases Llama 4, a new crop of flagship AI models
(00:13:55) Amazon unveils Nova Act, an AI agent that can control a web browser
(00:17:06) Alibaba Preparing for Flagship AI Model Release as Soon as April
(00:17:59) Runway releases an impressive new video-generating AI model
(00:19:10) Adobe launches Premiere Pro’s generative AI video extender
(00:20:54) OpenAI prepares reasoning slider and memory update for ChatGPT users
Applications & Business
(00:21:28) Nvidia H20 Chips: $16 Billion Orders from ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent
(00:24:45) Elon Musk sells X for $33 billion to his own AI startup company xAI
(00:28:00) SoftBank dethroned Microsoft as OpenAI's largest investor, pushing the ChatGPT maker's market cap to $300 billion — but reportedly buried itself in debt
(00:30:48) DeepMind is holding back release of AI research to give Google an edge
(00:34:06) SMIC Is Rumored To Complete 5nm Chip Development By 2025; Costs Could Be Up To 50 Percent Higher Than TSMC’s Version Due To The Use Of Older-Generation Equipment
(00:36:04) Google-backed Isomorphic Labs raises $600m to advance AI drug discovery
Research & Advancements
(00:38:03) PaperBench: Evaluating AI's Ability to Replicate AI Research
(00:43:50) Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding RL with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains
(00:48:39) Inference-Time Scaling for Complex Tasks: Where We Stand and What Lies Ahead
(00:54:34) Overtrained Language Models Are Harder to Fine-Tune
Policy & Safety
(00:58:28) Taking a responsible path to AGI
(01:02:32) This A.I. Forecast Predicts Storms Ahead
(01:06:24) The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI
Our 205th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/28/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
OpenAI's new image generation capabilities represent significant advancements in AI tools, showcasing impressive benchmarks and multimodal functionalities.
OpenAI is finalizing a historic $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, and Sam Altman shifts focus to technical direction while COO Brad Lightcap takes on more operational responsibilities.,
Anthropic unveils groundbreaking interpretability research, introducing cross-layer tracers and showcasing deep insights into model reasoning through applications on Claude 3.5.
New challenging benchmarks such as ARC AGI 2 and complex Sudoku variations aim to push the boundaries of reasoning and problem-solving capabilities in AI models.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:01) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:46) Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model
(00:08:41) OpenAI rolls out image generation powered by GPT-4o to ChatGPT
(00:16:14) Ideogram presents version 3.0 of its AI image generation system
(00:19:20) New Reve Image Generator Beats AI Art Heavyweights MidJourney and Flux at a Penny Per Image
(00:21:56) Alibaba Releases Qwen2.5 Omni, Adds Voice and Video Modes to Qwen Chat
(00:23:58) The official version of Tencent's Hunyuan Deep Thinking Model T1 is here, with fast articulation, instant responses, and a decoding speed increase of 2 times
Applications & Business
(00:25:45) OpenAI Close to Finalizing $40 Billion SoftBank-Led Funding
(00:29:26) OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus
(00:33:23) Nvidia shows off Rubin Ultra with 600,000-Watt Kyber racks and infrastructure, coming in 2027
(00:35:23) China's SiCarrier emerges as challenger to ASML, other chip tool titans
(00:38:24) Pony.ai wins first permit for fully driverless taxi operation in the center of China’s Silicon Valley
Projects & Open Source
(00:40:27) A new, challenging AGI test stumps most AI models
(00:45:16) Challenging the Boundaries of Reasoning: An Olympiad-Level Math Benchmark for Large Language Models
(00:48:13) Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models
(00:50:38) DeepSeek V3-0324 tops non-reasoning AI models in open-source first
(00:54:46) OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data
Research & Advancements
(00:55:56) Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model
(01:06:00) Chain-of-Tools: Utilizing Massive Unseen Tools in the CoT Reasoning of Frozen Language Models
(01:11:50) Inside-Out: Hidden Factual Knowledge in LLMs
(01:15:14) Sakana AI super-powers AI reasoning using Japan’s own Sudoku Puzzles
Policy & Safety
(01:18:38) Senator Wiener Introduces Legislation to Protect AI Whistleblowers & Boost Responsible AI Development
(01:21:50) NVIDIA & Other Tech Giants Demand Trump Administration To Reconsider “AI Diffusion” Policy Which Is Set To Be Effective By May 15
(01:23:17) U.S. blacklists over 50 Chinese companies in bid to curb Beijing's AI, chip capabilities
(01:26:44) Netflix’s Reed Hastings Gives $50 Million to Bowdoin for A.I. Program
(01:27:55) Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward
(01:29:48) Judge rules that AI can continue training on copyrighted lyrics, for now
Our 204th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/21/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
Baidu launched two new multimodal models, Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1, boasting competitive pricing and capabilities compared to Western counterparts like GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek R1.
OpenAI introduced new audio models, including impressive speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems, and added O1 Pro to their developer API at high costs, reflecting efforts for more profitability.
Nvidia and Apple announced significant hardware advancements, including Nvidia's future GPU plans and Apple's new Mac Studio offering that can run DeepSeek R1.
DeepSeek employees are facing travel restrictions, suggesting China is treating its AI development with increased secrecy and urgency, emphasizing a wartime footing in AI competition.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:36) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:50) Baidu launches two new versions of its AI model Ernie
(00:10:46) OpenAI Unveils New Audio Models to Make AI Agents Sound More Human Than Ever
(00:16:41) OpenAI’s o1-pro is the company’s most expensive AI model yet
(00:20:53) Google brings a ‘canvas’ feature to Gemini, plus Audio Overview
(00:22:18) Anthropic adds web search to its Claude chatbot
(00:23:55) xAI launches an API for generating images
Applications & Business
(00:26:28) Nvidia announces Rubin GPUs in 2026, Rubin Ultra in 2027, Feynman also added to roadmap
(00:36:25) M3 Ultra Runs DeepSeek R1 With 671 Billion Parameters Using 448GB Of Unified Memory, Delivering High Bandwidth Performance At Under 200W Power Consumption, With No Need For A Multi-GPU Setup
(00:40:07) Intel reaches 'exciting milestone' for 18A 1.8nm-class wafers with first run at Arizona fab
(00:42:45) Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, acquires a generative AI video startup
(00:44:44) Tencent Reportedly Makes Massive NVIDIA H20 Chip Purchase for WeChat’s DeepSeek Integration
Projects & Open Source
(00:46:32) Anthropic’s Not-So-Secret Weapon That’s Giving Agents a Boost
(00:50:50) Mistral AI drops new open-source model that outperforms GPT-4o Mini with fraction of parameters
(00:53:30) EXAONE Deep: Reasoning Enhanced Language Models
Research & Advancements
(00:55:58) Sample, Scrutinize and Scale: Effective Inference-Time Search by Scaling Verification
(01:07:44) Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models
(01:12:27) Communication-Efficient Language Model Training Scales Reliably and Robustly: Scaling Laws for DiLoCo
(01:18:46) Transformers without Normalization
(01:19:52) Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
(01:26:12) HCAST: Human-Calibrated Autonomy Software Tasks
Policy & Safety
(01:26:45) Announcing Zochi, an Intology Project
(01:32:46) DeepSeek, a National Treasure in China, is Now Being Closely Guarded
(01:37:02) Claude Sonnet 3.7 (often) knows when it’s in alignment evaluations
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:42:27) US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator
(01:45:10) Trump urged by Ben Stiller, Paul McCartney and hundreds of stars to protect AI copyright rules
Our 203rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/14/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
OpenAI's new 'deep research' feature has raised concerns about cybersecurity and the potential misuse of AI models for bio-weapons and autonomous capabilities, prompting new safety and governance measures.
Google's extensive $3 billion investment in Anthropic is revealed, aligning with their AI strategy and reinforcing the importance of multiple technology partnerships.
Huawei's advancements in the AI chip industry are highlighted, with significant progress in producing chips comparable to Nvidia's H100, despite export control challenges.
China's recent directive discourages AI executives from traveling to the US, reflecting heightened security concerns and potentially signaling a more adversarial stance in the AI race.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:30) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:30) OpenAI launches new tools to help businesses build AI agents
(00:08:50) You can now test Gemini 2.0 Flash’s native image output
(00:13:32) Waymo is now offering 24/7 robotaxi rides in Silicon Valley
(00:17:19) Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content
(00:21:11) Snap introduces AI Video Lenses powered by its in-house generative model
(00:23:37) Sudowrite Launches Muse AI Model That Can Generate Narrative-Driven Fiction
Applications & Business
(00:27:48) In another chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is pouring $12B into CoreWeave
(00:30:54) Huawei’s Ascend 910C Takes on NVIDIA as China’s AI Race Heats Up: More Alleged Details
(00:36:26) Huawei reportedly acquired two million Ascend 910 AI chips from TSMC last year through shell companies
(00:40:27) Inside Google’s Investment in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic
(00:43:26) Meta is reportedly testing in-house chips for AI training
(00:46:48) Elon Musk's xAI buys 1 million sq ft site for second Memphis data center
(00:50:02) Superintelligence startup Reflection AI launches with $130M in funding
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:11) Google calls Gemma 3 the most powerful AI model you can run on one GPU
(00:58:18) Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
(01:01:13) Reka AI Open Sourced Reka Flash 3: A 21B General-Purpose Reasoning Model that was Trained from Scratch
(01:04:19) Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in $200k
Research & Advancements
(01:06:25) Google’s Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World
(01:14:33) Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
(01:23:29) Deep Research System Card
(01:29:50) Claude 3.7 Sonnet System Card
Policy & Safety
(01:33:24) Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models
(01:39:30) China tells its AI leaders to avoid US travel over security concerns, WSJ reports
(01:43:48) Outro
Our 202nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/07/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
Alibaba released Qwen-32B, their latest reasoning model, on par with leading models like DeepMind’s R1.
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a funding round, valuing the company at $61.5 billion, solidifying its position as a key competitor to OpenAI.
DeepMind introduced BigBench Extra Hard, a more challenging benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Reinforcement Learning pioneers Andrew Bartow and Rich Sutton were awarded the prestigious Turing Award for their contributions to the field.
Timestamps + Links:
cle picks:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:41) Episode Preview
(00:02:50) GPT-4.5 Discussion
(00:14:13) Alibaba’s New QwQ 32B Model is as Good as DeepSeek-R1 ; Outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini
(00:21:29) With Alexa Plus, Amazon finally reinvents its best product
(00:26:08) Another DeepSeek moment? General AI agent Manus shows ability to handle complex tasks
(00:29:14) Microsoft’s new Dragon Copilot is an AI assistant for healthcare
(00:32:24) Mistral’s new OCR API turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file
(00:33:19) A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Closes Deal That Values It at $61.5 Billion
(00:35:49) Nvidia-Backed CoreWeave Files for IPO, Shows Growing Revenue
(00:38:05) Waymo and Uber's Austin robotaxi expansion begins today
(00:38:54) UK competition watchdog drops Microsoft-OpenAI probe
(00:41:17) Scale AI announces multimillion-dollar defense deal, a major step in U.S. military automation
(00:44:43) DeepSeek Open Source Week: A Complete Summary
(00:45:25) DeepSeek AI Releases DualPipe: A Bidirectional Pipeline Parallelism Algorithm for Computation-Communication Overlap in V3/R1 Training
(00:53:00) Physical Intelligence open-sources Pi0 robotics foundation model
(00:54:23) BIG-Bench Extra Hard
(00:56:10) Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners
(01:01:49) The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems
(01:05:32) Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning Win the Turing Award
(01:06:56) OpenAI launches $50M grant program to help fund academic research
(01:07:25) The Nuclear-Level Risk of Superintelligent AI
(01:13:34) METR’s GPT-4.5 pre-deployment evaluations
(01:17:16) Chinese buyers are getting Nvidia Blackwell chips despite US export controls
Our 201st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/02/2025
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest host Sharon Zhou
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
- The release of GPT-4.5 from OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and Grok 3 from XAI, comparing their features, costs, and capabilities.
- Discussion on new tools and applications including Sesame's new voice assistant and Google's AI coding assistant, Gemini Code Assist, highlighting their unique benefits.
- OpenAI's continued user growth despite competition, pricing models for Google's text-to-video platform, and HP acquiring and shutting down Humane's AI pin.
- Insights into new research on alignment and specification gaming in LLMs, including papers on fine-tuning causing broad misalignment and Google's multi-agent system for scientific collaboration.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:36) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:33) OpenAI announces GPT-4.5, warns it’s not a frontier AI model
(00:07:22) Anthropic launches a new AI model that ‘thinks’ as long as you want
(00:11:14) New Grok 3 release tops LLM leaderboards
(00:16:43) Sesame is the first voice assistant I’ve ever wanted to talk to more than once
(00:18:30) Google launches a free AI coding assistant with very high usage caps
(00:20:45) Rabbit shows off the AI agent it should have launched with
(00:22:23) Mistral’s Le Chat tops 1M downloads in just 14 days
Applications & Business
(00:24:06) OpenAI Tops 400 Million Users Despite DeepSeek’s Emergence
(00:27:37) Google’s new AI video model Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second
(00:29:52) HP is buying Humane and shutting down the AI Pin
Projects & Open Source
(00:31:44) Microsoft launches next-gen Phi AI models.
(00:33:47) OpenAI introduces SWE-Lancer: A Benchmark for Evaluating Model Performance on Real-World Freelance Software Engineering Work
(00:37:12) SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMs
Research & Advancements
(00:40:00) Towards an AI co-scientist
(00:42:52) Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents
Policy & Safety
(00:47:32) Demonstrating specification gaming in reasoning models
(00:51:03) Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs
Our 200th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 02/14/2025
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
OpenAI announces plans to unify their model offerings, moving away from multiple separate models (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) toward a single unified intelligence system, with free users getting "standard intelligence" and Plus subscribers accessing "higher intelligence" levels.
Adobe launches their Sora-rivaling AI video generator with 1080p output and 5-second clips, emphasizing production-ready content for films and introducing new pricing tiers through Firefly subscriptions at $10-30 per month.
Elon Musk and a consortium offer $97.4 billion to acquire OpenAI's nonprofit entity, potentially complicating the company's transition to a for-profit structure, though Sam Altman quickly dismissed the offer's viability.
TSMC implements stricter chip sales restrictions to China, requiring government-approved third-party packaging houses for chips using 16nm and below processes, aligning with US export control measures and affecting major tech companies like Nvidia and AMD.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:25) Response to listener comments
(00:02:41) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:03:58) Adobe’s Sora rivalling AI video generator is now available for everyone
(00:09:45) OpenAI lays out plans for GPT-5
(00:16:42) OpenAI is rethinking how AI models handle controversial topics
(00:21:28) Perplexity AI launches new ultra-fast AI search model Sonar
(00:23:45) YouTube AI updates include auto dubbing expansion, age ID tech, and more
Applications & Business
(00:24:37) Musk-led group makes $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI
(00:34:32) Anthropic’s next major AI model could arrive within weeks
(00:39:09) AI chip startup Groq secures $1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia
(00:42:15) OpenAI reportedly planning to build its first AI chip in 2026
Projects & Open Source
(00:45:01) Zyphra Introduces the Beta Release of Zonos: A Highly Expressive TTS Model with High Fidelity Voice Cloning
(00:51:11) Gemstones: A Model Suite for Multi-Faceted Scaling Laws
(00:57:15) Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training
Research & Advancements
(00:58:24) Model Tampering Attacks Enable More Rigorous Evaluations of LLM Capabilities
(01:04:24) Distillation Scaling Laws
(01:10:06) Matryoshka Quantization
(01:17:47) How much AI compute exists globally? How rapidly is it growing?
Policy & Safety
(01:21:29) US and UK refuse to sign summit declaration on AI safety
(01:25:43) Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs
(01:34:40) xAI Risk Management Framework (Draft)
(01:39:59) TSMC bans more chip sales to China due to stricter U.S. export sanctions
(01:42:38) Listener requested topic
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:43:48) Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US
(01:44:46) Scarlett Johansson calls for deepfake ban after AI video goes viral
(01:45:55) Outro
Our 199th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 02/09/2025
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
- OpenAI's deep research feature capability launched, allowing models to generate detailed reports after prolonged inference periods, competing directly with Google's Gemini 2.0 reasoning models.
- France and UAE jointly announce plans to build a massive AI data center in France, aiming to become a competitive player within the AI infrastructure landscape.
- Mistral introduces a mobile app, broadening its consumer AI lineup amidst market skepticism about its ability to compete against larger firms like OpenAI and Google.
- Anthropic unveils 'Constitutional Classifiers,' a method showing strong defenses against universal jailbreaks; they also launched a $20K challenge to find weaknesses.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:27) News Preview
(00:03:28) Response to listener comments
Tools & Apps
(00:08:01) OpenAI now reveals more of its o3-mini model’s thought process
(00:16:03) Google’s Gemini app adds access to ‘thinking’ AI models
(00:21:04) OpenAI Unveils A.I. Tool That Can Do Research Online
(00:31:09) Mistral releases its AI assistant on iOS and Android
(00:36:17) AI music startup Riffusion launches its service in public beta
(00:39:11) Pikadditions by Pika Labs lets users seamlessly insert objects into videos
Applications & Business
(00:41:19) Softbank set to invest $40 billion in OpenAI at $260 billion valuation, sources say
(00:47:36) UAE to invest billions in France AI data centre
(00:50:34) Report: Ilya Sutskever’s startup in talks to fundraise at roughly $20B valuation
(00:52:03) ASML to Ship First Second-Gen High-NA EUV Machine in the Coming Months, Aiming for 2026 Production
(00:54:38) NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL 72 Shipments Not Under Threat From DeepSeek As Hyperscalers Maintain CapEx; Meanwhile, Trump Tariffs Play Havoc With TSMC’s Pricing Strategy
Projects & Open Source
(00:56:49) The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Releases Tülu 3 405B: Scaling Open-Weight...
(01:00:06) SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model
(01:03:56) PhD Knowledge Not Required: A Reasoning Challenge for Large Language Models
(01:08:26) OpenEuroLLM: Europe’s New Initiative for Open-Source AI Development
Research & Advancements
(01:10:34) LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning
(01:16:39) s1: Simple test-time scaling
(01:19:17) ZebraLogic: On the Scaling Limits of LLMs for Logical Reasoning
(01:23:55) Streaming DiLoCo with overlapping communication: Towards a Distributed Free Lunch
Policy & Safety
(01:26:50) US sets AI safety aside in favor of 'AI dominance'
(01:29:39) Almost Surely Safe Alignment of Large Language Models at Inference-Time
(01:32:02) Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming
(01:33:16) Anthropic offers $20,000 to whoever can jailbreak its new AI safety system
Our 198th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/31/2024
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
- DeepSeek releases R1, a competitive AI model comparable to OpenAI’s O1, leading to market unrest and significant drops in tech stocks, including a 17% plunge in NVIDIA's stock.
- OpenAI launches Operator to facilitate agentic computer use, while facing competition from new releases by DeepSeek and Quen, with applications seeing rapid adoption.
- President Trump revokes the Biden administration's executive order on AI, signaling a shift in AI policy and deregulation efforts.
- Taiwanese government clears TSMC to produce advanced 2-nanometer chip technology abroad, aiming to strengthen global semiconductor supply amidst geopolitical tensions.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:03:01) Response to listener comments
Projects & Open Source
(00:06:26) DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
(00:30:25) Viral AI company DeepSeek releases new image model family
(00:34:07) Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report
(00:38:32) Alibaba’s Qwen team releases AI models that can control PCs and phones
Tools & Apps
(00:42:09) OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that performs tasks autonomously
(00:47:37) DeepSeek reaches No. 1 on US Play Store
(00:52:17) Alibaba rolled out Qwen Chat v0.2 and Qwen2.5-1M model
(00:53:50) Perplexity launches US-hosted DeepSeek R1, hints at EU hosting soon
(00:55:31) Apple is pulling its AI-generated notifications for news after generating fake headlines
(00:59:00) French AI ‘Lucie’ looks très chic, but keeps getting answers wrong
Applications & Business
(01:02:09) DeepSeek’s New AI Model Sparks Shock, Awe, and Questions From US Competitors
(01:07:49) Microsoft loses OpenAI exclusive cloud provider status to $500 billion Stargate project
(01:13:00) OpenAI adds BlackRock exec Adebayo Ogunlesi to board of directors
(01:15:00) ElevenLabs has raised a new round at $3B+ valuation led by ICONIQ Growth, sources say
Policy & Safety
(01:16:00) Donald Trump unveils $500 billion Stargate Project to build AI infrastructure in the US, promising over 100K jobs
(01:20:36) Trump Revokes Biden AI Policy, Signs Executive Order to Strengthen AI Leadership
(01:23:20) Anthropic CEO doesn’t see DeepSeek as ‘adversaries,’ but says export controls are critical
(01:30:26) Taiwanese govt clears TSMC to make 2nm chips abroad — country lowers its 'Silicon Shield'
(01:33:01) Outro
A special one-off episode with a deep dive into the past, present, and future of how computer hardware makes AI possible.
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Google and Mistral sign deals with AP and AFP, respectively, to deliver up-to-date news through their AI platforms.
- ChatGPT introduces a tasks feature for reminders and to-dos, positioning itself more as a personal assistant.
- Synthesia raises $180 million to enhance its AI video platform for generating videos of human avatars.
- New U.S. guidelines restrict exporting AI chips to various countries, impacting Nvidia and other tech firms.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:08 Historical Recap: Early AI and Hardware
00:11:51 The Rise of GPUs and Deep Learning
00:15:39 Scaling Laws and the Evolution of AI Models
00:24:05 The Bitter Lesson and the Future of AI Compute
00:25:58 Moore's Law and Huang's Law
00:30:12 Memory and Logic in AI Hardware
00:34:53 Challenges in AI Hardware: The Memory Wall
00:37:08 The Role of GPUs in Modern AI
00:42:27 Fitting Neural Nets in GPUs
00:48:04 Batch Sizes and GPU Utilization
00:52:47 Parallelism in AI Models
00:55:53 Matrix Multiplications and GPUs
00:59:57 Understanding B200 and GB200
01:05:41 Data Center Hierarchy
01:13:42 High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)
01:16:45 Fabrication and Packaging
01:20:17 The Complexity of Semiconductor Fabrication
01:24:34 Understanding Process Nodes
01:28:26 The Art of Fabrication
01:33:17 The Role of Yield in Fabrication
01:35:47 The Photolithography Process
01:40:38 Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV)
01:43:58 Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV)
01:51:46 Export Controls and Their Impact
01:54:22 The Rise of Custom AI Hardware
02:00:10 The Future of AI and Hardware
Our 197th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/17/2024
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest-hosted by the folks from Latent Space
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Google and Mistral sign deals with AP and AFP, respectively, to deliver up-to-date news through their AI platforms.
- ChatGPT introduces a tasks feature for reminders and to-dos, positioning itself more as a personal assistant.
- Synthesia raises $180 million to enhance its AI video platform for generating videos of human avatars.
- New U.S. guidelines restrict exporting AI chips to various countries, impacting Nvidia and other tech firms.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:04:29) News Preview
(00:05:09) Response to listener comments
(00:05:58) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:07:01) Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free — but raising the price of Workspace
(00:07:52) Microsoft relaunches Copilot for business with free AI chat and pay-as-you-go agents
(00:12:36) Google signs deal with AP to deliver up-to-date news through its Gemini AI chatbot
(00:18:08) Mistral signs deal with AFP to offer up-to-date answers in Le Chat
(00:18:45) ChatGPT can now handle reminders and to-dos
Applications & Business
(00:22:53) Palmer Luckey’s AI Defense Company Anduril Is Building a $1 Billion Plant in Ohio
(00:28:36) OpenAI is bankrolling Axios’ expansion into four new markets
(00:29:39) AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI
(00:32:18) Nvidia-backed AI video platform Synthesia doubles valuation to $2.1 billion
(00:34:46) Anysphere Raises $105M in Series B
(00:40:14) Harvey Valuation of 3 Billion
Projects & Open Source
(00:46:12) MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention
(00:51:16) MinMo: A Multimodal Large Language Model with Approximately 8B Parameters for Seamless Voice Interaction
(00:53:01) HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them
Research & Advancements
(00:57:03) Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
(01:04:38) Transformer2: Self-adaptive LLMs
(01:08:15) Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models beyond Scaling Denoising Steps
Policy & Safety
(01:11:23) Biden administration proposes sweeping new restrictions on exporting AI chips
(01:13:56) Biden orders Energy, Defense departments to lease sites for AI data centers, clean energy generation
(01:15:00) OpenAI presents its preferred version of AI regulation in a new ‘blueprint’
(01:16:15) More teens report using ChatGPT for schoolwork, despite the tech’s faults
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:17:55) In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense
(01:19:53) Outro
Our 196th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's
Recorded on 01/10/2024
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Nvidia announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits, featuring the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, aiming to lower the barrier for developers working on large models.
- The U.S. Department of Justice finalizes a rule restricting the transmission of specific data types to countries of concern, including China and Russia, under executive order 14117.
- Meta allegedly trained Llama on pirated content from LibGen, with internal concerns about the legality confirmed through court filings.
- Microsoft paused construction on a section of a large data center project in Wisconsin to reassess based on new technological changes.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:04:52) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:05:55) Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits
(00:10:23) Meta removes AI character accounts after users criticize them as ‘creepy and unnecessary’
Applications & Business
(00:16:16) NVIDIA Is Reportedly Focused Towards “Custom Chip” Manufacturing, Recruiting Top Taiwanese Talent
(00:21:54) AI start-up Anthropic closes in on $60bn valuation
(00:25:38) Why OpenAI is Taking So Long to Launch Agents
(00:30:08) TSMC Set to Expand CoWoS Capacity to Record 75,000 Wafers in 2025, Doubling 2024 Output
(00:33:10) Microsoft 'pauses construction' on part of data center site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
(00:37:23) Google folds more AI teams into DeepMind to ‘accelerate the research to developer pipeline’
Projects & Open Source
(00:41:59) Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI
(00:48:21) Microsoft releases Phi-4 language model on Hugging Face
Research & Advancements
(00:50:16) PRIME: Online Reinforcement Learning with Process Rewards
(00:58:29) ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations
(01:07:38) Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs
(01:11:44) METAGENE-1: Metagenomic Foundation Model for Pandemic Monitoring
(01:15:45) TransPixar: Advancing Text-to-Video Generation with Transparency
(01:18:03) The amount of compute used to train frontier models has been growing at a breakneck pace of over 4x per year since 2018, resulting in an overall scale-up of more than 10,000x! But what factors are enabling this rapid growth?
Policy & Safety
(01:23:45) InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment
(01:28:44) Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims
(01:33:19) Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics
(01:35:57) US government says companies are no longer allowed to send bulk data to these nations
(01:39:10) Trump announces $20B plan to build new data centers in the US
Our 195th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's
Recorded on 01/04/2024
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Note: apologies for Andrey's slurred speech and the jumpy editing, will be back to normal next week!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- OpenAI teases new deliberative alignment techniques in its O3 model, showcasing major improvements in reasoning benchmarks, whilst surprising with autonomy in hacks against chess engines.
- Microsoft and OpenAI continue to wrangle over the terms of their partnership, highlighting tensions amid OpenAI's shift towards a for-profit model.
- Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek and Quen release advanced open-source models, presenting significant contributions to AI capabilities and performance optimization.
- Sakana AI introduces innovative applications of AI to the search for artificial life, emphasizing the potential and curiosity-driven outcomes of open-ended learning and exploration.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:03:07) News Preview
(00:03:54) Response to listener comments
(00:05:00) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:06:11) OpenAI announces new o3 model
(00:21:17) Alibaba slashes prices on large language models by up to 85% as China AI rivalry heats up
(00:23:04) ElevenLabs launches Flash, its fastest text-to-speech AI yet
Applications & Business
(00:24:24) OpenAI announces plan to transform into a for-profit company
(00:33:17) Microsoft and OpenAI Wrangle Over Terms of Their Blockbuster Partnership
(00:37:36) Elon Musk’s xAI gets investment from Nvidia in recent funding round: report
(00:39:43) Sam Altman’s nuclear energy startup signs one of the largest nuclear power deals to date
(00:41:13) OpenAI Search Leader Departs After Less Than a Year
(00:42:43) Senior OpenAI Researcher Radford Departs
Projects & Open Source
(00:45:21) DeepSeek-AI Just Released DeepSeek-V3: A Strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Language Model with 671B Total Parameters with 37B Activated for Each Token
(00:54:14) Qwen Team Releases QvQ: An Open-Weight Model for Multimodal Reasoning
(00:58:09) LightOn and Answer.ai Releases ModernBERT: A New Model Series that is a Pareto Improvement over BERT with both Speed and Accuracy
Research & Advancements
(01:00:31) Deliberation in Latent Space via Differentiable Cache Augmentation
(01:05:14) Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models
Policy & Safety
(01:10:27) Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition
(01:14:35) OpenAI Researchers Propose 'Deliberative Alignment' : A Training Approach that Teaches LLMs to Explicitly Reason through Safety Specifications before Producing an Answer
(01:22:06) o1-preview autonomously hacked its environment rather than lose to Stockfish in our chess challenge. No adversarial prompting needed.
(01:27:22) Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer gets 150MW power boost despite concerns over grid impact and local power stability
(01:29:06) DOE: Data centers consumed 4.4% of US power in 2023, could hit 12% by 2028
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:32:20) OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025
(01:36:15) Outro
Our 194th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's
Recorded on 12/19/2024
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Google dominates AI news with multiple announcements, including a reasoning model and Project Mariner, an AI browsing agent.
- Anthropic explores alignment faking in LLMs, revealing models may show deceptive compliance under certain conditions.
- Apple observes a trend towards smaller but more efficient language models, bucking previous trends of scaling larger parameter counts.
- Legal drama unfolds as Meta backs Elon Musk's opposition to OpenAI's profit status change, raising concerns about competitive fairness.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:14) Response to listener comments
(00:08:52) News Preview
(00:10:01) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:10:55) Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model
(00:16:52) Google Gemini can now do more in-depth research
(00:21:58) Google DeepMind unveils a new video model to rival Sora
(00:27:50) Pika Labs releases AI video generator 2.0 with new features
(00:29:51) Google unveils Project Mariner: AI agents to use the web for you
(00:34:33) X gains a faster Grok model and a new ‘Grok button’
Applications & Business
(00:36:11) AI GPU clusters with one million GPUs are planned for 2027 — Broadcom says three AI supercomputers are in the works
(00:43:02) Meta asks the government to block OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit
(00:49:36) OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted it to be for-profit in 2017
(00:56:04) EQTY Lab, Intel, and NVIDIA Unveil 'Verifiable Compute,' A Solution to Secure Trusted AI
(00:59:53) Liquid AI just raised $250M to develop a more efficient type of AI model
(01:03:19) Hundreds of OpenAI’s current and ex-employees are about to get a huge payday by cashing out up to $10 million each in a private stock sale
Projects & Open Source
(01:07:45) Phi-4 Technical Report
(01:13:04) DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding
(01:15:23) Meta AI Releases Apollo: A New Family of Video-LMMs Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding
Research & Advancements
(01:16:34) Alignment faking in large language models
(01:28:39) Meta AI Introduces Byte Latent Transformer (BLT): A Tokenizer-Free Model That Scales Efficiently
(01:36:49) Frontier language models have become much smaller
(01:42:28) The Complexity Dynamics of Grokking
Policy & Safety
(01:46:49) Homeland Security gets its very own generative AI chatbot
(01:49:16) Pre-Deployment Evaluation of OpenAI’s o1 Model
(01:51:35) Pricing for key chipmaking material hits 13-year high following (01:53:46) Chinese export restrictions — China's restrictions on Gallium exports hit hard
Synthetic Media & Art
Meta debuts a tool for watermarking AI-generated videos
(01:55:27) Outro
Our 193rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's
Note: this one was recorded on 12/13, so the news is a bit outdated... will get things back on track soon!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- OpenAI launches Sora, a text-to-video model with significant capabilities, and Gemini 2.0 from Google showcasing agentic potential in AI tools.
- Character.ai introduces a teen model to address safety concerns following two tragic incidents linked to addiction and harmful influence.
- The U.S. government sets up a task force to support the rapid development of AI data centers, reflecting the critical need for robust infrastructure.
- A paper from Anthropic reveals that frontier AI systems have reached the capability of self-replication, sparking discussions on future implications and safety protocols.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:44) News Preview
(00:03:43) Response to listener comments
(00:09:50) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:11:12) OpenAI has finally released Sora
(00:21:16) Google Reveals Gemini 2, AI Agents, and a Prototype Personal Assistant
(00:28:23) ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode adding video and screen sharing input (plus a Santa mode)
(00:30:43) Microsoft’s Copilot can browse the web with you using AI ‘Vision’
(00:32:31) Musk’s xAI has launched Grok image generation model
(00:35:22) Cognition Labs’ AI Software Engineer Devin Launched for Subscribers
(00:40:43) Apple launches its ChatGPT integration with Siri
(00:43:23) Reddit’s New AI Search Tool Helps You Find Reddit Answers Without Google
Applications & Business
(00:46:35) OpenAI Aiming to Eliminate Microsoft AGI Rule to Boost Future Investment
(00:53:34) GM halts funding of robotaxi development by Cruise
(00:57:08) Largest AI data centre in the world to be built in northwest Alberta
(01:02:36) Meta announces 4 million sq ft, 2GW Louisiana data center campus
(01:05:22) Google’s future data centers will be built next to solar and wind farms
Projects & Open Source
(01:08:37) Google DeepMind Just Released PaliGemma 2: A New Family of Open-Weight Vision Language Models (3B, 10B and 28B)
Research & Advancements
(01:13:51) Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space
(01:25:37) An Evolved Universal Transformer Memory
(01:31:48) APOLLO: SGD-like Memory, AdamW-level Performance
(01:37:59) Clio: A system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use
Policy & Safety
(01:39:47) Character.AI steps up teen safety after bots allegedly caused suicide, self-harm
(01:45:22) What Trump’s New AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks Means For the Tech Industry
(01:49:03) Frontier AI systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line
(01:53:52) Chip war: China launches antitrust probe into US semiconductor giant Nvidia in sign of escalation
(01:56:53) White House Creating Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure
(02:00:00) US clears export of advanced AI chips to UAE under Microsoft deal, Axios says
(02:02:19) Outro
Our 192nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's
Note: this one was recorded on 12/04 , so the news is a bit outdated...
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
The AI safety book “Uncontrollable" which is not a doomer book, but instead lays out the reasonable case for AI safety and what we can do about it. Max TEGMARK said that “Uncontrollable” is a captivating, balanced, and remarkably up-to-date book on the most important issue of our time" - find it on Amazon today!
In this episode:
OpenAI launches a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription with advanced capabilities, while Amazon unveils cost-effective Nova multimodal models at the re:Invent conference.
Meta releases LLAMA 3.3 70B model, showing significant gains through post-training techniques, and Alibaba introduces QWQ, a reasoning model rivaling OpenAI's O1.
Amazon collaborates with Anthropic on a massive AI supercomputer project, and Black Forest Labs eyes a $200 million funding round for growth in AI tools.
New research from DeepMind's Genie 2 generates interactive 3D worlds from text and images, progressing AI's understanding of world models and interactive environments.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:34) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:04:19) OpenAI confirms new $200 monthly subscription, which includes its o1 reasoning model
(00:10:40) Amazon announces Nova, a new family of multimodal AI models
(00:17:13) ElevenLabs launches GenFM to turn user content into AI-powered podcasts
(00:20:21) Google’s new generative AI video model is now available
Applications & Business
(00:23:56) Elon Musk files for injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit
(00:29:40) Amazon Is Building a Mega AI Supercomputer With Anthropic
(00:34:15) It Sounds an Awful Lot Like OpenAI Is Adding Ads to ChatGPT
(00:38:23) A16z in Talks to Lead $200 Million Round in Black Forest Labs, Startup Behind AI Images on Grok
(00:41:10) Bezos Backs AI Chipmaker Vying With Nvidia at $2.6 Billion Value
Projects & Open Source
(00:45:25) Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model
(00:50:00) Alibaba releases an ‘open’ challenger to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model
(00:55:21) DeMo: Decoupled Momentum Optimization
(00:57:01) PRIME Intellect Releases INTELLECT-1 (Instruct + Base): The First 10B Parameter Language Model Collaboratively Trained Across the Globe
(01:03:03) Tencent Launches HunyuanVideo, an Open-Source AI Video Model
Research & Advancements
(01:09:23) DeepMind’s Genie 2 can generate interactive worlds that look like video games
(01:16:43) Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding
(01:20:40) Densing Law of LLMs
(01:25:59) Monet: Mixture of Monosemantic Experts for Transformers
Policy & Safety
(01:30:56) Commerce Strengthens Export Controls to Restrict China’s Capability to Produce Advanced Semiconductors for Military Applications
(01:37:33) China retaliates against latest US chip restrictions
(01:40:52) OpenAI Is Working With Anduril to Supply the US Military With AI
(01:43:24) On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback
(01:47:52) AI Safety Researcher Quits OpenAI, Saying Its Trajectory Alarms Her
(01:51:52) Meta Claims AI Content Was Less than 1% of Election Misinformation
(01:55:05) Outro
Our 191st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:55) Response to listener comments
(00:09:30) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:10:52) OpenAI’s Sora video generator appears to have leaked
(00:21:11) Mistral unleashes Pixtral Large and upgrades Le Chat into full-on ChatGPT competitor
(00:26:39) Ignite 2024 introduces new AI agents and more for Microsoft 365 Copilot
(00:28:50) H, the AI startup that raised $220M, launches its first product: Runner H for ‘agentic’ applications
(00:31:20) Anthropic bets on personalization in the AI arms race with new ‘styles’ feature
(00:33:42) ElevenLabs now offers ability to build conversational AI agents
(00:37:08) Perplexity introduces a shopping feature for Pro users in the U.S.
(00:38:49) Google’s Gemini chatbot now has memory
(00:43:03) Suno V4 Ai Music Generator Is Out Now And It’s Very Impressive
(00:46:28) Introducing FLUX.1 Tools
(00:49:51) OpenAI just gave ChatGPT a major 'creativity' upgrade
(00:51:26) Runway launches Frames — a new AI image generator that creates custom worlds
Applications & Business
(00:54:56) OpenAI Email Archives (from Musk v. Altman)
(01:02:01) Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival
(01:05:41) Amazon Robots Struggling to Keep Up With Human Workers
Projects & Open Source
(01:11:27) DeepSeek’s first reasoning model R1-Lite-Preview turns heads, beating OpenAI o1 performance
(01:15:30) OpenScholar: The open-source A.I. that’s outperforming GPT-4o in scientific research
Research & Advancements
(01:18:02) A statistical approach to model evaluations
(01:22:08) Scaling Laws for Precision
(01:25:10) Cerebras Delivers Record-Breaking Performance with Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B Model
Policy & Safety
(01:28:01) Sam Altman will co-chair San Francisco mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s transition team
(01:32:21) Biden’s final meeting with Xi Jinping reaps agreement on AI and nukes
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:33:07) How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test?
(01:38:27) Outro
I love you guys but astrocade is super lame. sorry
Thanks
🔴💚Really Amazing ️You Can Try This💚WATCH💚ᗪOᗯᑎᒪOᗩᗪ👉https://co.fastmovies.org
The audio is quite horrible.