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Note: this one was recorded on 12/13, so the news is a bit outdated...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