Last Week in AI

#216 - Grok 4, Project Rainier, Kimi K2

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Our 216th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 07/11/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.

In this episode:

  • xAI launches Grok 4 with breakthrough performance across benchmarks, becoming the first true frontier model outside established labs, alongside a $300/month subscription tier
  • Grok's alignment challenges emerge with antisemitic responses, highlighting the difficulty of steering models toward "truth-seeking" without harmful biases
  • Perplexity and OpenAI launch AI-powered browsers to compete with Google Chrome, signaling a major shift in how users interact with AI systems
  • Meta study reveals AI tools actually slow down experienced developers by 20% on complex tasks, contradicting expectations and anecdotal reports of productivity gains

    • Timestamps + Links:

    • (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
    • (00:01:02) News Preview

      •       Tools & Apps

      • (00:01:59) Elon Musk's xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription | TechCrunch
      • (00:15:28) Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is suddenly posting antisemitic tropes
      • (00:29:52) Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser | TechCrunch
      • (00:32:54) OpenAI is reportedly releasing an AI browser in the coming weeks | TechCrunch
      • (00:33:27) Replit Launches New Feature for its Agent, CEO Calls it ‘Deep Research for Coding’
      • (00:34:40) Cursor launches a web app to manage AI coding agents
      • (00:36:07) Cursor apologizes for unclear pricing changes that upset users | TechCrunch

        •       Applications & Business

        • (00:39:10) Lovable on track to raise $150M at $2B valuation
        • (00:41:11) Amazon built a massive AI supercluster for Anthropic called Project Rainier – here's what we know so far
        • (00:46:35) Elon Musk confirms xAI is buying an overseas power plant and shipping the whole thing to the U.S. to power its new data center — 1 million AI GPUs and up to 2 Gigawatts of power under one roof, equivalent to powering 1.9 million homes
        • (00:48:16) Microsoft's own AI chip delayed six months in major setback — in-house chip now reportedly expected in 2026, but won't hold a candle to Nvidia Blackwell
        • (00:49:54) Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross
        • (00:52:46) OpenAI’s Stock Compensation Reflect Steep Costs of Talent Wars

          •       Projects & Open Source

          • (00:58:04) Hugging Face Releases SmolLM3: A 3B Long-Context, Multilingual Reasoning Model - MarkTechPost
          • (00:58:33) Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence
          • (00:58:59) Kyutai Releases 2B Parameter Streaming Text-to-Speech TTS with 220ms Latency and 2.5M Hours of Training

            •       Research & Advancements

            • (01:02:14) Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning
            • (01:07:58) Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity
            • (01:13:03) Mitigating Goal Misgeneralization with Minimax Regret
            • (01:17:01) Correlated Errors in Large Language Models
            • (01:20:31) What skills does SWE-bench Verified evaluate?

              •       Policy & Safety

              • (01:22:53) Evaluating Frontier Models for Stealth and Situational Awareness
              • (01:25:49) When Chain of Thought is Necessary, Language Models Struggle to Evade Monitors
              • (01:30:09) Why Do Some Language Models Fake Alignment While Others Don't?
              • (01:34:35) Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers
              • (01:35:40) Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI Overviews
              • (01:36:41) The transfer of user data by DeepSeek to China is unlawful': Germany calls for Google and Apple to remove the AI app from their stores
              • (01:37:30) Virology Capabilities Test (VCT): A Multimodal Virology Q&A Benchmark
                • ...more
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