Our 245th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 05/13/2026

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:

• OpenAI released new voice intelligence API features including GPT Realtime 2 (GPT-5-powered) plus realtime translation and Whisper transcription, emphasizing the latency–reasoning tradeoff, larger context, and new guardrails amid fraud risks.
• Thinking Machines previewed a low-latency, full‑duplex conversational system with a two-model architecture and custom inference stack, reporting strong interactivity benchmark results but without public access or third‑party validation yet.
• Anthropic pushed further into vertical products with Claude for Legal and deeper AWS availability, while ongoing ecosystem tension grows as platform model providers compete with application-layer companies.
• Safety, policy, and research updates included OpenAI’s self-harm trusted contact feature, Anthropic work on reducing agent misalignment by training ethical “why” reasoning, OpenAI’s investigation of accidental chain-of-thought grading in RL, and Meta horizon eval updates showing benchmarking limits for long task horizons.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:35) Response to listener comments
• (00:03:27) Sponsor Break

Tools & Apps

• (00:06:27) OpenAI launches new voice intelligence features in its API | TechCrunch
• (00:15:52) Thinking Machines drops a new, highly responsive model designed for humanlike interactions in real time - SiliconANGLE
• (00:27:49) Claude For Legal Launches, May Reshape the Legal Tech World – Artificial Lawyer
• (00:40:27) Threads tests a Meta AI integration that works similarly to Grok | TechCrunch
• (00:43:08) Google brings agentic AI and vibe-coded widgets to Android | TechCrunch
• (00:45:33) Google updates AI search to include quotes from Reddit and other sources | TechCrunch

Applications & Business

• (00:47:38) Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough | The Verge
• (00:55:04) Nvidia C.E.O. Jensen Huang Hitches Ride With Trump to China After Last-Minute Invite - The New York Times
• (00:58:40) AWS expands Anthropic partnership with Claude Platform launch
• (01:01:13) Chinese grey market sells Claude API access at 90% off by using stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users' prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data — 'transfer stations' operate through proxy networks that harvest user data
• (01:06:43) DeepMind Spinout Isomorphic Labs Raises $2.1 Billion to Design Drugs With AI - Bloomberg

Projects & Open Source

• (01:09:04) Petri: Anthropic Hands Its Alignment Toolbox to Meridian Labs with 3.0 Update
• (01:12:25) Daybreak': OpenAI's Answer to Anthropic's Project Glasswing Has Arrived

Policy & Safety

• (01:14:04) Teaching Claude why
• (01:21:45) Import AI 455: Automating AI Research
• (01:28:31) ChatGPT's New Safety Feature Could Alert 'Trusted Contact' to Risk of Self-Harm - CNET
• (01:30:09) Investigating the consequences of accidentally grading CoT during RL
• (01:34:46) Natural Language Autoencoders criticism
• (01:39:15) Review of the "Risks from automated R&D" section in the Anthropic Risk Report (February 2026)

Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:43:39) George Clooney, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep back new ‘Human Consent Standard’ for AI licensing | The Verge

Research & Advancements

• (01:45:10) METR says Claude Mythos is testing the limits of AI evaluation – Startup Fortune

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