Last Week in AI

By Skynet Today

Weekly summaries of the AI news that matters!... more

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The podcast currently has 248 episodes available.

Last Week in AI episodes:

April 18, 2025#207 - GPT 4.1, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Ironwood, Claude Max
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 43min
April 09, 2025#206 - Llama 4, Nova Act, xAI buys X, PaperBench
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 14min
April 01, 2025#205 - Gemini 2.5, ChatGPT Image Gen, Thoughts of LLMs
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 35min
March 24, 2025#204 - OpenAI Audio, Rubin GPUs, MCP, Zochi
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 50min
March 17, 2025#203 - Gemini Image Gen, Ascend 910C, Gemma 3, Gemini Robotics
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 47min
March 09, 2025#202 - Qwen-32B, Anthropic's $3.5 billion, LLM Cognitive Behaviors
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 20min
March 05, 2025#201 - GPT 4.5, Sonnet 3.7, Grok 3, Phi 4
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
59min
February 17, 2025#200 - ChatGPT Roadmap, Musk OpenAI Bid, Model Tampering
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 49min
February 12, 2025#199 - OpenAI's 03-mini, Gemini Thinking, Deep Research, s1
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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
...more
1h 38min
February 02, 2025#198 - DeepSeek R1 & Janus, Qwen2.5, OpenAI Agents
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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
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.
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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
...more
1h 38min

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