Our 204th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
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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.(00:00:00) Intro / Banter(00:01:36) News PreviewTools & 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 imagesApplications & 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 IntegrationProjects & 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 ModelsResearch & 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 TasksPolicy & 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 evaluationsSynthetic 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