Last Week in AI

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Last Week in AI episodes

August 11, 2025#219 - GPT 5, Opus 4.1, OpenAI's Open Source, Astrocade
Our 219th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 08/08/2025
Check out Andrey's work over at Astrocade , sign up to be an ambassador here
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 reveals GPT-5, a consolidated model combining all previous versions, marking notable improvements and introducing a new infrastructure and product update.
Multiple major releases from leading AI labs, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google reflect the ongoing competitive landscape with significant business updates and new model capabilities.
Discussions on geopolitical influences in AI development highlight China’s evolving stance on AI safety and governance, contrasting with U.S. approaches and raising concerns over export bans and international cooperation.
Papers from leading AI entities such as OpenAI and Anthropic delve into the complexities of AI alignment and safety, proposing new methodologies for auditing and mitigating risks in model behaviors.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:14) Plug: Astrocade rolls out AI agent-powered game creation experience so anyone can create games
Tools & Apps
(00:03:07) OpenAI’s GPT-5 is here
(00:17:02) Anthropic Releases Claude Opus 4.1 With Agentic, Coding and Reasoning Upgrades
(00:21:06) Google rolls out Gemini Deep Think AI, a reasoning model that tests multiple ideas in parallel | TechCrunch
(00:24:04) Grok Imagine, xAI’s new AI image and video generator, lets you make NSFW content | TechCrunch
Applications & Business
(00:26:35) Meta, Microsoft stocks rise on strong earnings and AI spending boom
(00:29:17) OpenAI to Establish Stargate Norway With 230MW Data Center - Bloomberg
(00:32:12) Anthropic Revenue Pace Nears $5 Billion in Run-Up to Mega Round — The Information
(00:37:18) OpenAI Hits $12 Billion Annualized Revenue
(00:40:06) Noma Security raises $100 million to defend against AI agent vulnerabilities | Ctech
Projects & Open Source
(00:42:13) OpenAI Just Released Its First Open-Weight Models Since GPT-2
(00:53:13) Falcon-H1: A Family of Hybrid-Head Language Models Redefining Efficiency and Performance
(00:57:39) Meta CLIP 2: A Worldwide Scaling Recipe
(01:01:12) BFL and Krea release FLUX.1 Krea: Open image model designed for realism
Research & Advancements
(01:02:33) Google’s Newest AI Model Acts like a Satellite to Track Climate Change | WIRED
(01:04:50) Google’s new AI model creates video game worlds in real time
(01:10:55) AlphaGo Moment for Model Architecture Discovery
(01:17:22) METR evaluates Grok 4
Policy & Safety
(01:20:05) Estimating Worst-Case Frontier Risks of Open-Weight LLMs
(01:23:14) Anthropic's AI 'Vaccine': Train It With Evil to Make It Good - Business Insider
(01:27:26) Anthropic unveils 'auditing agents' to test for AI misalignment | VentureBeat
(01:28:31) Optimizing The Final Output Can Obfuscate CoT (Research Note)
(01:31:23) Why China isn’t about to leap ahead of the West on compute
(01:33:15) Inside the Summit Where China Pitched Its AI Agenda to the World | WIRED
(01:38:47) Nvidia H20 GPUs reportedly caught up in U.S. Commerce Department's worst export license backlog in 30 years — billions of dollars worth of GPUs and other products in limbo due to staffing cuts, communication issues | Tom's Hardware
(01:42:35) Response to listener comments
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 49 min
July 31, 2025#218 - Github Spark, MegaScience, US AI Action Plan
Our 218th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/25/2025
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:
GitHub introduces Vibe Coding with Spark, engaging users with natural language and visual controls to develop full-stack applications.
AI coding tools from Gemin, CLI and RepleIt face significant issues, inadvertently deleting user data and highlighting the importance of careful management.
US release never Award Americans, AI Action Plan outlining economic, technical, and policy strategies to maintain leadership in AI technology.
Newly released Mega Science and SWE-Perf data sets evaluate AI reasoning and performance capabilities in diverse scientific and software engineering tasks.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:31) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:03:53) GitHub Introduces Vibe Coding with Spark: Revolutionizing Intelligent App Development in a Flash - MarkTechPost
(00:07:05) Figma’s AI app building tool is now available for everyone | The Verge
(00:10:18) Two major AI coding tools wiped out user data after making cascading mistakes - Ars Technica
(00:14:10) Google's AI Overviews have 2B monthly users, AI Mode 100M in the US and India | TechCrunch
Applications & Business
(00:18:10) Leaked Memo: Anthropic CEO Says the Company Will Pursue Gulf State Investments After All
(00:24:39) Mira Murati says her startup Thinking Machines will release new product in ‘months’ with ‘significant open source component’
(00:27:07) Waymo responds to Tesla’s dick joke with a bigger Austin robotaxi map | The Verge
Projects & Open Source
(00:32:05) MegaScience: Pushing the Frontiers of Post-Training Datasets for Science Reasoning
(00:43:09) TikTok Researchers Introduce SWE-Perf: The First Benchmark for Repository-Level Code Performance Optimization - MarkTechPost
Research & Advancements
(00:47:17) Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data
(00:55:34) Inverse Scaling in Test-Time Compute
(01:02:34) Scaling Laws for Optimal Data Mixtures
Policy & Safety
(01:07:35) White House Unveils America’s AI Action Plan
(01:16:55) Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety
(01:20:20) Self-preservation or Instruction Ambiguity? Examining the Causes of Shutdown Resistance
(01:24:00) People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"
(01:28:03) Meta refuses to sign EU’s AI code of practice
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 33 min
July 23, 2025#217 - ChatGPT Agent, Kimi k2, Hiring Drama
Our 217th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/17/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest co-host Jon Krohn.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Check out Jon's workshop on Agentic AI Engineering, and find his consultancy here.
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
OpenAI's new ChatGPT agent: The episode begins with a detailed discussion on OpenAI's latest ChatGPT agent, which can control entire computers and perform a wide range of tasks, showcasing powerful performance benchmarks and potential applications in business and research.
Major business moves in the AI space: Significant shifts include Google's acquisition of Windsurf's top talent after OpenAI's deal fell through, Cognition's acquisition of Windsurf, and several notable hires by Meta from OpenAI and Apple, highlighting intense competition in the AI industry.
AI's ethical and societal impacts: The hosts discuss serious concerns like the rise of non-consensual explicit AI-generated images, ICE's use of facial recognition for large databases, and regulations aimed at controlling AI's potential misuse.
Video game actors strike ends: The episode concludes with news that SAG-AFTRA's year-long strike for video game voice actors has ended after reaching an agreement on AI rights and wage increases, reflecting the broader impact of AI on the job market.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:49) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:03:29) OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent can control an entire computer and do tasks for you
(00:07:11) Alibaba-backed Moonshot releases new Kimi AI model that beats ChatGPT, Claude in coding — and it costs less
(00:09:36) Amazon targets vibe-coding chaos with new 'Kiro' AI software development tool – GeekWire
(00:12:33) Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code – without telling users
(00:15:51) Mistral's Le Chat chatbot gets a productivity push with new ‘deep research' mode | TechCrunch
(00:17:46) I spent 24 hours flirting with Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend
(00:21:32) Uber is close to completing its quest to become the ultimate robotaxi app | The Verge
Applications & Business
(00:24:02) OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off — and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google | The Verge
(00:28:09) Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquires Windsurf | TechCrunch
(00:28:46) Anthropic hired back two of its employees — just two weeks after they left for a competitor. | The Verge
(00:28:46) Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta | WIRED
(00:28:46) Meta Hires Two Key Apple (AAPL) AI Experts After Poaching Their Boss - Bloomberg
(00:31:31) Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round | TechCrunch
(00:33:20) Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch | TechCrunch
(00:34:55) SpaceX commits $2 billion to xAI as Musk steps up AI ambitions: Report | World News - Business Standard
Research & Advancements
(00:35:59) A former OpenAI engineer describes what it’s really like to work there | TechCrunch
(00:38:23) Reasoning or Memorization? Unreliable Results of Reinforcement Learning Due to Data Contamination
Policy & Safety
(00:42:14) Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI granted up to $200 million from DoD
(00:43:08) California State Senator Scott Wiener Pushes Bill to Regulate AI Companies - Bloomberg
(00:43:58) AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars | WIRED
(00:45:55) Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images
Synthetic Media & Art
(00:48:47) Video game actors' strike officially ends after AI deal
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
53 min
July 14, 2025#216 - Grok 4, Project Rainier, Kimi K2
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
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 43 min
July 08, 2025#215 - Runway games, Meta Superintelligence, ERNIE 4.5, Adaptive Tree Search
Our 215th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/04/2025
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:
Cloudflare's new AI data scraper blocking feature, its potential implications, and technical challenges
Meta's aggressive recruitment for its Super Intelligence Labs division is covered, highlighting key hires from OpenAI and other leaders in the field
Anthropic loses significant talent to Cursor, with details on their new economic futures program focusing on AI's impact on the labor market
Notable open-source AI model releases from Baidu and Tencent are also discussed, including their performance metrics and potential applications.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:11) Intro / Banter
(00:01:43) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:55) Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers
(00:05:44) Runway is going to let people generate video games with AI
(00:11:24) Google embraces AI in the classroom with new Gemini tools for educators, chatbots for students, and more
(00:16:23) No one likes meetings. They’re sending their AI note takers instead.
(00:18:08) Google launches Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you
(00:19:14) Google's Imagen 4 text-to-image model promises 'significantly improved' boring images
Applications & Business
(00:22:18) Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI ‘superintelligence’ super-group
(00:29:35) Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies
(00:35:10) As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI’s economic fallout
(00:38:04) OpenAI says it has no plan to use Google's in-house chip
(00:41:08) Nvidia stakes new startup that flips script on data center power
(00:44:11) TSMC Arizona Chips Are Reportedly Being Flown Back to Taiwan For Packaging; U.S. Semiconductor Supply Chain Still Remains Dependent on Taiwan
Projects & Open Source
(00:46:57) Baidu releases open source model family ERNIE 4.5
(00:51:55) Tencent Open Sources Hunyuan-A13B: A 13B Active Parameter MoE Model with Dual-Mode Reasoning and 256K Context
(00:57:09) Together AI Releases DeepSWE: A Fully Open-Source RL-Trained Coding Agent Based on Qwen3-32B and Achieves 59% on SWEBench
(01:00:11) GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
(01:04:10) DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation
Research & Advancements
(01:06:21) Wider or Deeper? Scaling LLM Inference-Time Compute with Adaptive Branching Tree Search
(01:13:07) The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements
(01:18:04) Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet reach 50%-time-horizon point estimates of about 80 and 65 minutes, respectively
(01:21:37) Performance Prediction for Large Systems via Text-to-Text Regression
(01:25:38) Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning
(01:26:33) Correlated Errors in Large Language Models
Policy & Safety
(01:29:04) Forecasting Biosecurity Risks from LLMs
(01:36:06) AI Task Length Horizons in Offensive Cybersecurity
(01:42:30) Inside Tech's Risky Gamble to Kill State AI Regulations for a Decade
(01:52:56) Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 57 min
July 04, 2025#214 - Gemini CLI, io drama, AlphaGenome, copyright rulings
Our 214th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/27/2025
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:
Meta's hiring of key engineers from OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab securing a $2 billion seed round with a valuation of $10 billion.
DeepMind introduces Alpha Genome, significantly advancing genomic research with a model comparable to Alpha Fold but focused on gene functions.
Taiwan imposes technology export controls on Huawei and SMIC, while Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI in a groundbreaking legal case.
A new DeepMind research paper introduces a transformative approach to cognitive debt in AI tasks, utilizing EEG to assess cognitive load and recall in essay writing with LLMs.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:22) News Preview
(00:02:15) Response to listener comments
Tools & Apps
(00:06:18) Google is bringing Gemini CLI to developers’ terminals
(00:12:09) Anthropic now lets you make apps right from its Claude AI chatbot
Applications & Business
(00:15:54) Sam Altman takes his ‘io’ trademark battle public
(00:21:35) Huawei Matebook Contains Kirin X90, using SMIC 7nm (N+2) Technology
(00:26:05) AMD deploys its first Ultra Ethernet ready network card — Pensando Pollara provides up to 400 Gbps performance
(00:31:21) Amazon joins the big nuclear party, buying 1.92 GW for AWS
(00:33:20) Nvidia goes nuclear — company joins Bill Gates in backing TerraPower, a company building nuclear reactors for powering data centers
(00:36:18) Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab closes on $2B at $10B valuation
(00:41:02) Meta hires key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models
Research & Advancements
(00:49:46) Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work
(00:55:13) Direct Reasoning Optimization: LLMs Can Reward And Refine Their Own Reasoning for Open-Ended Tasks
(01:01:54) Farseer: A Refined Scaling Law in Large Language Models
(01:06:28) LLM-First Search: Self-Guided Exploration of the Solution Space
Policy & Safety
(01:11:20) Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models
(01:16:04) Taiwan Imposes Technology Export Controls on Huawei, SMIC
(01:18:22) Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:23:41) Judge Rejects Authors’ Claim That Meta AI Training Violated Copyrights
(01:29:46) Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI, but UK lawsuit continues
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 34 min
June 26, 2025#213 - Midjourney video, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, LiveCodeBench Pro
Our 213nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/21/2025
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/.
In this episode:
Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, moving from text-to-image to video with a subscription model offering up to 21-second clips, highlighting the affordability and growing capabilities in AI video generation.
Google's Gemini AI family updates include high-efficiency models for cost-effective workloads, and new enhancements in Google's search function now allow for voice interactions.
The introduction of two new benchmarks, Live Code Bench Pro and Abstention Bench, aiming to test and improve the problem-solving and abstention capabilities of reasoning models, revealing current limitations.
OpenAI wins a $200 million US defense contract to support various aspects of the Department of Defense, reflecting growing collaborations between tech companies and government for AI applications.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:32) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:12) Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, V1
(00:05:52) Google’s Gemini AI family updated with stable 2.5 Pro, super-efficient 2.5 Flash-Lite
(00:07:59) Google’s AI Mode can now have back-and-forth voice conversations
(00:10:13) YouTube to Add Google’s Veo 3 to Shorts in Move That Could Turbocharge AI on the Video Platform
Applications & Business
(00:11:10) The ‘OpenAI Files’ will help you understand how Sam Altman’s company works
(00:12:29) OpenAI drops Scale AI as a data provider following Meta deal
(00:13:28) Amazon’s Zoox opens its first major robotaxi production facility
Projects & Open Source
(00:15:20) LiveCodeBench Pro: How Do Olympiad Medalists Judge LLMs in Competitive Programming?
(00:19:45) AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions
(00:22:49) MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attention
Research & Advancements
(00:24:33) Scaling Laws of Motion Forecasting and Planning -- A Technical Report
Policy & Safety
(00:28:07) Universal Jailbreak Suffixes Are Strong Attention Hijackers
(00:30:52) OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’
(00:33:25) OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
37 min
June 17, 2025#212 - o3 pro, Cursor 1.0, ProRL, Midjourney Sued
Our 212th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/13/2025
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:
OpenAI introduces O3 PRO for ChatGPT, highlighting significant improvements in performance and cost-efficiency.
Anthropic sees an influx of talent from OpenAI and DeepMind, with significantly higher retention rates and competitive advantages in AI capabilities.
New research indicates that reinforcing negative responses in LLMs significantly improves performance across all metrics, highlighting novel approaches in reinforcement learning.
A security flaw in Microsoft Copilot demonstrates the growing risk of AI agents being hacked, emphasizing the need for robust protection against zero-click attacks.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:11) Intro / Banter
(00:01:31) News Preview
(00:02:46) Response to Listener Reviews
Tools & Apps
(00:04:48) OpenAI adds o3 Pro to ChatGPT and drops o3 price by 80 per cent, but open-source AI is delayed
(00:09:10) Cursor AI editor hits 1.0 milestone, including BugBot and high-risk background agents
(00:13:07) Mistral releases a pair of AI reasoning models
(00:16:18) Elevenlabs' Eleven v3 lets AI voices whisper, laugh and express emotions naturally
(00:19:00) ByteDance's Seedance 1.0 is trading blows with Google's Veo 3
(00:22:42) Google Reveals $20 AI Pro Plan With Veo 3 Fast Video Generator For Budget Creators
Applications & Business
(00:25:42) OpenAI and DeepMind are losing engineers to Anthropic in a one-sided talent war
(00:34:32) OpenAI slams court order to save all ChatGPT logs, including deleted chats
(00:37:24) Nvidia’s Biggest Chinese Rival Huawei Struggles to Win at Home
(00:43:06) Huawei Expected to Break Semiconductor Barriers with Development of High-End 3nm GAA Chips; Tape-Out by 2026
(00:45:21) TSMC’s 1.4nm Process, Also Called Angstrom, Will Make Even The Most Lucrative Clients Think Twice When Placing Orders, With An Estimate Claiming That Each Wafer Will Cost $45,000
(00:47:43) Mistral AI Launches Mistral Compute To Replace Cloud Providers from US, China
Projects & Open Source
(00:51:26) ProRL: Prolonged Reinforcement Learning Expands Reasoning Boundaries in Large Language Models
Research & Advancements
(00:57:27) Kinetics: Rethinking Test-Time Scaling Laws
(01:05:12) The Surprising Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement in LLM Reasoning
(01:10:45) Predicting Empirical AI Research Outcomes with Language Models
(01:15:02) EXP-Bench: Can AI Conduct AI Research Experiments?
Policy & Safety
(01:20:07) Large Language Models Often Know When They Are Being Evaluated
(01:24:56) Beyond Induction Heads: In-Context Meta Learning Induces Multi-Phase Circuit Emergence
(01:31:16) Exclusive: New Microsoft Copilot flaw signals broader risk of AI agents being hacked—‘I would be terrified’
(01:35:01) Claude Gov Models for U.S. National Security Customers
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:37:32) Disney And NBCUniversal Sue AI Company Midjourney For Copyright Infringement
(01:40:39) AMC Networks is teaming up with AI company Runway
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 47 min
June 03, 2025#211 - Claude Voice, Flux Kontext, wrong RL research?
Our 211th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/31/2025
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:
Recent AI podcast covers significant AI news: startups, new tools, applications, investments in hardware, and research advancements.
Discussions include the introduction of various new tools and applications such as Flux's new image generating models and Perplexity's new spreadsheet and dashboard functionalities.
A notable segment focuses on OpenAI's partnership with the UAE and discussions on potential legislation aiming to prevent states from regulating AI for a decade.
Concerns around model behaviors and safety are discussed, highlighting incidents like Claude Opus 4's blackmail attempt and Palisade Research's tests showing AI models bypassing shutdown commands.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:39) News Preview
(00:02:50) Response to Listener Comments
Tools & Apps
(00:07:10) Anthropic launches a voice mode for Claude
(00:10:35) Black Forest Labs’ Kontext AI models can edit pics as well as generate them
(00:15:30) Perplexity’s new tool can generate spreadsheets, dashboards, and more
(00:18:43) xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
(00:22:42) Opera’s new AI browser promises to write code while you sleep
(00:24:17) Google Photos debuts redesigned editor with new AI tools
Applications & Business
(00:25:13) Top Chinese memory maker expected to abandon DDR4 manufacturing at the behest of Beijing
(00:30:04) Oracle to Buy $40 Billion Worth of Nvidia Chips for First Stargate Data Center
(00:31:47) UAE makes ChatGPT Plus subscription free for all residents as part of deal with OpenAI
(00:35:34) NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) to Launch Cheaper Blackwell AI Chip for China, Says Report
(00:38:39) The New York Times and Amazon ink AI licensing deal
Projects & Open Source
(00:41:11) DeepSeek’s distilled new R1 AI model can run on a single GPU
(00:45:19) Google Unveils SignGemma, an AI Model That Can Translate Sign Language Into Spoken Text
(00:47:08) Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools
(00:49:42) Hugging Face unveils two new humanoid robots
Research & Advancements
(00:52:33) PANGU PRO MOE: MIXTURE OF GROUPED EXPERTS FOR EFFICIENT SPARSITY
(00:58:55) DataRater: Meta-Learned Dataset Curation
(01:05:05) Incorrect Baseline Evaluations Call into Question Recent LLM-RL Claims
(01:10:17) Maximizing Confidence Alone Improves Reasoning
(01:11:00) Guided by Gut: Efficient Test-Time Scaling with Reinforced Intrinsic Confidence
(01:11:44) One RL to See Them All
(01:15:05) Efficient Reinforcement Finetuning via Adaptive Curriculum Learning
Policy & Safety
(01:17:58) Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' could ban states from regulating AI for a decade
(01:24:31) Researchers claim ChatGPT o3 bypassed shutdown in controlled test
(01:30:10) Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
(01:31:09) Anthropic Faces Backlash As Claude 4 Opus Can Autonomously Alert Authorities
(01:35:37) Claude helps users make bioweapons
(01:35:49) The Claude 4 System Card is a Wild Read

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 39 min
May 26, 2025#210 - Claude 4, Google I/O 2025, OpenAI+io, Gemini Diffusion
Our 210th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/23/2025
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:
Google's Gemini diffusion technology showcases significant improvements in speed and efficiency for generating text, potentially revolutionizing the auto-regressive generation paradigm.
Anthropic activates AI Safety Level 3 protections for Claude Opus 4, implementing robust measures such as bug bounties, synthetic jailbreak data, and preliminary egress bandwidth controls to mitigate bio-risk threats.
OpenAI responds to the California Attorney General, refuting claims by the not-for-private-gain coalition and defending their controversial restructuring plans amidst ongoing criticism.
Mistral delays the release of its Llama 4 Behemoth model due to training challenges, while Meta faces similar obstacles in rolling out its large-scale AI models, signaling difficulties in reaching frontier level performance.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:43) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:58) Anthropic’s new Claude 4 AI models can reason over many steps
(00:09:58) Google Unveils A.I. Chatbot, Signaling a New Era for Search
(00:14:04) Google rolls out Project Mariner, its web-browsing AI agent
(00:16:40) Veo 3 can generate videos — and soundtracks to go along with them
(00:21:26) Imagen 4 is Google’s newest AI image generator
(00:23:15) Google Meet is getting real-time speech translation
(00:25:36) Google’s new Jules AI agent will help developers fix buggy code
(00:26:43) GitHub’s new AI coding agent can fix bugs for you
(00:28:50) Mistral’s new Devstral model was designed for coding
Applications & Business
(00:29:53) OpenAI Unites With Jony Ive in $6.5 Billion Deal to Create A.I. Devices
(00:36:10) OpenAI’s planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco
(00:41:18) LM Arena, the organization behind popular AI leaderboards, lands $100M
(00:45:21) Nvidia CEO says next chip after H20 for China won't be from Hopper series
(00:46:39) Google’s Gemini AI app has 400M monthly active users
(00:51:15) AI Servers: End demand intact, but rising gap between upstream build and system production (2025.5.18)
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:46) Meta Is Delaying the Rollout of Its Flagship AI Model
Research & Advancements
(00:57:53) Gemini Diffusion
(01:03:07) Chain-of-Model Learning for Language Model
(01:09:16) Seek in the Dark: Reasoning via Test-Time Instance-Level Policy Gradient in Latent Space
(01:15:38) Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training
(01:20:16) Lessons from Defending Gemini Against Indirect Prompt Injections
(01:23:35) How Fast Can Algorithms Advance Capabilities?
(01:30:20) Reinforcement Learning Finetunes Small Subnetworks in Large Language Models
Policy & Safety
(01:31:12) Exclusive: What OpenAI Told California's Attorney General
(01:38:25) Activating AI Safety Level 3 Protections
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
1 hr 45 min