Pretrained

Pierce and Richard cover the news that Yann LeCunn is planning to depart Meta to focus on world models, Cursor 2.0 and their new home trained Composer coding model, Kimi K2 has great generalization performance for an open model but is lagging on code, Microsoft creates a super data center across 700 miles, and Anthropic reports the first hacking campaign orchestrated by AI.

Further reading:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.14252
https://www.digit.in/features/general/meta-chief-ai-scientist-yann-lecun-thinks-llms-are-a-waste-of-time.html
https://cursor.com/blog/composer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.20534
https://www.anthropic.com/news/disrupting-AI-espionage

Richard and Pierce talk about the major AI conferences, walk through the history of NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, and retrofitting the peer review system.

Richard and Pierce break down all the new AI web browser entrants with a particular focus on OpenAI's new Atlas, tradeoffs between vision models and text based dom parsing, potential security vulnerabilities, and more.

OpenAI releases their long awaited browser Atlas, Pytorch releases their distributed computation framework Monarch, the SALT reinforcement learning addition to GRPO, the HAL benchmark for agent evaluation, and trying to adapt the kv cache for text diffusion models.

Further reading:
https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/
https://pytorch.org/blog/introducing-pytorch-monarch/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.20022

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.11977

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14973

Richard and Pierce take the bull case on whether we're in an AI bubble. They cover circular financial deals, energy build outs, AI representing 92% of GDP growth in H1 2025, and a comparison with the hype in 2000s around meaningless dot-com companies.

Articles written by LLMs have stabilized at exactly 50% of the internet (at least - so far as our classifiers can discriminate), the price of embedding models, OpenAI announces a new job board and certification programs for applied AI, Amazon releases the public availability of Bedrock AgentCore, and how pre-training on low quality data affects the capability of post-training.

Further reading:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13928
https://openai.com/index/expanding-economic-opportunity-with-ai/
https://www.tensoreconomics.com/p/why-are-embeddings-so-cheap
https://graphite.io/five-percent/more-articles-are-now-created-by-ai-than-humans

OpenAI diversifies their chip suppliers through partnerships with AMD and Broadcom, Google starts a new AI Bug Bountry problem but only for computational security not for llm hallucinations, Nvidia ships their first prosumer computer, DeepMind has a new complexity theory proof solver, and Anthropic writes their own gibberish poison pill that works across model sizes.

Further reading:
https://openai.com/index/openai-amd-strategic-partnership/
https://investor.nvidia.com/news/press-release-details/2024/NVIDIA-Announces-Financial-Results-for-Second-Quarter-Fiscal-2025/default.aspx
https://bughunters.google.com/blog/6116887259840512/announcing-google-s-new-ai-vulnerability-reward-program
https://marketplace.nvidia.com/en-us/developer/dgx-spark/
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.18057
https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

You asked, we answered! Rich and Pierce do their first listener mailbag. Explaining RLHF, our current development stack, whether model competition is making things better for people using them, and more.

Breaking down California's recently passed SB 53 to legislate frontier model development, ISO standards in startups, and why this one passed where the older SB 1047 failed.

Building a modern AI app and architecting Sora II, first impressions of Sonnet 4.5, and the frontier labs go after n8n and Zapier.

Further reading:
https://openai.com/index/sora-2/
https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4yn8B8p2YiouxLABy/claude-sonnet-4-5-system-card-and-alignment
https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/872c653b2d0501d6ab44cf87f43e1dc4853e4d37.pdf
https://www.testingcatalog.com/openai-prepares-to-release-agent-builder-during-devday-on-october-6/