#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

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

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

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

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

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  

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

Our 209th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 05/16/2025 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 has decided not to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, instead opting to become a public benefit corporation influenced by legal and civic discussions. Trump administration meetings with Saudi Arabia and the UAE have opened floodgates for AI deals, leading to partnerships with companies like Nvidia and aiming to bolster AI infrastructure in the Middle East. DeepMind introduced Alpha Evolve, a new coding agent designed for scientific and algorithmic discovery, showing improvements in automated code generation and efficiency. OpenAI pledges greater transparency in AI safety by launching the Safety Evaluations Hub, a platform showcasing various safety test results for their models. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:01:41) News Preview (00:02:26) Response to listener comments Applications & Business (00:03:00) OpenAI says non-profit will remain in control after backlash (00:13:23) Microsoft Moves to Protect Its Turf as OpenAI Turns Into Rival (00:18:07) TSMC’s 2nm Process Said to Witness ‘Unprecedented’ Demand, Exceeding 3nm Due to Interest from Apple, NVIDIA, AMD, & Many Others (00:21:42) NVIDIA’s Global Headquarters Will Be In Taiwan, With CEO Huang Set To Announce Site Next Week, Says Report (00:23:58) CoreWeave in Talks for $1.5 Billion Debt Deal 6 Weeks After IPO Tools & Apps (00:26:39) The Day Grok Told Everyone About ‘White Genocide’ (00:32:58) Figma releases new AI-powered tools for creating sites, app prototypes, and marketing assets (00:36:12) Google’s bringing Gemini to your car with Android Auto (00:38:49) Google debuts an updated Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model ahead of I/O (00:45:09) Hugging Face releases a free Operator-like agentic AI tool Projects & Open Source (00:47:42) Stability AI releases an audio-generating model that can run on smartphones (00:50:47) Freepik releases an ‘open’ AI image generator trained on licensed data (00:54:22) AM-Thinking-v1: Advancing the Frontier of Reasoning at 32B Scale (01:01:29) BLIP3-o: A Family of Fully Open Unified Multimodal Models-Architecture, Training and Dataset Research & Advancements (01:05:40) DeepMind claims its newest AI tool is a whiz at math and science problems (01:12:31) Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data (01:19:44) How far can reasoning models scale? (01:26:47) HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health Policy & Safety (01:34:10) Trump administration officially rescinds Biden’s AI diffusion rules (01:37:08) Trump’s Mideast Visit Opens Floodgate of AI Deals Led by Nvidia (01:44:04) Scaling Laws For Scalable Oversight (01:49:43) OpenAI pledges to publish AI safety test results more often

Our 208th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 05/02/2025 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 showcases new integration capabilities in their API, enhancing the performance of LLMs and image generators with updated functionalities and improved user interfaces. Analysis of OpenAI's preparedness framework reveals updates focusing on biological and chemical risks, cybersecurity, and AI self-improvement, while tone down the emphasis on persuasion capabilities. Anthropic's research highlights potential security vulnerabilities in AI models, demonstrating various malicious use cases such as influence operations and hacking tool creation. A detailed examination of AI competition between the US and China reveals China's impending capability to match the US in AI advancement this year, emphasizing the impact of export controls and the importance of geopolitical strategy. Timestamps + Links: Tools & Apps (00:02:57) Anthropic lets users connect more apps to Claude (00:08:20) OpenAI undoes its glaze-heavy ChatGPT update (00:15:16) Baidu ERNIE X1 and 4.5 Turbo boast high performance at low cost (00:19:44) Adobe adds more image generators to its growing AI family (00:24:35) OpenAI makes its upgraded image generator available to developers (00:27:01) xAI’s Grok chatbot can now ‘see’ the world around it Applications & Business: (00:28:41) Thinking Machines Lab CEO Has Unusual Control in Andreessen-Led Deal (00:33:36) Chip war heats up: Huawei 910C emerges as China’s answer to US export bans (00:34:21) Huawei to Test New AI Chip (00:40:17) ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent stockpile billions worth of Nvidia chips (00:43:59) Speculation mounts that Musk will raise tens of billions for AI supercomputer with 1 million GPUs: Report Projects & Open Source: (00:47:14) Alibaba unveils Qwen 3, a family of ‘hybrid’ AI reasoning models (00:54:14) Intellect-2 (01:02:07) BitNet b1.58 2B4T Technical Report (01:05:33) Meta AI Introduces Perception Encoder: A Large-Scale Vision Encoder that Excels Across Several Vision Tasks for Images and Video Research & Advancements: (01:06:42) The Leaderboard Illusion (01:12:08) Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model? (01:18:38) Reinforcement Learning for Reasoning in Large Language Models with One Training Example (01:24:40) Sleep-time Compute: Beyond Inference Scaling at Test-time Policy & Safety: (01:28:23) Every AI Datacenter Is Vulnerable to Chinese Espionage, Report Says (01:32:27) OpenAI preparedness framework update (01:38:31) Detecting and Countering Malicious Uses of Claude: March 2025 (01:46:33) Chinese AI Will Match America's

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