Last Week in AI

• #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

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• #209 - OpenAI non-profit, US diffusion rules, AlphaEvolve

  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

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• #208 - Claude Integrations, ChatGPT Sycophancy, Leaderboard Cheats

  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

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• #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

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• #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

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