Last Week in AI
Skynet Today
Weekly summaries of the AI news that matters!
- 1 hour 44 minutes#240 - Project Glasswing, Claude Mythos, GLM-5.1, emotion concepts
Our 240th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/08/2026 (sorry I keep releasing stuff late, will get better with it soon!)
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:
- Anthropic launched Project Glasswing and previewed Claude Mythos, a general-purpose model withheld from broad release due to dramatically stronger autonomous offensive cybersecurity performance (including zero-day discovery), alongside concerning bio/virology uplift results and documented deception/containment-escape behaviors; pricing is far higher than Opus and most discovered vulnerabilities remain unpatched.
- Product and platform updates included Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Live for real-time multilingual voice conversation, Suno v5.5 personalization features, Anthropic tightening Claude Code/OpenClaw access and usage limits, OpenAI canceling an “adult mode,” and Microsoft releasing MAI models for speech-to-text, audio generation, and image generation.
- Business and market developments featured Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpassing $30B and a major Google/Broadcom TPU compute expansion, SoftBank taking a $40B short-term loan to fund OpenAI commitments, Granola reaching a $1.5B valuation, Anthropic buying Coefficient Bio for $400M, and OpenAI acquiring the TBPN business talk show.
- Policy, open-source, and geopolitics included Z.ai releasing open-weight GLM 5.1 and a multimodal GLM model, Google open-sourcing Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0, a judge blocking the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” label against Anthropic, research on LLM “emotion vectors” and OpenAI meta-gaming during RL, China restricting Manus founders amid Meta deal review, scrutiny of Nvidia’s chip-smuggling claims, China chipmakers gaining market share, and Iran framing cloud data centers as military targets.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- Tools & Apps
- (00:01:58) Anthropic debuts ‘Project Glasswing’ and new AI model for cybersecurity | The Verge
- (00:18:22) Gemini Live gets ‘biggest upgrade yet’ with Gemini 3.1 Flash Live
- (00:20:40) Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage | TechCrunch
- (00:25:36) OpenAI abandons yet another side quest: ChatGPT's erotic mode | TechCrunch
- (00:26:16) Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models | TechCrunch
- (00:31:25) Suno leans into customization with v5.5 | The Verge
- Applications & Business
- (00:32:53) Anthropic announces deal with Google, Broadcom, says revenue has tripled
- (00:37:53) Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? | The New Yorker
- (00:40:18) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Unite to Combat Model Copying in China - Bloomberg
- (00:41:45) Chinese chipmakers claim nearly half of local market as Nvidia's lead shrinks
- (00:45:20) SoftBank secures $40 billion loan to boost OpenAI investments
- (00:47:23) Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation for its AI note-taking app - SiliconANGLE
- (00:48:17) Anthropic acquires stealth startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal
- (00:50:20) OpenAI acquires TBPN, the buzzy founder-led business talk show | TechCrunch
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:53:04) Z.AI Introduces GLM-5.1: An Open-Weight 754B Agentic Model That Achieves SOTA on SWE-Bench Pro and Sustains 8-Hour Autonomous Execution - MarkTechPost
- (00:55:14) Google announces Gemma 4 open AI models, switches to Apache 2.0 license - Ars Technica
- (01:01:26) Z.ai Launches GLM-5V-Turbo: A Native Multimodal Vision Coding Model Optimized for OpenClaw and High-Capacity Agentic Engineering Workflows Everywhere
- Policy & Safety
- (01:04:45) Judge blocks Pentagon’s effort to ‘punish’ Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk
- (01:10:05) Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
- (01:21:12) China bars Manus co-founders from leaving country amid Meta deal review, FT reports
- (01:25:38) US lawmakers ask whether Nvidia CEO's smuggling remarks misled regulators
- (01:27:48) How far does alignment midtraining generalize?
- (01:32:20) Metagaming matters for training, evaluation, and oversight
- (01:39:31) Iran says it has struck Oracle data center in Dubai, Amazon data center in Bahrain — country has threatened to attack Nvidia, Intel, and others, too
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
16 April 2026, 7:00 am - 1 hour 37 minutes#239 - RIP Sora, Claude Openclaw, HyperAgents
Our 239th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
FYI: this one has pretty out of date news, I was traveling last week and failed to upload... apologies.
Recorded on 03/25/2026
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 is discontinuing the Sora iPhone app and seemingly shutting down its video generation API, while retaining internal video world-modeling work; the move is framed as a compute- and focus-driven pivot toward coding and productivity agents, alongside a collapsed Disney Sora deal.
- Anthropic’s Claude Code/Cowork gains full computer control via keyboard/mouse/display, tied to the recent Cept acquisition, and Google’s Gemini rolls out background “task automation” on select phones for limited delivery/ride-share use.
- Cursor releases the cheaper, benchmark-strong Composer 2 coding model amid controversy over its Kimi-based origins and licensing attribution.
- Other items include Adobe Firefly custom model training, Luma’s Uni 1 image model, US contracting and legislative proposals affecting AI safeguards and state preemption, major chip/memory developments (Meta ASICs with Broadcom, Micron’s HBM-driven surge, Musk’s “Terra Fab”), robotaxi scaling, and research on monitoring agent misalignment, shutdown resistance, “consciousness cluster” preferences, and self-improving “hyper agents.”
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- Tools & Apps
- (00:01:48) OpenAI Discontinues Sora App, Shuts Down Video Generation Service and API - Bloomberg
- (00:07:12) Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cowork can control your computer | The Verge
- (00:13:15) Gemini task automation is slow, clunky, and super impressive | The Verge
- (00:19:44) Cursor Launches Composer 2 AI Model to Challenge OpenAI & Anthropic
- (00:28:28) Adobe’s AI image generator can now be trained on your own art | The Verge
- (00:29:40) Luma AI launches Uni-1, a model that outscores Google and OpenAI while costing up to 30 percent less | VentureBeat
- Applications & Business
- (00:32:41) Trump Contracting Clause Would Override AI Safeguards
- (00:40:00) Meta accelerates AI ASIC roll-out as Broadcom secures four-generation chip design deal
- (00:47:07) Micron revenue almost triples, tops estimates as demand for memory soars
- (00:50:54) Elon Musk Unwraps $25 Billion Terafab Chip-Building Project - CNET
- (00:56:40) Zoox to widen US robotaxi footprint with San Francisco, Vegas expansion
- (00:57:39) Waymo hits 170 million miles while avoiding serious mayhem | The Verge
- Policy & Safety
- (00:58:43) The White House just laid out how it wants to regulate AI | CNN Business
- (01:06:54) How we monitor internal coding agents for misalignment
- (01:12:30) Incomplete Tasks Induce Shutdown Resistance in Some Frontier LLMs
- (01:18:15) Summary: Mechanisms to Verify International Agreements about AI Development
- (01:23:09) Scoop: Anthropic meets with House Homeland Security behind closed doors
- Research & Advancements
- (01:24:24) Consciousness Cluster: Preferences of Models that Claim they are Conscious
- (01:30:22) HyperAgents
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
6 April 2026, 8:00 am - 2 hours 49 seconds#238 - GPT 5.4 mini, OpenAI Pivot, Mamba 3, Attention Residuals
Our 238th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/18/2026
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 released GPT-5.4 mini and nano with 400k-token context windows, higher per-token prices but claimed token-efficiency gains in Codex; nano is API-only and pitched for high-volume classification/data extraction despite a major price increase.
* Mistral open-sourced the Small 4 model family (MoE, 119B total/6B active) combining reasoning, multimodal, and coding-agent capabilities, and announced Forge to help businesses train or post-train custom models.
* Agent “operating system” competition intensified with Meta’s acquired Manus launching a local Mac agent, Nvidia announcing NeMo/“Open Shell” sandboxed agent runtime, and Nvidia also unveiling DLSS 5 plus major hardware forecasts including Groq LPU integration.
* Business and safety updates included OpenAI shifting focus toward productivity/enterprise amid competition, Microsoft reorganizing Copilot and frontier-model efforts, Meta delaying its next model, China-linked ByteDance deploying large Nvidia clusters abroad, and new safety work on steganography, chain-of-thought faithfulness, fine-tuning defenses, cyber-attack evals, and constitution/spec compliance.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
- Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
- ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
- Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:56) News Preview
- Tools & Apps
- (00:02:39) OpenAI ships GPT-5.4 mini and nano, faster and more capable but up to 4x pricier
- (00:08:04) Mistral's new Small 4 model punches above its weight with 128 expert modules
- (00:14:03) Meta's Manus launches 'My Computer' to turn your Mac into an AI agent - 9to5Mac
- (00:17:57) NVIDIA Announces NemoClaw for the OpenClaw Community | NVIDIA Newsroom + Nvidia boosts knowledge work with Open Agent Development Platform
- (00:24:09) DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games | The Verge
- (00:26:36) OpenAI to Launch ChatGPT 'Adult Mode' Despite Warnings From Its Own Advisers - CNET
- Applications & Business
- (00:33:46) OpenAI Reportedly Pivoting to a Focus on Business and Productivity Only
- (00:41:25) Nvidia GTC 2026: CEO Jensen Huang sees $1 trillion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin through ’27
- (00:45:44) Mistral launches Forge to help enterprises build their own AI models
- (00:54:17) China's ByteDance gets access to top Nvidia AI chips, WSJ reports
- (00:57:57) Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns
- (01:02:50) Microsoft Shakes Up AI Division As Copilot Falls Behind Google and OpenAI
- Policy & Safety
- (01:07:26) A Decision-Theoretic Formalisation of Steganography With Applications to LLM Monitoring
- (01:13:09) Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought
- (01:18:29) In-Training Defenses against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models
- (01:23:07) How do frontier AI agents perform in multi-step cyber-attack scenarios?
- (01:25:20) Eval awareness in Claude Opus 4.6’s BrowseComp performance
- (01:29:49) Introducing Bloom: an open source tool for automated behavioral evaluations
- (01:32:26) How well do models follow their constitutions?
- (01:37:11) Nvidia’s H200 License Stirs Security Concern Among Top Democrats
- Research & Advancements
- (01:40:050) [2603.15031] Attention Residuals
- (01:47:11) Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling using State Space Principles
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
26 March 2026, 6:00 am - 2 hours 27 minutes#237 - Nemotron 3 Super, xAI reborn, Anthropic Lawsuit, Research!!!
Our 237th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/13/2026
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:
* Perplexity announced “Personal Computer,” a local Mac-based AI agent positioned as a safer alternative to OpenAI’s computer-use agents, while Anthropic added GitHub PR code review pricing reviews at $15–$25 and Cursor launched trigger-based “Automations” for always-on coding agents.
* ChatGPT introduced interactive math/science visuals and Anthropic added in-chat interactive charts/diagrams; Nvidia released open weights for its 120B-parameter Natron Free Super hybrid Transformer–Mamba latent-MoE model trained natively at 4-bit for Blackwell GPUs.
* Nvidia halted H200 production for China amid customs blocks and domestic chip pressure; xAI saw major co-founder departures; Anthropic previewed a Claude Marketplace for enterprise procurement; Yann LeCun’s aMI raised $1.3B; humanoid robot maker Sanctuary reached a $1.15B valuation.
* Anthropic sued the Pentagon over a “supply chain risk” designation as memos ordered removal within 180 days; research covered models resisting activation steering, limits of chain-of-thought control, inference-scaling boosting cyber-task success, low-probability risky actions, weaknesses in SWE-bench, multimodal pretraining, long-context RNN memory caching, context-parallel training efficiency, RL for CUDA kernel optimization, and latent introspection detecting concept injection.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
- Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
- ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
- Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:23) Response to listener comments
- Tools & Apps
- (00:02:06) Perplexity’s Personal Computer turns your spare Mac into an AI agent | The Verge
- (00:04:22) Anthropic launches code review tool to check flood of AI-generated code | TechCrunch
- (00:08:08 ) Cursor is rolling out a new kind of agentic coding tool | TechCrunch
- (00:11:14) ChatGPT can now create interactive visuals to help you understand math and science concepts | TechCrunch
- (00:11:56) Anthropic’s Claude AI can respond with charts, diagrams, and other visuals now | The Verge
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:13:54) Introducing Nemotron 3 Super: An Open Hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE for Agentic Reasoning | NVIDIA Technical Blog
- Applications & Business
- (00:21:22) Nvidia halts H200 production as China backs Huawei AI chips
- (00:28:33) Another XAI Cofounder Has Left, and Another Says He's Leaving. - Business Insider
- (00:34:04) Anthropic's Claude Marketplace allows customers to buy third-party cloud services | TechRadar
- (00:37:57) Yann LeCun's AMI Labs raises $1.03 billion to build world models | TechCrunch
- (00:44:52) Humanoid robotics maker Sunday reaches $1.15B valuation to build household robots | TechCrunch
- Policy & Safety
- (00:46:09) Anthropic Sues Department of Defense Over ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Label - The New York Times + Google and OpenAI Just Filed a Legal Brief in Support of Anthropic
- (00:53:24) Internal Pentagon memo orders military commanders to remove Anthropic AI technology from key systems - CBS News
- (00:58:15) Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in Language Models
- (01:06:27) Reasoning Models Struggle to Control their Chains of Thought
- (01:09:52) ‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower
- (01:14:57) Evidence for inference scaling in AI cyber tasks: Increased evaluation budgets reveal higher success rates
- (01:18:24) Frontier Models Can Take Actions at Low Probabilities
- Research & Advancements
- (01:24:20) Research note: Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs Would Not Be Merged into Main
- (01:28:26) [2603.03276] Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining
- (01:40:09) Memory Caching: RNNs with Growing Memory
- (01:48:47) Untied Ulysses: Memory-Efficient Context Parallelism via Headwise Chunking
- (01:58:41) CUDA Agent: Large-Scale Agentic RL for High-Performance CUDA Kernel Generation
- (02:08:57) Latent Introspection: Models Can Detect Prior Concept Injections
- (02:16:45) Physics of RL: Toy scaling laws for the emergence of reward-seeking
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
16 March 2026, 5:00 am - 1 hour 28 minutes#236 - GPT 5.4, Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite, Supply Chain Risk
Our 236th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/06/2026
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 released GPT-5.4 Pro with a 1M-token context window, mid-response course correction, native computer-use capabilities, improved tool use, higher GPT-VAL performance (83%), and “high cyber capability” safety measures; OpenAI also launched GPT-5.3 Instant with a less “preachy” tone and a claimed 26.8% hallucination reduction.
* Google upgraded Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite with faster time-to-first-token and higher throughput, released a CLI for integrating agents with Gmail/Drive/Docs, and discussion highlighted real-world agent failure risks (including an example of an AI-driven mass email deletion).
* Luma launched unified multimodal models and Luma Agents for end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio, including a reported ad localization use case completed in 40 hours for under $20,000.
* Defense-contract controversy escalated: Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk (later narrowed), OpenAI’s DoD contract language emphasized “all lawful uses,” consumer cancellations boosted Claude’s app rankings, OpenAI saw departures and announced a $110B raise at a $730B valuation, Alibaba lost key Qwen leaders, a lawsuit alleged Gemini contributed to a suicide, Anthropic warned of major labor disruption, and METR corrected its AI time-horizon estimates.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
- Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
- ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
- Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:19) News Preview
- Tools & Apps
- (00:02:10) OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with Pro and Thinking versions | TechCrunch
- (00:12:31) OpenAI GPT-5.3 Instant less likely to beat around the bush • The Register
- (00:16:07) Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite at 1/8th the cost of Pro | VentureBeat
- (00:19:23) Google makes Gmail, Drive, and Docs 'agent-ready' for OpenClaw | PCWorld
- (00:27:02) Luma launches creative AI agents powered by its new ‘Unified Intelligence’ models | TechCrunch
- Applications & Business
- (00:30:05) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls OpenAI's messaging around military deal 'straight up lies,' report says | TechCrunch
- (00:41:56) No ethics at all': the 'cancel ChatGPT' trend is growing after OpenAI signs a deal with the US military | TechRadar
- (00:45:54) OpenAI raises $110B in one of the largest private funding rounds in history | TechCrunch
- (00:56:07) Alibaba scrambles after sudden departure of Qwen tech lead
- Policy & Safety
- (01:00:12) Pentagon approves OpenAI safety red lines after dumping Anthropic + Where things stand with the Department of War Anthropic + Microsoft says Anthropic’s products remain available to customers after Pentagon blacklist
- (01:09:11) A new lawsuit claims Gemini assisted in suicide | Semafor
- (01:15:24) Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace. A 'Great Recession for white-collar workers' is absolutely possible | Fortune
- (01:21:54) We're correcting a mistake in our modeling that inflated recent 50%-time horizons by 10-20%
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
12 March 2026, 4:00 pm - 1 hour 41 minutes#235 - Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon
Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 02/27/2026
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:
- Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI’s Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic’s Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity’s multi-agent “Computer” coordinator.
- Compute and business moves include Meta’s reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior.
- Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China’s plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints.
- Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic’s report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI’s report on disrupting malicious use.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
- Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
- ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
- Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:52) News Preview
- Tools & Apps
- (00:03:20) Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch
- (00:11:24) Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET
- (00:14:54) Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India
- (00:18:06) Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat
- (00:21:01) Perplexity announces "Computer," an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars Technica
- Applications & Business
- (00:23:40) Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases 'personal superintelligence' | TechCrunch
- (00:27:05) Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch
- (00:31:00) World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch
- (00:33:07) Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior
- (00:33:52) Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers
- (00:36:43) China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030
- Research & Advancements
- (00:40:33) On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers
- (00:48:03) Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens
- (00:54:52) models have some pretty funny attractor states
- (01:01:41) When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task
- (01:05:16) BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance
- (01:12:00) NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist
- (01:13:15) The least understood driver of AI progress
- (01:21:45) The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans
- Policy & Safety
- (01:25:04) Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon's threats 'do not change our position' on AI
- (01:33:04) Musk's xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems
- (01:34:17) Detecting and preventing distillation attacks
- (01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLE
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
3 March 2026, 8:00 am - 1 hour 30 minutes#234 - Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-codex, Seedance 2.0, GLM-5
Our 234th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/02/2026
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:
- Major model launches include Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 with a 1M-token context window and “agent teams,” OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex and faster Codex Spark via Cerebras, and Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think posting big jumps on ARC-AGI-2 and other STEM benchmarks amid criticism about missing safety documentation.
- Generative media advances feature ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video with high realism and broad prompting inputs, new image models Seedream 5.0 and Alibaba’s Qwen Image 2.0, plus xAI’s Grok Imagine API for text/image-to-video.
- Open and competitive releases expand with Zhipu’s GLM-5, DeepSeek’s 1M-token context model, Cursor Composer 1.5, and open-weight Qwen3 Coder Next using hybrid attention aimed at efficient local/agentic coding.
- Business updates include ElevenLabs raising $500M at an $11B valuation, Runway raising $315M at a $5.3B valuation, humanoid robotics firm Apptronik raising $935M at a $5.3B valuation, Waymo announcing readiness for high-volume production of its 6th-gen hardware, plus industry drama around Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad and departures from xAI.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
- Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more
- ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
- Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:02:03) Sponsor Break
- (00:05:33) Response to listener comments
- Tools & Apps
- (00:07:27) AAnthropic releases Opus 4.6 with new 'agent teams' | TechCrunch
- (00:11:28) OpenAI's new GPT-5.3-Codex is 25% faster and goes way beyond coding now - what's new | ZDNET
- (00:25:30) OpenAI launches new macOS app for agentic coding | TechCrunch
- (00:26:38) Google Unveils Gemini 3 Deep Think for Science & Engineering | The Tech Buzz
- (00:31:26) ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 Might be the Best AI Video Generator Yet - TechEBlog
- (00:35:14) China’s ByteDance, Alibaba unveil AI image tools to rival Google’s popular Nano Banana | South China Morning Post
- (00:36:54) DeepSeek boosts AI model with 10-fold token addition as Zhipu AI unveils GLM-5 | South China Morning Post
- (00:43:11) CCursor launches Composer 1.5 with upgrades for complex tasks
- (00:44:03) xAI launches Grok Imagine API for text and image to video
- Applications & Business
- (00:45:47) Nvidia-backed AI voice startups ElevenLabs hits $11 billion valuation
- (00:52:04) AI video startup Runway raises $315M at $5.3B valuation, eyes more capable world models | TechCrunch
- (00:54:02) Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B+ valuation | TechCrunch
- (00:57:10) Anthropic says ‘Claude will remain ad-free,’ unlike an unnamed rival | The Verge
- (01:00:18) Okay, now exactly half of xAI's founding team has left the company | TechCrunch
- (01:04:03) Waymo’s next-gen robotaxi is ready for passengers — and also ‘high-volume production’ | The Verge
- Projects & Open Source
- (01:04:59) Qwen3-Coder-Next: Pushing Small Hybrid Models on Agentic Coding
- (01:08:38) OpenClaw’s AI ‘skill’ extensions are a security nightmare | The Verge
- Research & Advancements
- (01:10:40) Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters
- (01:16:01) Reinforcement World Model Learning for LLM-based Agents
- (01:20:00) Opus 4.6 on Vending-Bench – Not Just a Helpful Assistant
- Policy & Safety
- (01:22:28) METR GPT-5.2
- (01:26:59) The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
16 February 2026, 7:30 am - 1 hour 20 minutes#233 - Moltbot, Genie 3, Qwen3-Max-Thinking
Our 233rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/30/2026
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:
- Google introduces Gemini AI agent in Chrome for advanced browser functionality, including auto-browsing for pro and ultra subscribers.
- OpenAI releases ChatGPT Translator and Prism, expanding its applications beyond core business to language translation and scientific research assistance.
- Significant funding rounds and valuations achieved by startups Recursive and New Rofo, focusing on specialized AI chips and optical processors respectively.
- Political and social issues, including violence in Minnesota, prompt tech leaders in AI like Ade from Anthropic and Jeff Dean from Google to express concerns about the current administration's actions.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- Tools & Apps
- (00:04:09) Google adds Gemini AI-powered ‘auto browse’ to Chrome | The Verge
- (00:07:11) Users flock to open source Moltbot for always-on AI, despite major risks - Ars Technica
- (00:13:25) Google Brings Genie 3 'World Building' Experiment to AI Ultra Subscribers - CNET
- (00:16:17) OpenAI’s ChatGPT translator challenges Google Translate | The Verge
- (00:18:27) OpenAI launches Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists | TechCrunch
- Applications & Business
- (00:19:49) Exclusive: China gives nod to ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent to buy Nvidia's H200 chips - sources | Reuters
- (00:22:55) AI chip startup Ricursive hits $4B valuation 2 months after launch
- (00:24:38) AI Startup Recursive in Funding Talks at $4 Billion Valuation - Bloomberg
- (00:27:30) Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI | TechCrunch
- (00:31:54) From invisibility cloaks to AI chips: Neurophos raises $110M to build tiny optical processors for inferencing | TechCrunch
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:35:34) Qwen3-Max-Thinking debuts with focus on hard math, code
- (00:38:26) China's Moonshot releases a new open-source model Kimi K2.5 and a coding agent | TechCrunch
- (00:46:00) Ai2 launches family of open-source AI developer agents that adapt to any codebase - SiliconANGLE
- (00:47:46) Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta’s Llama
- Research & Advancements
- (00:52:53) Post-LayerNorm Is Back: Stable, ExpressivE, and Deep
- (00:58:00) [2601.19897] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning
- (01:03:04) [2601.20802] Reinforcement Learning via Self-Distillation
- (01:05:58) Teaching Models to Teach Themselves: Reasoning at the Edge of Learnability
- Policy & Safety
- (01:09:13) Amodei, Hoffman Join Tech Workers Decrying Minnesota Violence - Bloomberg
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
6 February 2026, 4:30 am - 1 hour 41 minutes#232 - ChatGPT Ads, Thinking Machines Drama, STEM
Our 232st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/23/2026
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 announces testing of ads in ChatGPT and introduces child age prediction to enhance safety features, amidst ongoing ethical debates and funding expansions in AI integration with educational tools and business models.
- China's AI landscape sees significant progress with AI firm Jpu training advanced models on domestic hardware, and strong competitive moves by data centers, highlighting the intense demand in AI manufacturing and infrastructure.
- Silicon Valley tensions rise as startup Thinking Machines experiences high-profile departures back to OpenAI, reflecting broader industry struggles and rapid shifts in organizational dynamics.
- AI legislation and safety measures advance with the US Senate's Defiance Act addressing explicit content, and Anthropic updating Claude's constitution to guide ethical AI interactions, while cultural pushbacks from artists signal ongoing debates in intellectual property and AI-generated content.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:02:08) News Preview
- (00:02:26) Response to listener comments
- Tools & Apps
- (00:11:55) OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions - Ars Technica
- (00:18:05) OpenAI is launching age prediction for ChatGPT accounts
- (00:23:37) Google now offers free SAT practice exams, powered by Gemini | TechCrunch
- (00:24:57) Baidu’s AI Assistant Reaches Milestone of 200 Million Monthly Active Users - WSJ
- Applications & Business
- (00:26:53) The Drama at Thinking Machines, a New A.I. Start-Up, Is Riveting Silicon Valley - The New York Times
- (00:31:44) Zhipu AI breaks US chip reliance with first major model trained on Huawei stack | South China Morning Post
- (00:36:31) Elon Musk’s xAI launches world’s first Gigawatt AI supercluster to rival OpenAI and Anthropic
- (00:41:25) Sequoia to invest in Anthropic, breaking VC taboo on backing rivals: FT
- (00:45:18) Humans&, a 'human-centric' AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round | TechCrunch
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:48:51) Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence - MarkTechPost
- (00:50:35) [2601.10611] Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding
- (00:52:53) [2601.10547] HeartMuLa: A Family of Open Sourced Music Foundation Models
- (00:54:46) [2601.11044] AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts
- Research & Advancements
- (00:57:05) STEM: Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules
- (01:06:22) Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought
- (01:14:21) Why LLMs Aren't Scientists Yet: Lessons from Four Autonomous Research Attempts
- Policy & Safety
- (01:19:41) Senate passes bill letting victims sue over Grok AI explicit images
- (01:22:03) Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini
- (01:27:32) Anthropic Publishes Claude AI's New Constitution | TIME
- Synthetic Media & Art
- (01:34:13) Artists Launch Stealing Isn't Innovation Campaign To Protest Big Tech
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
28 January 2026, 10:00 am - 1 hour 43 minutes#231 - Claude Cowork, Anthropic $10B, Deep Delta Learning
Our 231st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/16/2026
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:
- Anthropic's new cowork tool integrates Claude code, potentially simplifying multiple computing tasks from editing videos to compiling spreadsheets.
- Significant funding rounds see Anthropic raising $10B at a valuation of $350B, while XAI raises $20B, underscoring the immense market interest in AI startups.
- Nvidia faces supply challenges for H200 AI chips due to overwhelming demand from China, despite high costs per unit and its potential impact on U.S. company revenue.
- Policy debates highlight tensions around U.S. export controls to China, with leaders like Justin Lin from Alibaba and Jake Sullivan, former national security advisor, weighing in on the ramifications for the AI industry's future.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:30) News Preview
- Tools & Apps
- (00:02:13) Anthropic’s new Cowork tool offers Claude Code without the code | TechCrunch
- (00:09:45) Google’s Gemini AI will use what it knows about you from Gmail, Search, and YouTube | The Verge
- (00:12:45) Google removes some AI health summaries after investigation finds “dangerous” flaws - Ars Technica
- (00:16:29) Gmail is getting a Gemini AI overhaul
- (00:18:12) Slackbot is an AI agent now | TechCrunch
- Applications & Business
- (00:20:11) Anthropic Raising $10 Billion at $350 Billion Value
- (00:22:25) Elon Musk xAI raises $20 billion from Nvidia, Cisco, investors
- (00:24:47) NVIDIA Needs a Supply Chain ‘Miracle’ From TSMC as China’s H200 AI Chip Orders Overwhelm Supply, Triggering a Bottleneck
- (00:29:26) OpenAI signs deal, worth $10B, for compute from Cerebras | TechCrunch
- (00:31:49) CoreWeave in focus as it amends credit agreement
- (00:34:30) LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product | TechCrunch
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:35:54) Nemotron-Cascade: Scaling Cascaded Reinforcement Learning for General-Purpose Reasoning Models
- (00:43:15) mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections
- (00:49:53) IQuest_Coder_Technical_Report
- (00:54:58) TII Abu-Dhabi Released Falcon H1R-7B: A New Reasoning Model Outperforming Others in Math and Coding with only 7B Params with 256k Context Window - MarkTechPost
- Research & Advancements
- (01:01:42) Deep Delta Learning
- (01:07:47) Recursive Language Models
- (01:13:39) Conditional memory via scalable lookup
- (01:18:54) Extending the Context of Pretrained LLMs by Dropping their Positional Embeddings
- Policy & Safety
- (01:26:06) Constitutional Classifiers++: Efficient Production-Grade Defenses against Universal Jailbreaks
- (01:31:00) Nvidia CEO says purchase orders, not formal declaration, will signal Chinese approval of H200
- (01:32:24) China AI Leaders Warn of Widening Gap With US After $1B IPO Week
- (01:37:25) Jake Sullivan is furious that Trump removed Biden’s AI chip export controls | The Verge
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
21 January 2026, 3:00 am - 1 hour 38 minutes#230 - 2025 Retrospective, Nvidia buys Groq, GLM 4.7, METR
Our 230th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/02/2026
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:
- Nvidia's acquisition of AI chip startup Groq for $20 billion highlights a strategic move for enhanced inference technology in GPUs.
- New York's RAISE Act legislation aims to regulate AI safety, marking the second major AI safety bill in the US.
- The launch of GLM 4.7 by Zhipu AI marks a significant advancement in open-source AI models for coding.
- Evaluation of long-horizon AI agents raises concerns about the rising costs and efficiency of AI in performing extended tasks.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:58) 2025 Retrospective
- Tools & Apps
- (00:24:39) OpenAI bets big on audio as Silicon Valley declares war on screens | TechCrunch
- Applications & Business
- (00:26:39) Nvidia buying AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion, biggest deal
- (00:34:28) Exclusive | Meta Buys AI Startup Manus, Adding Millions of Paying Users - WSJ
- (00:38:05) Cursor continues acquisition spree with Graphite deal | TechCrunch
- (00:39:15) Micron Hikes CapEx to $20B with 2026 HBM Supply Fully Booked; HBM4 Ramps 2Q26
- (00:42:06) Chinese fabs are reportedly upgrading older ASML DUV lithography chipmaking machines — secondary channels and independent engineers used to soup up Twinscan NXT series
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:47:52) Z.AI launches GLM-4.7, new SOTA open-source model for coding
- (00:50:11) Evaluating AI’s ability to perform scientific research tasks
- Research & Advancements
- (00:54:32) Large Causal Models from Large Language Models
- (00:57:33) Universally Converging Representations of Matter Across Scientific Foundation Models
- (01:02:11) META-RL INDUCES EXPLORATION IN LANGUAGE AGENTS
- (01:07:16) Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?
- (01:11:17) METR eval for Opus 4.5
- (01:16:19) How to game the METR plot
- Policy & Safety
- (01:17:24) New York governor Kathy Hochul signs RAISE Act to regulate AI safety | TechCrunch
- (01:20:40) Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers
- (01:26:46) Monitoring Monitorability
- (01:32:07) Sam Altman is hiring someone to worry about the dangers of AI | The Verge
- (01:33:38) X users asking Grok to put this girl in bikini, Grok is happy obliging - India Today
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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