Last Week in AI

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 contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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 contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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

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 contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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

Our 205th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/28/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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's new image generation capabilities represent significant advancements in AI tools, showcasing impressive benchmarks and multimodal functionalities.
OpenAI is finalizing a historic $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, and Sam Altman shifts focus to technical direction while COO Brad Lightcap takes on more operational responsibilities.,
Anthropic unveils groundbreaking interpretability research, introducing cross-layer tracers and showcasing deep insights into model reasoning through applications on Claude 3.5.
New challenging benchmarks such as ARC AGI 2 and complex Sudoku variations aim to push the boundaries of reasoning and problem-solving capabilities in AI models.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:01) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:46) Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model
(00:08:41) OpenAI rolls out image generation powered by GPT-4o to ChatGPT
(00:16:14) Ideogram presents version 3.0 of its AI image generation system
(00:19:20) New Reve Image Generator Beats AI Art Heavyweights MidJourney and Flux at a Penny Per Image
(00:21:56) Alibaba Releases Qwen2.5 Omni, Adds Voice and Video Modes to Qwen Chat
(00:23:58) The official version of Tencent's Hunyuan Deep Thinking Model T1 is here, with fast articulation, instant responses, and a decoding speed increase of 2 times
Applications & Business
(00:25:45) OpenAI Close to Finalizing $40 Billion SoftBank-Led Funding
(00:29:26) OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus
(00:33:23) Nvidia shows off Rubin Ultra with 600,000-Watt Kyber racks and infrastructure, coming in 2027
(00:35:23) China's SiCarrier emerges as challenger to ASML, other chip tool titans
(00:38:24) Pony.ai wins first permit for fully driverless taxi operation in the center of China’s Silicon Valley
Projects & Open Source
(00:40:27) A new, challenging AGI test stumps most AI models
(00:45:16) Challenging the Boundaries of Reasoning: An Olympiad-Level Math Benchmark for Large Language Models
(00:48:13) Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models
(00:50:38) DeepSeek V3-0324 tops non-reasoning AI models in open-source first
(00:54:46) OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data
Research & Advancements
(00:55:56) Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model
(01:06:00) Chain-of-Tools: Utilizing Massive Unseen Tools in the CoT Reasoning of Frozen Language Models
(01:11:50) Inside-Out: Hidden Factual Knowledge in LLMs
(01:15:14) Sakana AI super-powers AI reasoning using Japan’s own Sudoku Puzzles
Policy & Safety
(01:18:38) Senator Wiener Introduces Legislation to Protect AI Whistleblowers & Boost Responsible AI Development
(01:21:50) NVIDIA & Other Tech Giants Demand Trump Administration To Reconsider “AI Diffusion” Policy Which Is Set To Be Effective By May 15
(01:23:17) U.S. blacklists over 50 Chinese companies in bid to curb Beijing's AI, chip capabilities
(01:26:44) Netflix’s Reed Hastings Gives $50 Million to Bowdoin for A.I. Program
(01:27:55) Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward
(01:29:48) Judge rules that AI can continue training on copyrighted lyrics, for now

Our 204th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/21/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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:
Baidu launched two new multimodal models, Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1, boasting competitive pricing and capabilities compared to Western counterparts like GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek R1.
OpenAI introduced new audio models, including impressive speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems, and added O1 Pro to their developer API at high costs, reflecting efforts for more profitability.
Nvidia and Apple announced significant hardware advancements, including Nvidia's future GPU plans and Apple's new Mac Studio offering that can run DeepSeek R1.
DeepSeek employees are facing travel restrictions, suggesting China is treating its AI development with increased secrecy and urgency, emphasizing a wartime footing in AI competition.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:36) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:50) Baidu launches two new versions of its AI model Ernie
(00:10:46) OpenAI Unveils New Audio Models to Make AI Agents Sound More Human Than Ever
(00:16:41) OpenAI’s o1-pro is the company’s most expensive AI model yet
(00:20:53) Google brings a ‘canvas’ feature to Gemini, plus Audio Overview
(00:22:18) Anthropic adds web search to its Claude chatbot
(00:23:55) xAI launches an API for generating images
Applications & Business
(00:26:28) Nvidia announces Rubin GPUs in 2026, Rubin Ultra in 2027, Feynman also added to roadmap
(00:36:25) M3 Ultra Runs DeepSeek R1 With 671 Billion Parameters Using 448GB Of Unified Memory, Delivering High Bandwidth Performance At Under 200W Power Consumption, With No Need For A Multi-GPU Setup
(00:40:07) Intel reaches 'exciting milestone' for 18A 1.8nm-class wafers with first run at Arizona fab
(00:42:45) Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, acquires a generative AI video startup
(00:44:44) Tencent Reportedly Makes Massive NVIDIA H20 Chip Purchase for WeChat’s DeepSeek Integration
Projects & Open Source
(00:46:32) Anthropic’s Not-So-Secret Weapon That’s Giving Agents a Boost
(00:50:50) Mistral AI drops new open-source model that outperforms GPT-4o Mini with fraction of parameters
(00:53:30) EXAONE Deep: Reasoning Enhanced Language Models
Research & Advancements
(00:55:58) Sample, Scrutinize and Scale: Effective Inference-Time Search by Scaling Verification
(01:07:44) Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models
(01:12:27) Communication-Efficient Language Model Training Scales Reliably and Robustly: Scaling Laws for DiLoCo
(01:18:46) Transformers without Normalization
(01:19:52) Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
(01:26:12) HCAST: Human-Calibrated Autonomy Software Tasks
Policy & Safety
(01:26:45) Announcing Zochi, an Intology Project
(01:32:46) DeepSeek, a National Treasure in China, is Now Being Closely Guarded
(01:37:02) Claude Sonnet 3.7 (often) knows when it’s in alignment evaluations
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:42:27) US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator
(01:45:10) Trump urged by Ben Stiller, Paul McCartney and hundreds of stars to protect AI copyright rules

Our 203rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/14/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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's new 'deep research' feature has raised concerns about cybersecurity and the potential misuse of AI models for bio-weapons and autonomous capabilities, prompting new safety and governance measures.
Google's extensive $3 billion investment in Anthropic is revealed, aligning with their AI strategy and reinforcing the importance of multiple technology partnerships.
Huawei's advancements in the AI chip industry are highlighted, with significant progress in producing chips comparable to Nvidia's H100, despite export control challenges.
China's recent directive discourages AI executives from traveling to the US, reflecting heightened security concerns and potentially signaling a more adversarial stance in the AI race.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:30) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:30) OpenAI launches new tools to help businesses build AI agents
(00:08:50) You can now test Gemini 2.0 Flash’s native image output 
(00:13:32) Waymo is now offering 24/7 robotaxi rides in Silicon Valley
(00:17:19) Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content
(00:21:11) Snap introduces AI Video Lenses powered by its in-house generative model
(00:23:37) Sudowrite Launches Muse AI Model That Can Generate Narrative-Driven Fiction
Applications & Business
(00:27:48) In another chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is pouring $12B into CoreWeave
(00:30:54) Huawei’s Ascend 910C Takes on NVIDIA as China’s AI Race Heats Up: More Alleged Details
(00:36:26) Huawei reportedly acquired two million Ascend 910 AI chips from TSMC last year through shell companies
(00:40:27) Inside Google’s Investment in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic
(00:43:26) Meta is reportedly testing in-house chips for AI training
(00:46:48) Elon Musk's xAI buys 1 million sq ft site for second Memphis data center
(00:50:02) Superintelligence startup Reflection AI launches with $130M in funding
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:11) Google calls Gemma 3 the most powerful AI model you can run on one GPU
(00:58:18) Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
(01:01:13) Reka AI Open Sourced Reka Flash 3: A 21B General-Purpose Reasoning Model that was Trained from Scratch
(01:04:19) Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in $200k
Research & Advancements
(01:06:25) Google’s Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World
(01:14:33) Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
(01:23:29) Deep Research System Card
(01:29:50) Claude 3.7 Sonnet System Card
Policy & Safety
(01:33:24) Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models
(01:39:30) China tells its AI leaders to avoid US travel over security concerns, WSJ reports
(01:43:48) Outro

Our 202nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/07/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
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:
Alibaba released Qwen-32B, their latest reasoning model, on par with leading models like DeepMind’s R1.
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a funding round, valuing the company at $61.5 billion, solidifying its position as a key competitor to OpenAI.
DeepMind introduced BigBench Extra Hard, a more challenging benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Reinforcement Learning pioneers Andrew Bartow and Rich Sutton were awarded the prestigious Turing Award for their contributions to the field.
Timestamps + Links:
cle picks:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:41) Episode Preview
(00:02:50) GPT-4.5 Discussion
(00:14:13) Alibaba’s New QwQ 32B Model is as Good as DeepSeek-R1 ; Outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini
(00:21:29) With Alexa Plus, Amazon finally reinvents its best product
(00:26:08) Another DeepSeek moment? General AI agent Manus shows ability to handle complex tasks
(00:29:14) Microsoft’s new Dragon Copilot is an AI assistant for healthcare
(00:32:24) Mistral’s new OCR API turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file
(00:33:19) A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Closes Deal That Values It at $61.5 Billion
(00:35:49) Nvidia-Backed CoreWeave Files for IPO, Shows Growing Revenue
(00:38:05) Waymo and Uber's Austin robotaxi expansion begins today
(00:38:54) UK competition watchdog drops Microsoft-OpenAI probe
(00:41:17) Scale AI announces multimillion-dollar defense deal, a major step in U.S. military automation
(00:44:43) DeepSeek Open Source Week: A Complete Summary
(00:45:25) DeepSeek AI Releases DualPipe: A Bidirectional Pipeline Parallelism Algorithm for Computation-Communication Overlap in V3/R1 Training
(00:53:00) Physical Intelligence open-sources Pi0 robotics foundation model
(00:54:23) BIG-Bench Extra Hard
(00:56:10) Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners
(01:01:49) The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems
(01:05:32) Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning Win the Turing Award
(01:06:56) OpenAI launches $50M grant program to help fund academic research
(01:07:25) The Nuclear-Level Risk of Superintelligent AI
(01:13:34) METR’s GPT-4.5 pre-deployment evaluations
(01:17:16) Chinese buyers are getting Nvidia Blackwell chips despite US export controls

Our 201st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/02/2025
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest host Sharon ZhouFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
- The release of GPT-4.5 from OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and Grok 3 from XAI, comparing their features, costs, and capabilities. - Discussion on new tools and applications including Sesame's new voice assistant and Google's AI coding assistant, Gemini Code Assist, highlighting their unique benefits. - OpenAI's continued user growth despite competition, pricing models for Google's text-to-video platform, and HP acquiring and shutting down Humane's AI pin. - Insights into new research on alignment and specification gaming in LLMs, including papers on fine-tuning causing broad misalignment and Google's multi-agent system for scientific collaboration.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter 
(00:01:36) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:33) OpenAI announces GPT-4.5, warns it’s not a frontier AI model
(00:07:22) Anthropic launches a new AI model that ‘thinks’ as long as you want
(00:11:14) New Grok 3 release tops LLM leaderboards
(00:16:43) Sesame is the first voice assistant I’ve ever wanted to talk to more than once
(00:18:30) Google launches a free AI coding assistant with very high usage caps
(00:20:45) Rabbit shows off the AI agent it should have launched with
(00:22:23) Mistral’s Le Chat tops 1M downloads in just 14 days
Applications & Business
(00:24:06) OpenAI Tops 400 Million Users Despite DeepSeek’s Emergence
(00:27:37) Google’s new AI video model Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second
(00:29:52) HP is buying Humane and shutting down the AI Pin
Projects & Open Source
(00:31:44) Microsoft launches next-gen Phi AI models.
(00:33:47) OpenAI introduces SWE-Lancer: A Benchmark for Evaluating Model Performance on Real-World Freelance Software Engineering Work
(00:37:12) SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMs
Research & Advancements
(00:40:00) Towards an AI co-scientist
(00:42:52) Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents
Policy & Safety
(00:47:32) Demonstrating specification gaming in reasoning models
(00:51:03) Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs

Our 200th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 02/14/2025
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
OpenAI announces plans to unify their model offerings, moving away from multiple separate models (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) toward a single unified intelligence system, with free users getting "standard intelligence" and Plus subscribers accessing "higher intelligence" levels.
Adobe launches their Sora-rivaling AI video generator with 1080p output and 5-second clips, emphasizing production-ready content for films and introducing new pricing tiers through Firefly subscriptions at $10-30 per month.
Elon Musk and a consortium offer $97.4 billion to acquire OpenAI's nonprofit entity, potentially complicating the company's transition to a for-profit structure, though Sam Altman quickly dismissed the offer's viability.
TSMC implements stricter chip sales restrictions to China, requiring government-approved third-party packaging houses for chips using 16nm and below processes, aligning with US export control measures and affecting major tech companies like Nvidia and AMD.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:25) Response to listener comments
(00:02:41) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:03:58) Adobe’s Sora rivalling AI video generator is now available for everyone
(00:09:45) OpenAI lays out plans for GPT-5
(00:16:42) OpenAI is rethinking how AI models handle controversial topics
(00:21:28) Perplexity AI launches new ultra-fast AI search model Sonar
(00:23:45) YouTube AI updates include auto dubbing expansion, age ID tech, and more
Applications & Business
(00:24:37) Musk-led group makes $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI
(00:34:32) Anthropic’s next major AI model could arrive within weeks
(00:39:09) AI chip startup Groq secures $1.5 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia
(00:42:15) OpenAI reportedly planning to build its first AI chip in 2026
Projects & Open Source
(00:45:01) Zyphra Introduces the Beta Release of Zonos: A Highly Expressive TTS Model with High Fidelity Voice Cloning
(00:51:11) Gemstones: A Model Suite for Multi-Faceted Scaling Laws
(00:57:15) Hephaestus: Improving Fundamental Agent Capabilities of Large Language Models through Continual Pre-Training
Research & Advancements
(00:58:24) Model Tampering Attacks Enable More Rigorous Evaluations of LLM Capabilities
(01:04:24) Distillation Scaling Laws
(01:10:06) Matryoshka Quantization
(01:17:47) How much AI compute exists globally? How rapidly is it growing?
Policy & Safety
(01:21:29) US and UK refuse to sign summit declaration on AI safety
(01:25:43) Utility Engineering: Analyzing and Controlling Emergent Value Systems in AIs
(01:34:40) xAI Risk Management Framework (Draft)
(01:39:59) TSMC bans more chip sales to China due to stricter U.S. export sanctions
(01:42:38) Listener requested topic
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:43:48) Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US
(01:44:46) Scarlett Johansson calls for deepfake ban after AI video goes viral
(01:45:55) Outro

Our 199th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 02/09/2025
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
In this episode:
- OpenAI's deep research feature capability launched, allowing models to generate detailed reports after prolonged inference periods, competing directly with Google's Gemini 2.0 reasoning models. - France and UAE jointly announce plans to build a massive AI data center in France, aiming to become a competitive player within the AI infrastructure landscape. - Mistral introduces a mobile app, broadening its consumer AI lineup amidst market skepticism about its ability to compete against larger firms like OpenAI and Google. - Anthropic unveils 'Constitutional Classifiers,' a method showing strong defenses against universal jailbreaks; they also launched a $20K challenge to find weaknesses.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:27) News Preview
(00:03:28) Response to listener comments
Tools & Apps
(00:08:01) OpenAI now reveals more of its o3-mini model’s thought process
(00:16:03) Google’s Gemini app adds access to ‘thinking’ AI models
(00:21:04) OpenAI Unveils A.I. Tool That Can Do Research Online
(00:31:09) Mistral releases its AI assistant on iOS and Android
(00:36:17) AI music startup Riffusion launches its service in public beta
(00:39:11) Pikadditions by Pika Labs lets users seamlessly insert objects into videos
Applications & Business
(00:41:19) Softbank set to invest $40 billion in OpenAI at $260 billion valuation, sources say
(00:47:36) UAE to invest billions in France AI data centre
(00:50:34) Report: Ilya Sutskever’s startup in talks to fundraise at roughly $20B valuation
(00:52:03) ASML to Ship First Second-Gen High-NA EUV Machine in the Coming Months, Aiming for 2026 Production
(00:54:38) NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL 72 Shipments Not Under Threat From DeepSeek As Hyperscalers Maintain CapEx; Meanwhile, Trump Tariffs Play Havoc With TSMC’s Pricing Strategy
Projects & Open Source
(00:56:49) The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Releases Tülu 3 405B: Scaling Open-Weight...
(01:00:06) SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model
(01:03:56) PhD Knowledge Not Required: A Reasoning Challenge for Large Language Models
(01:08:26) OpenEuroLLM: Europe’s New Initiative for Open-Source AI Development
Research & Advancements
(01:10:34) LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning
(01:16:39) s1: Simple test-time scaling
(01:19:17) ZebraLogic: On the Scaling Limits of LLMs for Logical Reasoning
(01:23:55) Streaming DiLoCo with overlapping communication: Towards a Distributed Free Lunch
Policy & Safety
(01:26:50) US sets AI safety aside in favor of 'AI dominance'
(01:29:39) Almost Surely Safe Alignment of Large Language Models at Inference-Time
(01:32:02) Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming
(01:33:16) Anthropic offers $20,000 to whoever can jailbreak its new AI safety system