#211 - Claude Voice, Flux Kontext, wrong RL research?

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.
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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