Last Week in AI

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

Our 198th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 01/31/2024
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:
- DeepSeek releases R1, a competitive AI model comparable to OpenAI’s O1, leading to market unrest and significant drops in tech stocks, including a 17% plunge in NVIDIA's stock.  - OpenAI launches Operator to facilitate agentic computer use, while facing competition from new releases by DeepSeek and Quen, with applications seeing rapid adoption. - President Trump revokes the Biden administration's executive order on AI, signaling a shift in AI policy and deregulation efforts. - Taiwanese government clears TSMC to produce advanced 2-nanometer chip technology abroad, aiming to strengthen global semiconductor supply amidst geopolitical tensions.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:03:01) Response to listener comments
Projects & Open Source
(00:06:26) DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
(00:30:25) Viral AI company DeepSeek releases new image model family
(00:34:07) Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report
(00:38:32) Alibaba’s Qwen team releases AI models that can control PCs and phones
Tools & Apps
(00:42:09) OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that performs tasks autonomously
(00:47:37) DeepSeek reaches No. 1 on US Play Store
(00:52:17) Alibaba rolled out Qwen Chat v0.2 and Qwen2.5-1M model
(00:53:50) Perplexity launches US-hosted DeepSeek R1, hints at EU hosting soon
(00:55:31) Apple is pulling its AI-generated notifications for news after generating fake headlines
(00:59:00) French AI ‘Lucie’ looks très chic, but keeps getting answers wrong
Applications & Business
(01:02:09) DeepSeek’s New AI Model Sparks Shock, Awe, and Questions From US Competitors
(01:07:49) Microsoft loses OpenAI exclusive cloud provider status to $500 billion Stargate project
(01:13:00) OpenAI adds BlackRock exec Adebayo Ogunlesi to board of directors
(01:15:00) ElevenLabs has raised a new round at $3B+ valuation led by ICONIQ Growth, sources say
Policy & Safety
(01:16:00) Donald Trump unveils $500 billion Stargate Project to build AI infrastructure in the US, promising over 100K jobs
(01:20:36) Trump Revokes Biden AI Policy, Signs Executive Order to Strengthen AI Leadership
(01:23:20) Anthropic CEO doesn’t see DeepSeek as ‘adversaries,’ but says export controls are critical
(01:30:26) Taiwanese govt clears TSMC to make 2nm chips abroad — country lowers its 'Silicon Shield'
(01:33:01) Outro

A special one-off episode with a deep dive into the past, present, and future of how computer hardware makes AI possible.
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
 - Google and Mistral sign deals with AP and AFP, respectively, to deliver up-to-date news through their AI platforms. - ChatGPT introduces a tasks feature for reminders and to-dos, positioning itself more as a personal assistant. - Synthesia raises $180 million to enhance its AI video platform for generating videos of human avatars. - New U.S. guidelines restrict exporting AI chips to various countries, impacting Nvidia and other tech firms.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:08 Historical Recap: Early AI and Hardware
00:11:51 The Rise of GPUs and Deep Learning
00:15:39 Scaling Laws and the Evolution of AI Models
00:24:05 The Bitter Lesson and the Future of AI Compute
00:25:58 Moore's Law and Huang's Law
00:30:12 Memory and Logic in AI Hardware
00:34:53 Challenges in AI Hardware: The Memory Wall
00:37:08 The Role of GPUs in Modern AI
00:42:27 Fitting Neural Nets in GPUs
00:48:04 Batch Sizes and GPU Utilization
00:52:47 Parallelism in AI Models
00:55:53 Matrix Multiplications and GPUs
00:59:57 Understanding B200 and GB200
01:05:41 Data Center Hierarchy
01:13:42 High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)
01:16:45 Fabrication and Packaging
01:20:17 The Complexity of Semiconductor Fabrication
01:24:34 Understanding Process Nodes
01:28:26 The Art of Fabrication
01:33:17 The Role of Yield in Fabrication
01:35:47 The Photolithography Process
01:40:38 Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV)
01:43:58 Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV)
01:51:46 Export Controls and Their Impact
01:54:22 The Rise of Custom AI Hardware
02:00:10 The Future of AI and Hardware

Our 197th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 01/17/2024
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest-hosted by the folks from Latent Space
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
 - Google and Mistral sign deals with AP and AFP, respectively, to deliver up-to-date news through their AI platforms. - ChatGPT introduces a tasks feature for reminders and to-dos, positioning itself more as a personal assistant. - Synthesia raises $180 million to enhance its AI video platform for generating videos of human avatars. - New U.S. guidelines restrict exporting AI chips to various countries, impacting Nvidia and other tech firms.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:04:29) News Preview
(00:05:09) Response to listener comments
(00:05:58) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:07:01) Google is making AI in Gmail and Docs free — but raising the price of Workspace
(00:07:52) Microsoft relaunches Copilot for business with free AI chat and pay-as-you-go agents
(00:12:36) Google signs deal with AP to deliver up-to-date news through its Gemini AI chatbot
(00:18:08) Mistral signs deal with AFP to offer up-to-date answers in Le Chat
(00:18:45) ChatGPT can now handle reminders and to-dos
Applications & Business
(00:22:53) Palmer Luckey’s AI Defense Company Anduril Is Building a $1 Billion Plant in Ohio
(00:28:36) OpenAI is bankrolling Axios’ expansion into four new markets
(00:29:39) AI researcher François Chollet founds a new AI lab focused on AGI
(00:32:18) Nvidia-backed AI video platform Synthesia doubles valuation to $2.1 billion
(00:34:46) Anysphere Raises $105M in Series B
(00:40:14) Harvey Valuation of 3 Billion
Projects & Open Source
(00:46:12) MiniMax-01: Scaling Foundation Models with Lightning Attention
(00:51:16) MinMo: A Multimodal Large Language Model with Approximately 8B Parameters for Seamless Voice Interaction
(00:53:01) HALoGEN: Fantastic LLM Hallucinations and Where to Find Them
Research & Advancements
(00:57:03) Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time
(01:04:38) Transformer2: Self-adaptive LLMs
(01:08:15) Inference-Time Scaling for Diffusion Models beyond Scaling Denoising Steps
Policy & Safety
(01:11:23) Biden administration proposes sweeping new restrictions on exporting AI chips
(01:13:56) Biden orders Energy, Defense departments to lease sites for AI data centers, clean energy generation
(01:15:00) OpenAI presents its preferred version of AI regulation in a new ‘blueprint’
(01:16:15) More teens report using ChatGPT for schoolwork, despite the tech’s faults
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:17:55) In AI copyright case, Zuckerberg turns to YouTube for his defense
(01:19:53) Outro

Our 196th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!*and sometimes last last week's Recorded on 01/10/2024
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/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Nvidia announced a $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits, featuring the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, aiming to lower the barrier for developers working on large models. - The U.S. Department of Justice finalizes a rule restricting the transmission of specific data types to countries of concern, including China and Russia, under executive order 14117.- Meta allegedly trained Llama on pirated content from LibGen, with internal concerns about the legality confirmed through court filings. - Microsoft paused construction on a section of a large data center project in Wisconsin to reassess based on new technological changes.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:04:52) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:05:55) Nvidia announces $3,000 personal AI supercomputer called Digits
(00:10:23) Meta removes AI character accounts after users criticize them as ‘creepy and unnecessary’
Applications & Business
(00:16:16) NVIDIA Is Reportedly Focused Towards “Custom Chip” Manufacturing, Recruiting Top Taiwanese Talent
(00:21:54) AI start-up Anthropic closes in on $60bn valuation
(00:25:38) Why OpenAI is Taking So Long to Launch Agents
(00:30:08) TSMC Set to Expand CoWoS Capacity to Record 75,000 Wafers in 2025, Doubling 2024 Output
(00:33:10) Microsoft 'pauses construction' on part of data center site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin
(00:37:23) Google folds more AI teams into DeepMind to ‘accelerate the research to developer pipeline’
Projects & Open Source
(00:41:59) Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI
(00:48:21) Microsoft releases Phi-4 language model on Hugging Face
Research & Advancements
(00:50:16) PRIME: Online Reinforcement Learning with Process Rewards
(00:58:29) ICLR: In-Context Learning of Representations
(01:07:38) Do NOT Think That Much for 2+3=? On the Overthinking of o1-Like LLMs
(01:11:44) METAGENE-1: Metagenomic Foundation Model for Pandemic Monitoring
(01:15:45) TransPixar: Advancing Text-to-Video Generation with Transparency
(01:18:03) The amount of compute used to train frontier models has been growing at a breakneck pace of over 4x per year since 2018, resulting in an overall scale-up of more than 10,000x! But what factors are enabling this rapid growth?
Policy & Safety
(01:23:45) InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment
(01:28:44) Mark Zuckerberg gave Meta’s Llama team the OK to train on copyrighted works, filing claims
(01:33:19) Anthropic gives court authority to intervene if chatbot spits out song lyrics
(01:35:57) US government says companies are no longer allowed to send bulk data to these nations
(01:39:10) Trump announces $20B plan to build new data centers in the US
 

Our 195th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!*and sometimes last last week's 
Recorded on 01/04/2024
Join our brand new Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
Note: apologies for Andrey's slurred speech and the jumpy editing, will be back to normal next week!
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/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- OpenAI teases new deliberative alignment techniques in its O3 model, showcasing major improvements in reasoning benchmarks, whilst surprising with autonomy in hacks against chess engines. - Microsoft and OpenAI continue to wrangle over the terms of their partnership, highlighting tensions amid OpenAI's shift towards a for-profit model. - Chinese AI companies like DeepSeek and Quen release advanced open-source models, presenting significant contributions to AI capabilities and performance optimization. - Sakana AI introduces innovative applications of AI to the search for artificial life, emphasizing the potential and curiosity-driven outcomes of open-ended learning and exploration.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:03:07) News Preview
(00:03:54) Response to listener comments
(00:05:00) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:06:11) OpenAI announces new o3 model
(00:21:17) Alibaba slashes prices on large language models by up to 85% as China AI rivalry heats up
(00:23:04) ElevenLabs launches Flash, its fastest text-to-speech AI yet
Applications & Business
(00:24:24) OpenAI announces plan to transform into a for-profit company
(00:33:17) Microsoft and OpenAI Wrangle Over Terms of Their Blockbuster Partnership
(00:37:36) Elon Musk’s xAI gets investment from Nvidia in recent funding round: report
(00:39:43) Sam Altman’s nuclear energy startup signs one of the largest nuclear power deals to date
(00:41:13) OpenAI Search Leader Departs After Less Than a Year
(00:42:43) Senior OpenAI Researcher Radford Departs
Projects & Open Source
(00:45:21) DeepSeek-AI Just Released DeepSeek-V3: A Strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Language Model with 671B Total Parameters with 37B Activated for Each Token
(00:54:14) Qwen Team Releases QvQ: An Open-Weight Model for Multimodal Reasoning
(00:58:09) LightOn and Answer.ai Releases ModernBERT: A New Model Series that is a Pareto Improvement over BERT with both Speed and Accuracy
Research & Advancements
(01:00:31) Deliberation in Latent Space via Differentiable Cache Augmentation
(01:05:14) Automating the Search for Artificial Life with Foundation Models
Policy & Safety
(01:10:27) Nonprofit group joins Elon Musk’s effort to block OpenAI’s for-profit transition
(01:14:35) OpenAI Researchers Propose 'Deliberative Alignment' : A Training Approach that Teaches LLMs to Explicitly Reason through Safety Specifications before Producing an Answer
(01:22:06) o1-preview autonomously hacked its environment rather than lose to Stockfish in our chess challenge. No adversarial prompting needed.
(01:27:22) Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer gets 150MW power boost despite concerns over grid impact and local power stability
(01:29:06) DOE: Data centers consumed 4.4% of US power in 2023, could hit 12% by 2028
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:32:20) OpenAI failed to deliver the opt-out tool it promised by 2025
(01:36:15) Outro

Our 194th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!*and sometimes last last week's 
Recorded on 12/19/2024Hosted 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/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Google dominates AI news with multiple announcements, including a reasoning model and Project Mariner, an AI browsing agent. - Anthropic explores alignment faking in LLMs, revealing models may show deceptive compliance under certain conditions. - Apple observes a trend towards smaller but more efficient language models, bucking previous trends of scaling larger parameter counts. - Legal drama unfolds as Meta backs Elon Musk's opposition to OpenAI's profit status change, raising concerns about competitive fairness.
If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:14) Response to listener comments
(00:08:52) News Preview
(00:10:01) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:10:55) Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model
(00:16:52) Google Gemini can now do more in-depth research
(00:21:58) Google DeepMind unveils a new video model to rival Sora
(00:27:50) Pika Labs releases AI video generator 2.0 with new features
(00:29:51) Google unveils Project Mariner: AI agents to use the web for you
(00:34:33) X gains a faster Grok model and a new ‘Grok button’
Applications & Business
(00:36:11) AI GPU clusters with one million GPUs are planned for 2027 — Broadcom says three AI supercomputers are in the works
(00:43:02) Meta asks the government to block OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit
(00:49:36) OpenAI says Elon Musk wanted it to be for-profit in 2017
(00:56:04)  EQTY Lab, Intel, and NVIDIA Unveil 'Verifiable Compute,' A Solution to Secure Trusted AI
(00:59:53) Liquid AI just raised $250M to develop a more efficient type of AI model
(01:03:19) Hundreds of OpenAI’s current and ex-employees are about to get a huge payday by cashing out up to $10 million each in a private stock sale
Projects & Open Source
(01:07:45) Phi-4 Technical Report
(01:13:04) DeepSeek-VL2: Mixture-of-Experts Vision-Language Models for Advanced Multimodal Understanding
(01:15:23) Meta AI Releases Apollo: A New Family of Video-LMMs Large Multimodal Models for Video Understanding
Research & Advancements
(01:16:34) Alignment faking in large language models
(01:28:39) Meta AI Introduces Byte Latent Transformer (BLT): A Tokenizer-Free Model That Scales Efficiently
(01:36:49) Frontier language models have become much smaller
(01:42:28) The Complexity Dynamics of Grokking
Policy & Safety
(01:46:49) Homeland Security gets its very own generative AI chatbot
(01:49:16) Pre-Deployment Evaluation of OpenAI’s o1 Model
(01:51:35) Pricing for key chipmaking material hits 13-year high following (01:53:46) Chinese export restrictions — China's restrictions on Gallium exports hit hard
Synthetic Media & Art
Meta debuts a tool for watermarking AI-generated videos
(01:55:27) Outro

Our 193rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!*and sometimes last last week's 
Note: this one was recorded on 12/13, so the news is a bit outdated... will get things back on track soon!
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/.
Sponsors:
The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.
In this episode:
- OpenAI launches Sora, a text-to-video model with significant capabilities, and Gemini 2.0 from Google showcasing agentic potential in AI tools. - Character.ai introduces a teen model to address safety concerns following two tragic incidents linked to addiction and harmful influence. - The U.S. government sets up a task force to support the rapid development of AI data centers, reflecting the critical need for robust infrastructure. - A paper from Anthropic reveals that frontier AI systems have reached the capability of self-replication, sparking discussions on future implications and safety protocols.
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Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:44) News Preview
(00:03:43) Response to listener comments
(00:09:50) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
(00:11:12) OpenAI has finally released Sora
(00:21:16) Google Reveals Gemini 2, AI Agents, and a Prototype Personal Assistant
(00:28:23) ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode adding video and screen sharing input (plus a Santa mode)
(00:30:43) Microsoft’s Copilot can browse the web with you using AI ‘Vision’
(00:32:31) Musk’s xAI has launched Grok image generation model
(00:35:22) Cognition Labs’ AI Software Engineer Devin Launched for Subscribers
(00:40:43) Apple launches its ChatGPT integration with Siri
(00:43:23) Reddit’s New AI Search Tool Helps You Find Reddit Answers Without Google
Applications & Business
(00:46:35) OpenAI Aiming to Eliminate Microsoft AGI Rule to Boost Future Investment
(00:53:34) GM halts funding of robotaxi development by Cruise
(00:57:08) Largest AI data centre in the world to be built in northwest Alberta
(01:02:36) Meta announces 4 million sq ft, 2GW Louisiana data center campus
(01:05:22) Google’s future data centers will be built next to solar and wind farms
Projects & Open Source
(01:08:37) Google DeepMind Just Released PaliGemma 2: A New Family of Open-Weight Vision Language Models (3B, 10B and 28B)
Research & Advancements
(01:13:51) Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space
(01:25:37) An Evolved Universal Transformer Memory
(01:31:48) APOLLO: SGD-like Memory, AdamW-level Performance
(01:37:59) Clio: A system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use
Policy & Safety
(01:39:47) Character.AI steps up teen safety after bots allegedly caused suicide, self-harm
(01:45:22) What Trump’s New AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks Means For the Tech Industry
(01:49:03) Frontier AI systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line
(01:53:52) Chip war: China launches antitrust probe into US semiconductor giant Nvidia in sign of escalation
(01:56:53) White House Creating Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure
(02:00:00) US clears export of advanced AI chips to UAE under Microsoft deal, Axios says
(02:02:19) Outro