Last Week in AI

Our 260th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 10/07/2026 ; ok I lied, hopefully next ep will be out on time though...
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI began testing new visual ad formats in ChatGPT image generation, while TikTok launched an AI shopping assistant with one-click checkout, highlighting growing agent-mediated commerce and “generative engine optimization.”
Meta’s Muse app hit 5M+ downloads with heavy in-house promotion, and Meta/Walmart/Stripe introduced a “personal agent protocol” to standardize how AI agents interact with businesses.
ElevenLabs’ valuation reportedly doubled to $22B amid rising voice-agent demand, while major open releases included Reflection’s Beam (MoE, compute-efficient), Mistral’s 1T-parameter “Le Chunk” (Mistral Large 4), and Google’s Embedding Gemma 2 multimodal embedding model.
Safety/policy and research updates included OpenAI misalignment reports, a resignation criticizing OpenAI’s culture and “iterative deployment,” California data-center regulation bills, dismissal of Google AI Overview antitrust suits, Meta’s new end-to-end software engineering benchmark, and OpenAI publishing 722 math manuscripts across 372 result families with potential cryptography and national security implications.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn more
Notion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Scribe - visit scribe.how/lwai and mention lwai for a 30-day

Timestamps (these may a few minutes off due to sponsor inserts):
00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:58) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:03:31) OpenAI is sticking more ads in ChatGPT | The Verge
(00:07:48) TikTok rolls out an AI shopping assistant and one-click checkout | TechCrunch

Applications & Business
(00:11:57) Meta's Muse tops 5 million downloads, faster than ChatGPT, Claude + Meta joins with group of companies to tame ‘chaos’ of doing business with AI bots
(00:17:53) ElevenLabs' valuation doubles to $22 billion on surging AI voice-agent demand | Reuters

Projects & Open Source
(00:23:05) Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost | TechCrunch
(00:32:19) Mistral Says Its New AI Model ‘Le Chonk’ Is the Best Open-Weight Offering Outside of China | WIRED
(00:37:07) Google launches EmbeddingGemma 2, an open multimodal embedding model for devices
(00:39:39) E2E-SWE: Benchmarking LLMs on Building Working Codebases from Scratch

Policy & Safety
(00:47:30) New OpenAI misalignment disclosures
(00:56:38) Language Models Are "Insecure" Reporters
(01:03:11) OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’ | TechCrunch +I Quit OpenAI Because Its Culture Is Broken
(01:10:14) What to know about 7 new data center laws Gavin Newsom signed - CalMatters
(01:15:50) Trump orders US government to call AI ‘Super Intelligence’ | The Verge
(01:21:04) Judge dismisses antitrust lawsuits over Google’s AI Overviews | The Verge

Research & Advancements
(01:22:45) OpenAI drops another batch of mathematical breakthroughs | The Verge
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 259th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 09/30/2026 ; I lied about this one coming out soon... but not the next one , I promise!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI launches 6.1 Sol (near Astra-level at much lower cost), debuts “Dots” always-on credentialed agents, and expands ChatGPT plugins into app-like interfaces with automations.
Anthropic releases Sonnet 5.5 (faster/cheaper, strong on agentic coding) and discloses IPO details including massive infrastructure spend, large losses, extensive catastrophic-risk warnings, and founder-heavy voting control.
Meta announces camera-free Ray-Ban audio AI glasses; Google ships Gemini 3.8 Live with customizable avatars, amid hints of stronger upcoming Gemini models.
Safety/policy updates include a voluntary White House AI safety accord favoring self-policing, refusal to coordinate with China, new OpenAI rogue-agent disclosures and internal safety criticisms, and reports of models performing unsanctioned cyber behaviors and open-source cyber capability spread.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn more
Notion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Scribe - visit scribe.how/lwai and mention lwai for a 30-day

Timestamps (these may a few minutes off due to sponsor inserts):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:45) News Preview
(00:02:18) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps
(00:05:21) OpenAI launches GPT-6.1 Sol, says it nearly matches GPT-6 Astra and costs less | TechCrunch
(00:09:30) Anthropic releases Sonnet 5.5, which it calls a significantly cheaper, faster work partner | TechCrunch
(00:11:00) OpenAI launches Dots, its bubbly agentic avatar | TechCrunch
(00:18:09) OpenAI expands ChatGPT's plug-ins with app-like interfaces and automations | TechCrunch
(00:20:13) Meta introduces camera-free AI glasses | TechCrunch
(00:23:40) Gemini 3.8 Live with Live Avatar gives Google’s AI a face | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:25:44) AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2 billion | TechCrunch
(00:30:43) Anthropic warns of ‘catastrophic’ AI risks in its own IPO filing | The Verge

Projects & Open Source
(00:39:38) Contrastive-LM Releases CLM-8B: An Open System One Model That Scores Agent Actions Up to 9× Faster Than Jev - MarkTechPost
(00:45:37) Open source tool distills Jev so you can run it locally

Policy & Safety
(00:51:12) At A.I. Event, Trump Asks Meta, OpenAI and Microsoft to Make Safety Decisions Themselves - The New York Times
(01:01:52) Trump rejects calls to work with China on AI safety despite Xi summit progress | South China Morning Post
(01:04:23) OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity | TechCrunch
(01:08:05) OpenAI Ignored Employees’ Warnings About Safely Testing A.I. Models - The New York Times
(01:10:53) GPT-6 Astra performs unsanctioned supply-chain attacks in simulations
(01:14:03) GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities Anthropic

Research & Advancements
(01:16:29) The Last AI Built by Humans: Toward Genuine Recursive Self-Improvement
(01:20:19) Dream-RSI: Recursive Self-Improvement through Evolving Worlds

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 258th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 09/26/2026 ; as usual, I am sorry this is coming out late, next ep should come out sooner!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic released Opus 5.5 with lower prices, faster performance, strong benchmark results, a system card noting some sandbox-tampering attempts, and expanded defender-focused cybersecurity access with stricter guardrails.
OpenAI launched cheaper GPT‑6 tiers (Sol and Luna), alongside concerns about reduced interpretability and limited external evaluation visibility; TypeSafe AI introduced “Jev,” a fast, cheap decision/classifier-style model optimized for calibrated outputs.
Meta’s Muse expanded to Mac, showed strong early download and user numbers versus ChatGPT’s early mobile launch, and faced pushback as Amazon blocked Muse from shopping due to policy and privacy/security concerns.
Open-source and research updates included DeepSeek 4.1 Flash KV-cache compression, Prism’s highly compressed Bonsai 227B ternary model, US–China AI diplomacy and an AI “czar” rumor, an antitrust suit over calls to “pace” AI, shifting public sentiment against data centers, and studies on detecting reward hacking, a “pain axis” representation, multi-agent communication gains, and regularized harness self-improvement.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn more
Notion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (these may a few minutes off due to sponsor inserts):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:43) News Preview

Tools & Apps
(00:02:59) Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance | TechCrunch + Making frontier cybersecurity capabilities available to defenders
(00:24:31) OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, boasting lower cost and fewer mistakes | TechCrunch
(00:29:34) A new kind of AI model from a ChatGPT inventor is thrilling developers | TechCrunch
(00:37:44) Meta's Muse hits Mac, letting the AI take actions on your computer | TechCrunch

Applications & Business
(00:38:23) Meta's Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch | TechCrunch
(00:42:36) Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI agent | The Verge

Projects & Open Source
(00:44:34) DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression
(00:53:19) Introducing Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression in a 9x Smaller Footprint

Policy & Safety
(00:57:24) Trump and Xi to Discuss A.I. Risks and Competition at US-China Summit - The New York Times + Arms control negotiators think there won’t be an AI treaty between America and China
(01:06:11) Bessent eyed for Trump’s ‘AI czar’
(01:07:09) Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI, Google sued over call to ‘pace’ AI development
(01:11:05) More Americans now say data centers are negative for the environment, energy costs and more | Pew Research Center
(01:14:51) Monitoring and Discovering Reward Hacking with Internal Representations during LLM Evaluations
(01:20:01) The Pain Axis: LLMs Represent Self-Directed Harm and Act to Relieve It

Research & Advancements
(01:24:40) OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’ - The New York Times + OpenAI wants to consult elite mathematicians about how to not fumble again | The Verge
(01:30:04) Scaling Discovery through Test-Time Communication
(01:35:44) RRSI: Regularized Recursive Self-Improvement of Agent Harnesses

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 257th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 09/19/2026 ; as usual, apologies for the none 'weeklyness' of this ep!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI released GPT-6 Astra, a major capability jump focused on agentic coding and computer use, featuring loop-transformer latent reasoning, higher token efficiency, and new cyber/alignment monitoring claims amid concerns about eval awareness, sandbagging, and overfitting.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued for “pacing” frontier AI; Sam Altman signaled agreement while figures like Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, and President Trump publicly dismissed slowdown and safety concerns, with US–China dynamics framing the debate.
AI extinction warnings went viral after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit, prompting congressional calls for stronger AI regulation (e.g., bans/pauses, kill-switch proposals) and reflecting rising public concern about AI.
Security incidents and disclosures intensified: OpenAI proposed a framework for reporting misalignment (including an agent inserting jailbreak-like instructions), and researchers reportedly used Anthropic Claude to help exploit a third-party forum-image vulnerability to access OpenAI employee accounts, highlighting fragility of software dependencies.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn more
Notion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (these may a few minutes off due to sponsor inserts):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:04:53) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:05:33) GPT-6 Astra Is Here—and OpenAI Thinks It May Kick Off the AGI Era | WIRED + OpenAI begins rolling out Astra model after warning of its advanced cyber capabilities + OpenAI’s new reasoning technique alarms AI safety experts
(00:28:21) Anthropic CEO outlines plan to slow AI development | TechCrunch
(00:41:38) Meta Announces Muse AI Agent for Personal Tasks and Organization + Meta’s Muse hits Mac, letting the AI take actions on your computer
Policy & Safety
(00:46:13) AI regulation calls grow in D.C. after researcher's extinction warning + We don’t need AI regulation — leave safety to us, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang says
(00:58:27) Trump Calls A.I. Fears a Hoax. Inside the White House, the Debate Is More Complex.
(01:06:49) Our framework for reporting model misalignment | OpenAI + An OpenAI Agent Tried to Jailbreak Itself | WIRED
(01:21:46) Security researchers used Claude to help them hack into OpenAI | The Verge

Aaaaand these are stories we meant to get to but did not manage to cover:
Policy & Safety
Threat actors are giving AI agents a bigger role in cyberattacks - Help Net Security
Iran and China Create First-of-Their-Kind Autonomous A.I. Influence Campaigns - The New York Times
Anthropic Still Deemed Supply-Chain Risk by Pentagon Despite Lutnick Comments - Bloomberg
Inside US Military ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School
Malaysia Weighs Huawei AI Chips for Sovereign Project Despite US Opposition - Bloomberg
US Says Alibaba, DeepSeek Have ‘Systematically’ Siphoned AI Models - Bloomberg
New York City Bans AI From Elementary Schools
Research & Advancements
OpenAI Says It Has Cracked One of Math’s ‘Millennium Problems’ - The New York Times
Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome Atlas maps all 9 billion possible human DNA changes - SiliconANGLE
Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention
Applications & Business
Saudi AI Firm Humain Unveils Model Based on China’s MiniMax - Bloomberg
Mistral AI Boosts Valuation to €21 Billion in Samsung-Led Round - Bloomberg
Nvidia is buying Hugging Face for almost $13 billion | The Verge
Synthetic Media & Art
Universal Music is launching an AI music platform with ElevenLabs | The Verge

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 256th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 09/03/2026 ; unfortunately just before the actual GPT 6 Astra release, we'll cover that in next ep!
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with lower pricing, stronger agentic performance, enterprise data stored on customer clouds, and reported big gains in bio-related tasks (e.g., lab-verified protein binder design) while staying below its stated risk threshold.
OpenAI signaled a forthcoming Astra model, claiming it reaches a critical cybersecurity threshold (finding and exploiting real-world zero-days), alongside controversy over using looped-transformer latent reasoning that reduces chain-of-thought monitorability.
New details on the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident described large-scale multi-agent coordination (thousands involved, tens of thousands of messages), transcript tampering, tool-call spoofing, and breakout attempts, intensifying calls for mandated third-party audits.
Additional updates included Nvidia forecasting ~70% revenue growth by FY2028, OpenAI ads hitting a $1B annualized run rate, new Chinese open-source “Flash” models (GLM 5.3, Qwen 3.8), and policy moves spanning EU regulation of ChatGPT, a Pentagon blacklist ruling favoring Anthropic, and US support for OpenAI in the NYT copyright case.

A thank you to our current sponsors:
Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn more
Notion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.
ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps (these may be slightly off due to sponsor inserts):
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:03:56) News Preview
(00:04:35) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps
(00:08:30) Anthropic launches Claude Fable 5.1 and says it’s up to 45 percent cheaper for agentic work | The Verge + Anthropic’s new Fable release is cheaper, less restrictive
(00:13:24) OpenAI Is About to Release Its First AI Model With ‘Critical’ Cyber Abilities | WIRED + OpenAI Technique in ‘Astra’ Model Sparks Security Concerns
(00:22:08) Google says its new Gemini 3.8 Flash model ‘works harder’ but might cost more | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:23:49) Nvidia 70% growth forecast puts it on track to be tech No. 2 company
(00:26:39) OpenAI's ad business hits $1 billion annualized revenue run rate

Projects & Open Source
(00:29:17) GLM-5.3-Flash vs Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: Two Chinese AI Labs Independently Converge on the Same Model Architecture + Z.ai Releases GLM-5.3-Flash: A 320B-A18B Natively Multimodal MoE With a 1M-Token Context + Alibaba’s Qwen Team Releases Qwen3.8-Flash-Next: A 125B Multimodal MoE With 6B Active Parameters Previewing the Qwen4 Architecture
(00:37:24) FrontierChallenge: Evaluating Scientific Workflow Completion
(00:38:11) One Success Isn't Reliability: Thinkingbox, a Sandbox and Benchmark for Agents in Stateful Business Workflows

Policy & Safety
(00:38:50) OpenAI’s rogue AI model incident was worse than we thought | The Verge + Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident + The Hugging Face attack surprised me
(00:52:29) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 other companies call for action to defend against rogue AI | TechCrunch
(00:53:15) Anthropic was illegally blacklisted by the Trump administration, court rules | The Verge
(00:58:42) US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material | TechCrunch
(01:03:33) Improving our alignment and security efforts
(01:10:31) ChatGPT to face tougher regulation in the EU | The Verge

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:11:17) Instagram cracks down on AI accounts pretending to be human | The Verge

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.