Last Week in AI

• #217 - ChatGPT Agent, Kimi k2, Hiring Drama

  Our 217th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/17/2025 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's new ChatGPT agent**: The episode begins with a detailed discussion on OpenAI's latest ChatGPT agent, which can control entire computers and perform a wide range of tasks, showcasing powerful performance benchmarks and potential applications in business and research. **Major business moves in the AI space**: Significant shifts include Google's acquisition of Windsurf's top talent after OpenAI's deal fell through, Cognition's acquisition of Windsurf, and several notable hires by Meta from OpenAI and Apple, highlighting intense competition in the AI industry. **AI's ethical and societal impacts**: The hosts discuss serious concerns like the rise of non-consensual explicit AI-generated images, ICE's use of facial recognition for large databases, and regulations aimed at controlling AI's potential misuse. **Video game actors strike ends**: The episode concludes with news that SAG-AFTRA's year-long strike for video game voice actors has ended after reaching an agreement on AI rights and wage increases, reflecting the broader impact of AI on the job market. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:02:49) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:03:29) OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Agent can control an entire computer and do tasks for you (00:07:11) Alibaba-backed Moonshot releases new Kimi AI model that beats ChatGPT, Claude in coding — and it costs less (00:09:36) Amazon targets vibe-coding chaos with new 'Kiro' AI software development tool – GeekWire (00:12:33) Anthropic tightens usage limits for Claude Code – without telling users (00:15:51) Mistral's Le Chat chatbot gets a productivity push with new ‘deep research' mode | TechCrunch (00:17:46) I spent 24 hours flirting with Elon Musk’s AI girlfriend (00:21:32) Uber is close to completing its quest to become the ultimate robotaxi app | The Verge Applications & Business (00:24:02) OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off — and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google | The Verge (00:28:09) Cognition, maker of the AI coding agent Devin, acquires Windsurf | TechCrunch (00:28:46) Anthropic hired back two of its employees — just two weeks after they left for a competitor. | The Verge (00:28:46) Another High-Profile OpenAI Researcher Departs for Meta | WIRED (00:28:46) Meta Hires Two Key Apple (AAPL) AI Experts After Poaching Their Boss - Bloomberg (00:31:31) Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab is worth $12B in seed round | TechCrunch (00:33:20) Lovable becomes a unicorn with $200M Series A just 8 months after launch | TechCrunch (00:34:55) SpaceX commits $2 billion to xAI as Musk steps up AI ambitions: Report | World News - Business Standard Research & Advancements (00:35:59) A former OpenAI engineer describes what it’s really like to work there | TechCrunch (00:38:23) Reasoning or Memorization? Unreliable Results of Reinforcement Learning Due to Data Contamination Policy & Safety (00:42:14) Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, xAI granted up to $200 million from DoD (00:43:08) California State Senator Scott Wiener Pushes Bill to Regulate AI Companies - Bloomberg (00:43:58) AI 'Nudify' Websites Are Raking in Millions of Dollars | WIRED (00:45:55) Inside ICE’s Supercharged Facial Recognition App of 200 Million Images Synthetic Media & Art (00:48:47) Video game actors' strike officially ends after AI deal

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• #216 - Grok 4, Project Rainier, Kimi K2

  Our 216th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/11/2025 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: xAI launches Grok 4 with breakthrough performance across benchmarks, becoming the first true frontier model outside established labs, alongside a $300/month subscription tier Grok's alignment challenges emerge with antisemitic responses, highlighting the difficulty of steering models toward "truth-seeking" without harmful biases Perplexity and OpenAI launch AI-powered browsers to compete with Google Chrome, signaling a major shift in how users interact with AI systems Meta study reveals AI tools actually slow down experienced developers by 20% on complex tasks, contradicting expectations and anecdotal reports of productivity gains Timestamps + Links: (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:02) News Preview       Tools & Apps (00:01:59) Elon Musk's xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription | TechCrunch (00:15:28) Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is suddenly posting antisemitic tropes (00:29:52) Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser | TechCrunch (00:32:54) OpenAI is reportedly releasing an AI browser in the coming weeks | TechCrunch (00:33:27) Replit Launches New Feature for its Agent, CEO Calls it ‘Deep Research for Coding’ (00:34:40) Cursor launches a web app to manage AI coding agents (00:36:07) Cursor apologizes for unclear pricing changes that upset users | TechCrunch       Applications & Business (00:39:10) Lovable on track to raise $150M at $2B valuation (00:41:11) Amazon built a massive AI supercluster for Anthropic called Project Rainier – here's what we know so far (00:46:35) Elon Musk confirms xAI is buying an overseas power plant and shipping the whole thing to the U.S. to power its new data center — 1 million AI GPUs and up to 2 Gigawatts of power under one roof, equivalent to powering 1.9 million homes (00:48:16) Microsoft's own AI chip delayed six months in major setback — in-house chip now reportedly expected in 2026, but won't hold a candle to Nvidia Blackwell (00:49:54) Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross (00:52:46) OpenAI’s Stock Compensation Reflect Steep Costs of Talent Wars       Projects & Open Source (00:58:04) Hugging Face Releases SmolLM3: A 3B Long-Context, Multilingual Reasoning Model - MarkTechPost (00:58:33) Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence (00:58:59) Kyutai Releases 2B Parameter Streaming Text-to-Speech TTS with 220ms Latency and 2.5M Hours of Training       Research & Advancements (01:02:14) Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning (01:07:58) Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity (01:13:03) Mitigating Goal Misgeneralization with Minimax Regret (01:17:01) Correlated Errors in Large Language Models (01:20:31) What skills does SWE-bench Verified evaluate?       Policy & Safety (01:22:53) Evaluating Frontier Models for Stealth and Situational Awareness (01:25:49) When Chain of Thought is Necessary, Language Models Struggle to Evade Monitors (01:30:09) Why Do Some Language Models Fake Alignment While Others Don't? (01:34:35) Positive review only': Researchers hide AI prompts in papers (01:35:40) Google faces EU antitrust complaint over AI Overviews (01:36:41) The transfer of user data by DeepSeek to China is unlawful': Germany calls for Google and Apple to remove the AI app from their stores (01:37:30) Virology Capabilities Test (VCT): A Multimodal Virology Q&A Benchmark

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• #215 - Runway games, Meta Superintelligence, ERNIE 4.5, Adaptive Tree Search

  Our 215th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/04/2025 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: Cloudflare's new AI data scraper blocking feature, its potential implications, and technical challenges Meta's aggressive recruitment for its Super Intelligence Labs division is covered, highlighting key hires from OpenAI and other leaders in the field Anthropic loses significant talent to Cursor, with details on their new economic futures program focusing on AI's impact on the labor market Notable open-source AI model releases from Baidu and Tencent are also discussed, including their performance metrics and potential applications. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:11) Intro / Banter (00:01:43) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:55) Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers (00:05:44) Runway is going to let people generate video games with AI (00:11:24) Google embraces AI in the classroom with new Gemini tools for educators, chatbots for students, and more (00:16:23) No one likes meetings. They’re sending their AI note takers instead. (00:18:08) Google launches Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you (00:19:14) Google's Imagen 4 text-to-image model promises 'significantly improved' boring images Applications & Business (00:22:18) Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI ‘superintelligence’ super-group (00:29:35) Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies (00:35:10) As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI’s economic fallout (00:38:04) OpenAI says it has no plan to use Google's in-house chip (00:41:08) Nvidia stakes new startup that flips script on data center power (00:44:11) TSMC Arizona Chips Are Reportedly Being Flown Back to Taiwan For Packaging; U.S. Semiconductor Supply Chain Still Remains Dependent on Taiwan Projects & Open Source (00:46:57) Baidu releases open source model family ERNIE 4.5 (00:51:55) Tencent Open Sources Hunyuan-A13B: A 13B Active Parameter MoE Model with Dual-Mode Reasoning and 256K Context (00:57:09) Together AI Releases DeepSWE: A Fully Open-Source RL-Trained Coding Agent Based on Qwen3-32B and Achieves 59% on SWEBench (01:00:11) GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning (01:04:10) DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation Research & Advancements (01:06:21) Wider or Deeper? Scaling LLM Inference-Time Compute with Adaptive Branching Tree Search (01:13:07) The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements (01:18:04) Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet reach 50%-time-horizon point estimates of about 80 and 65 minutes, respectively (01:21:37) Performance Prediction for Large Systems via Text-to-Text Regression (01:25:38) Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning (01:26:33) Correlated Errors in Large Language Models Policy & Safety (01:29:04) Forecasting Biosecurity Risks from LLMs (01:36:06) AI Task Length Horizons in Offensive Cybersecurity (01:42:30) Inside Tech's Risky Gamble to Kill State AI Regulations for a Decade (01:52:56) Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features

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• #214 - Gemini CLI, io drama, AlphaGenome, copyright rulings

  Our 214th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 06/27/2025 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: Meta's hiring of key engineers from OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab securing a $2 billion seed round with a valuation of $10 billion. DeepMind introduces Alpha Genome, significantly advancing genomic research with a model comparable to Alpha Fold but focused on gene functions. Taiwan imposes technology export controls on Huawei and SMIC, while Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI in a groundbreaking legal case. A new DeepMind research paper introduces a transformative approach to cognitive debt in AI tasks, utilizing EEG to assess cognitive load and recall in essay writing with LLMs. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:22) News Preview (00:02:15) Response to listener comments Tools & Apps (00:06:18) Google is bringing Gemini CLI to developers’ terminals (00:12:09) Anthropic now lets you make apps right from its Claude AI chatbot Applications & Business (00:15:54) Sam Altman takes his ‘io’ trademark battle public (00:21:35) Huawei Matebook Contains Kirin X90, using SMIC 7nm (N+2) Technology (00:26:05) AMD deploys its first Ultra Ethernet ready network card — Pensando Pollara provides up to 400 Gbps performance (00:31:21) Amazon joins the big nuclear party, buying 1.92 GW for AWS (00:33:20) Nvidia goes nuclear — company joins Bill Gates in backing TerraPower, a company building nuclear reactors for powering data centers (00:36:18) Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab closes on $2B at $10B valuation (00:41:02) Meta hires key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models Research & Advancements (00:49:46) Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work (00:55:13) Direct Reasoning Optimization: LLMs Can Reward And Refine Their Own Reasoning for Open-Ended Tasks (01:01:54) Farseer: A Refined Scaling Law in Large Language Models (01:06:28) LLM-First Search: Self-Guided Exploration of the Solution Space Policy & Safety (01:11:20) Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models (01:16:04) Taiwan Imposes Technology Export Controls on Huawei, SMIC (01:18:22) Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task Synthetic Media & Art (01:23:41) Judge Rejects Authors’ Claim That Meta AI Training Violated Copyrights (01:29:46) Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI, but UK lawsuit continues

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• #213 - Midjourney video, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, LiveCodeBench Pro

  Our 213nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 06/21/2025 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: Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, moving from text-to-image to video with a subscription model offering up to 21-second clips, highlighting the affordability and growing capabilities in AI video generation. Google's Gemini AI family updates include high-efficiency models for cost-effective workloads, and new enhancements in Google's search function now allow for voice interactions. The introduction of two new benchmarks, Live Code Bench Pro and Abstention Bench, aiming to test and improve the problem-solving and abstention capabilities of reasoning models, revealing current limitations. OpenAI wins a $200 million US defense contract to support various aspects of the Department of Defense, reflecting growing collaborations between tech companies and government for AI applications. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:32) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:12) Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, V1 (00:05:52) Google’s Gemini AI family updated with stable 2.5 Pro, super-efficient 2.5 Flash-Lite (00:07:59) Google’s AI Mode can now have back-and-forth voice conversations (00:10:13) YouTube to Add Google’s Veo 3 to Shorts in Move That Could Turbocharge AI on the Video Platform Applications & Business (00:11:10) The ‘OpenAI Files’ will help you understand how Sam Altman’s company works (00:12:29) OpenAI drops Scale AI as a data provider following Meta deal (00:13:28) Amazon’s Zoox opens its first major robotaxi production facility Projects & Open Source (00:15:20) LiveCodeBench Pro: How Do Olympiad Medalists Judge LLMs in Competitive Programming? (00:19:45) AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions (00:22:49) MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attention Research & Advancements (00:24:33) Scaling Laws of Motion Forecasting and Planning -- A Technical Report Policy & Safety (00:28:07) Universal Jailbreak Suffixes Are Strong Attention Hijackers (00:30:52) OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’ (00:33:25) OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract

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