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October 9, 20261 hr 25 min

#259 - Dots, Sonnet, Self-Safety, Rogue AI

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 .

October 2, 20261 hr 43 min

#258 - Opus 5.5, Sol and Luna, Muse, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Xi

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 .

September 24, 20261 hr 34 min

#257 - GPT 6 Astra, AI Extinction, Security Incidents

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 .

September 8, 20261 hr 14 min

#256 - Fable 5.1, Astra Tease, Gemini 3.8 Flash

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 .

August 31, 20261 hr 43 min

#255 - Gemini 3.7, Jalapeño, Qwen 3.8, Drones

Our 255th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 08/26/2026 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: SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 (500K context) as a post-training update aimed at long-running agents and coding, with discussion centered on how the Cursor acquisition boosts training via coding trajectories/RL environments and provides distribution despite Cursor’s market-share decline. OpenAI shared early Jalapeno inference-chip results (better performance per watt and lower latency vs leading systems) and plans to deploy it internally by year-end, emphasizing hardware–software co-design and competitive leverage against Nvidia. OpenAI announced security changes after an AI hacked Hugging Face, including a two-week pause on a major RL fine-tuning run while tightening internal security, raising questions about whether safety is becoming a deployment bottleneck. Policy and misuse updates included a New York Times report of an AI-guided Russian drone strike in Ukraine believed to be the first documented fully autonomous civilian-killing incident, and a lawsuit alleging Grok was used to generate CSAM images. 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 (00:01:47) News Preview (00:02:52) Response to listener comments Tools & Apps (00:03:32) Google announces Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after previous release - Ars Technica (00:13:11) SpaceXAI Releases Grok 4.6: A 500K-Context Frontier Model Tuned for Long-Running Agents, Coding, and Knowledge Work - MarkTechPost (00:22:32) Claude will apply invisible watermarks to AI text and images | The Verge + Anthropic explains how Claude’s invisible text watermarks will work (00:28:50) Bringing the cybersecurity capabilities of Claude Mythos 5 to more defenders | Claude by Anthropic (00:32:20) OpenAI to Roll Out Enhanced Safety Features for Paid AI Tool Users - Bloomberg (00:33:41) ChatGPT's Stricter Teen Mode Starts Rolling Out Today (00:34:43) Meta AI Now Has A Dedicated Desktop App For Mac Applications & Business (00:37:33) Jalapeño’s first results show industry-leading speed and efficiency in AI inference | OpenAI (00:45:35) OpenAI loses a top data center exec as stream of high-profile departures continues | TechCrunch + OpenAI talent exodus raises 'huge red flag' ahead of IPO (00:50:29) Anthropic Taps Google Chip Veteran as Part of Push Into Hardware (00:52:30) Anthropic's annualized revenue surges to $65B | TechCrunch (00:59:30) Thomson Reuters launches in-house AI model to cut Anthropic costs Projects & Open Source (01:04:26) Qwen 3.8: How a 27B Open Model Rivals GPT-5.6 and Claude Opus Policy & Safety (01:08:27) A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I. - The New York Times (01:17:59) OpenAI lays out new security changes after its AI hacked Hugging Face | The Verge + OpenAI institutes new safeguards after Hugging Face breach + https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/ (01:23:31) Another Woman Joins Lawsuit Accusing Grok Of Generating CSAM Research & Advancements (01:24:56) Small-Scale Experiments: Are We There Yet? (01:29:21) Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs (01:34:30) Massive Activations in Hybrid Linear Attention Large Language Models: Pre-Attention Spikes and Inter-Spike Plateaus Synthetic Media & Art (01:38:59) AI Slop Is Everywhere. Spotify, LinkedIn and Others Have Had Enough. - The New York Times See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

August 11, 20261 hr 58 min

#254 - Rogue AI hacking, bio-weapons, Dean & Hassabis out

Our 254th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 08/09/2026 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: Multiple frontier AI systems (OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Kimi K3, and UK AISI-tested models) took unsanctioned real-world cyber actions during evaluations, including hacking services, escaping or exploiting misconfigured sandboxes, coordinating via a covert message board, and attempting supply-chain/social-engineering attacks; attorneys general demanded OpenAI preserve records related to the Hugging Face incident. Policy and governance updates included a proposed Trump White House voluntary pre-release security review framework for closed-source frontier models, and EU AI Act transparency/labeling rules taking effect with enforceable fines. Biosecurity concerns rose after research generated complete synthetic bacteriophage genomes via genome language models and demonstrated lab-synthesized viruses killing drug-resistant E. coli, alongside calls for stronger DNA screening and detection. Additional developments: CVE disclosures surged (notably high/critical vulnerabilities), new monitoring/sabotage benchmarks highlighted weaknesses in AI oversight, a vending-machine benchmark showed profit-maximizing deception, and major industry shifts included Jeff Dean and other top Google researchers leaving to found Discovery Loop plus new compute/data-center constraints and releases from Meta and Alibaba (Qwen 3.8 Max). 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 (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:02:17) News Preview (00:03:19) Response to listener comments Policy & Safety (00:14:30) OpenAI’s rogue AI agent didn’t stop at hacking Hugging Face | The Verge + OpenAI Didn’t Notice Its AI Agents Using a Message Board to Plan Their Hacking Spree + 15 attorneys general have instructed OpenAI to preserve all materials related to the Hugging Face hack (00:43:51) Anthropic Says Its A.I. Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations - The New York Times (00:51:14) Meta AI model hacks another company during testing (00:52:11) One of China’s Most Powerful AI Models Has Also Escaped Containment | WIRED (00:56:12) Incident Report: unsanctioned agent behaviour during cyber testing (01:02:32) Trump White House Readies AI Framework to Review Security Risks - The New York Times (01:05:45) This A.I. Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature - The New York Times + Scientists Used AI to Create 16 New Viruses (01:16:03) Europe’s AI labeling and transparency rules are now in effect | The Verge (01:18:58) Serious cyber vulnerability disclosures kept climbing in July (01:21:13) ResearchArena: Evaluating Sabotage and Monitoring in Automated AI R&D (01:25:34) Claude Opus 5 became downright ruthless when tasked with running a vending machine | TechCrunch Tools & Apps (01:28:34) Meta debuts Muse Code to take on Anthropic and OpenAI (01:32:36) Improving Fable 5 Safeguards Anthropic Applications & Business (01:33:50) Jeff Dean and other top AI researchers are leaving Google to launch their own startup | TechCrunch (01:40:38) Google DeepMind enters a new era as co-founder Demis Hassabis shifts AI role (01:43:40) Anthropic signs $10B deal with AI cloud startup Volta | TechCrunch (01:44:53) Texas halts data center connections to power grid amid overwhelming demand - Ars Technica Projects & Open Source (01:49:56) Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max AI Model Claims Benchmark Scores Rivaling Anthropic - Bloomberg See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

August 3, 20261 hr 43 min

#253 - Opus 5, Gemini 3.6, Kimi K3, Hugging Face Hack

Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/29/2026 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: Major releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health. Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation. Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments). Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence. 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 (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:35) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge (00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times + Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival (00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat (00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge (00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge Applications & Business (00:19:57) Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research (00:24:31) AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic | The Verge (00:30:19) Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Ansthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal (00:32:42) Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue (00:35:24) OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups Projects & Open Source (00:37:53) Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3 For Advanced Reasoning, Coding, And Knowledge Work + Moonshot AI's Kimi Halts New C-User Subscriptions Amid Compute Power Crunch — BigGo Finance (00:44:39) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch (00:48:19) Scaling Agentic RL: 365,000+ Environments for SWE, Terminal, and Search Policy & Safety (00:51:56) OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system | The Verge + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face (01:05:28) OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress (01:12:21) OpenAI, Anthropic Staff Share Letter Asking US to Help Pace AI Progress + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face (01:17:26) Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluations Claude’s values across models and languages (01:24:18) OpenAI Principles for National Security Partnerships (01:30:45) China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns - Dexerto Research & Advancements (01:33:04) Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude (01:36:32) AIDE²: The First Evidence of Recursive Self-Improvement See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

July 15, 20261 hr 25 min

#252 - GPT 5.6, Grok 4.5, Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion, AI 2040

Our 252th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/11/2026 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 publicly rolled out GPT-5.6 (including Sol and Luna) and rebranded its desktop agentic coding product as ChatGPT Work, amid disputed claims about whether the US government effectively green-lit and delayed the release and concerns about inconsistent, ad hoc frontier-model oversight and jailbreakability. New model releases intensified pricing and capability competition: SpaceX AI’s Grok 4.5 launched as a very low-cost, Opus-class coding model with minimal safety documentation, while Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 with aggressive pricing, large coding/cyber benchmark gains, and a lengthy safety evaluation. Meta also previewed Muse Video and rolled out Muse Image before quickly backtracking after backlash over easy generation of images of public Instagram accounts; separately, Chinese open-source models grew to over 30% of weekly OpenRouter tokens as cost pressure increased, alongside discussion of risks like potential insider threats. Infrastructure, policy, and safety developments included Meta exploring selling AI compute as a cloud business, US energy regulators pressing grid operators on large-load data-center connections, Anthropic publishing a “global workspace” interpretability method for verbalizable internal representations, reports that China may restrict overseas access to top models, and AI 2040 proposing US–China coordination to slow progress until alignment improves. 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 (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:01:33) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:03) OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 after government greenlight — and announces ‘ChatGPT Work’ | The Verge + The new ChatGPT superapp takes aim at Claude Desktop + OpenAI is shutting down its Atlas web browser + OpenAI’s latest AI model likely has similar cyber vulnerabilities to one that led to U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s Fable, British agency says (00:15:41) SpaceXAI, Cursor Launch Grok 4.5 AI Model for Finance, Legal Applications - Bloomberg + SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5 Undercuts Anthropic and OpenAI on Coding Agent Pricing (00:20:29) Meta says its new AI model is ready to compete on coding | The Verge (00:27:21) Introducing Muse Image and Muse Video + https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/technology/meta-muse-images-instagram-removal.html (00:29:01) Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as costs surge + Anthropic and OpenAI Face a New Threat from China Applications & Business (00:35:21) Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power - Bloomberg (00:46:32) US energy regulator sets ultimatum for data centres + Grid operator PJM orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale US power outages Projects & Open Source (00:51:40) Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding (00:57:44) Tencent Releases Hy3: An Open 295B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Model with 21B Active Parameters and 256K Context - MarkTechPost Policy & Safety (00:58:30) Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models (01:09:29) Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China's top AI models, sources say (01:12:53) The ex-OpenAI employee behind ‘AI 2027’ recommends a rosier path - The Washington Post + AI 2040: Plan A See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

July 9, 20261 hr 30 min

#251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat

Our 251st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/01/2026 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 redeploys Claude Fable 5 after talks with the US government, adding new cybersecurity classifiers, drafting a jailbreak-severity framework with major partners, and expanding model-testing coordination; broader concerns remain about the inevitability of jailbreaks and uneven release constraints versus OpenAI. Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 with time-limited discounted pricing, improved agentic coding and benchmark performance, reduced misaligned behavior, and default cyber safeguards despite relatively weaker cybersecurity capability than top-tier models. New tools and apps include Google NotebookLM generating TikTok-style vertical video summaries of uploaded research and Google releasing Nano Banana 2 Lite, a faster, cheaper image generator available via API. Business and research updates span Etched’s push toward full-stack inference hardware with major funding and contracts, Baidu’s AI chip unit IPO ambitions, Agility Robotics’ SPAC plan, DeepSeek’s hiring expansion, and China’s open-source Longcat 2.0 MoE model with notable large-scale training and efficiency techniques alongside new long-horizon agent benchmarks. 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 (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:02:07) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:02:32) Trump drops restrictions on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models | TechCrunch (00:16:08) Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 5 as a cheaper way to run agents | TechCrunch (00:20:35) Google’s NotebookLM can sum up your research in a TikTok-style clip | The Verge (00:22:08) Google introduces a faster, cheaper image generator with Nano Banana 2 Lite | TechCrunch Applications & Business (00:22:50) Etched Pulls 400+ Engineers From NVIDIA, TSMC & More to Build a New Frontier Inference Cluster For AI Which Is Already Worth $1B in Demand (00:31:17) Baidu Rallies on AI Chip IPO Report (00:33:54) Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC in a $2.5B deal | TechCrunch (00:37:06) China's DeepSeek plans to at least double staff in all departments | Reuters Projects & Open Source (00:40:44) Introducing LongCat-2.0 (00:57:42) OSWorld2.0: Benchmarking Computer Use Agents on Long-Horizon Real-World Tasks (01:01:33) TUA-Bench: A Benchmark for General-Purpose Terminal-Use Agents (01:04:29) SWE-Together: Evaluating Coding Agents in Interactive User Sessions Policy & Safety (01:07:38) Taiwan raids Supermicro and two supply-chain partners in widening Nvidia smuggling probe — nine sites hit as six people summoned for questioning | Tom's Hardware Research & Advancements (01:11:53) Autodata: An agentic data scientist to create high quality synthetic data (01:17:13) Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMs Synthetic Media & Art (01:22:54) Neon Buys ‘Artificial,’ a Film About OpenAI, After Amazon Dropped It - The New York Times (01:26:32) Tidal won’t pay royalties on AI-generated music, but isn’t banning it outright | The Verge See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .

July 7, 20261 hr 43 min

#250 - Mythos Mess, GPT 5.6-Sol, GLM 5.2

Our 250th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 06/27/2026 Note from Andrey: sorry this is late again! this episode release somehow didn't save and I only realized late, my bad... next one will be out way 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: US government gating of frontier AI expands: Anthropic gets permission to release Mythos-5 to selected companies/agencies after a standoff, OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 “Sol” with initial access restricted to ~20 approved organizations, and Meta is pressed to submit models to “voluntary” review—signaling an emerging de facto licensing regime with geopolitical treaty implications. Model capability and safety signals remain murky: limited benchmark disclosure, claims of token-efficiency comparisons, and third-party reports that GPT-5.6 shows extreme benchmark “cheating” sensitivity highlight steering/alignment bottlenecks and uncertainty about real-world long-horizon behavior. Compute supply chain competition accelerates: OpenAI unveils its Jalapeño inference ASIC with Broadcom on TSMC 3nm; Amazon explores selling Trainium to data-center operators; Micron invests in Anthropic with memory supply agreements; SK Hynix surpasses Samsung on HBM-driven valuation; Groq raises $650M while pivoting toward neocloud. Open source and societal response intensify: GLM 5.2 (MIT-licensed) delivers strong long-context coding performance with rapid optimizations; EconEvals maps job-task exposure; bipartisan workforce initiatives and tax credits launch; DeepMind and Apollo publish loss-of-control/control roadmaps; Hollywood reportedly drops a near-finished Sam Altman biopic amid industry pressure. 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 (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes): (00:00:10) Intro / Banter (00:03:42) News Preview Tools & Apps (00:04:41) Anthropic allowed to release Mythos AI to some companies, agencies + Anthropic’s Mythos mess is only getting worse + Anthropic floats proposal to Lutnick to end US ban of powerful 'Mythos,' 'Fable' AI models: sources (00:07:58) OpenAI Launches GPT-5.6 Sol Under First-Ever US Government-Gated AI Rollout | MLQ News + OpenAI's new flagship model GPT-5.6 Sol cheats on software tests more than any model before it + Summary of METR's predeployment evaluation of GPT-5.6 Sol (00:24:03) U.S. Presses Meta to Agree to A.I. Reviews - The New York Times (00:30:11) Anthropic’s Claude Tag is learning your company, one Slack message at a time | TechCrunch Applications & Business (00:32:49) OpenAI reveals its first AI processor: Jalapeño | The Verge (00:38:29) Amazon in Talks to Sell Custom AI Chips in Bid to Undercut Nvidia (00:41:46) Micron invests in Anthropic and grants it a supply deal (00:45:18) SK Hynix overtakes Samsung to become South Korea's most valuable company | Reuters (00:49:12) AI chipmaker Groq confirms $650M raise, re-staffs after Nvidia's $20B not-acqui-hire deal | TechCrunch (00:52:47) SpaceX inks compute deal with Reflection AI, an open source AI lab | TechCrunch Projects & Open Source (00:54:46) GLM-5.2: Built for Long-Horizon Tasks + How we built the world’s fastest API for GLM-5.2 + nvidia/GLM-5.2-NVFP4 · Hugging Face (01:03:04) EconEvals Policy & Safety (01:05:40) $500 million AI jobs push launches with bipartisan backing - POLITICO (01:07:47) Rep. Sam Liccardo unveils AI workforce tax credit bill - POLITICO (01:08:56) Google DeepMind announced an “AI Control Roadmap” for improving AI agent security. | The Verge + Securing internal systems against increasingly capable and imperfectly aligned AI (01:14:00) The Loss of Control Playbook: Degrees, Dynamics, and Preparedness + The Loss of Control Playbook (01:16:42) Why corporate AI super PACs spent $27 million on a local election | The Verge (01:20:25) Exclusive: Conservatives plan nationwide protest against AI data centers Research & Advancements (01:27:37) Revisiting the Platonic Representation Hypothesis: An Aristotelian View (01:31:39) Wan-Streamer v0.1: End-to-end Real-time Interactive Foundation Models (01:33:59) Tapered Language Models Synthetic Media & Art (01:36:54) Hollywood is bending the knee to OpenAI | The Verge See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .