Last Week in AI
Weekly summaries of the AI news that matters!
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Episodes
7 days ago
7 days ago
Our 204th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/21/2025
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/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
Baidu launched two new multimodal models, Ernie 4.5 and Ernie X1, boasting competitive pricing and capabilities compared to Western counterparts like GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek R1.
OpenAI introduced new audio models, including impressive speech-to-text and text-to-speech systems, and added O1 Pro to their developer API at high costs, reflecting efforts for more profitability.
Nvidia and Apple announced significant hardware advancements, including Nvidia's future GPU plans and Apple's new Mac Studio offering that can run DeepSeek R1.
DeepSeek employees are facing travel restrictions, suggesting China is treating its AI development with increased secrecy and urgency, emphasizing a wartime footing in AI competition.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:36) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:50) Baidu launches two new versions of its AI model Ernie
(00:10:46) OpenAI Unveils New Audio Models to Make AI Agents Sound More Human Than Ever
(00:16:41) OpenAI’s o1-pro is the company’s most expensive AI model yet
(00:20:53) Google brings a ‘canvas’ feature to Gemini, plus Audio Overview
(00:22:18) Anthropic adds web search to its Claude chatbot
(00:23:55) xAI launches an API for generating images
Applications & Business
(00:26:28) Nvidia announces Rubin GPUs in 2026, Rubin Ultra in 2027, Feynman also added to roadmap
(00:36:25) M3 Ultra Runs DeepSeek R1 With 671 Billion Parameters Using 448GB Of Unified Memory, Delivering High Bandwidth Performance At Under 200W Power Consumption, With No Need For A Multi-GPU Setup
(00:40:07) Intel reaches 'exciting milestone' for 18A 1.8nm-class wafers with first run at Arizona fab
(00:42:45) Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, acquires a generative AI video startup
(00:44:44) Tencent Reportedly Makes Massive NVIDIA H20 Chip Purchase for WeChat’s DeepSeek Integration
Projects & Open Source
(00:46:32) Anthropic’s Not-So-Secret Weapon That’s Giving Agents a Boost
(00:50:50) Mistral AI drops new open-source model that outperforms GPT-4o Mini with fraction of parameters
(00:53:30) EXAONE Deep: Reasoning Enhanced Language Models
Research & Advancements
(00:55:58) Sample, Scrutinize and Scale: Effective Inference-Time Search by Scaling Verification
(01:07:44) Block Diffusion: Interpolating Between Autoregressive and Diffusion Language Models
(01:12:27) Communication-Efficient Language Model Training Scales Reliably and Robustly: Scaling Laws for DiLoCo
(01:18:46) Transformers without Normalization
(01:19:52) Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks
(01:26:12) HCAST: Human-Calibrated Autonomy Software Tasks
Policy & Safety
(01:26:45) Announcing Zochi, an Intology Project
(01:32:46) DeepSeek, a National Treasure in China, is Now Being Closely Guarded
(01:37:02) Claude Sonnet 3.7 (often) knows when it’s in alignment evaluations
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:42:27) US appeals court rejects copyrights for AI-generated art lacking 'human' creator
(01:45:10) Trump urged by Ben Stiller, Paul McCartney and hundreds of stars to protect AI copyright rules
Monday Mar 17, 2025
Monday Mar 17, 2025
Our 203rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/14/2025
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/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
OpenAI's new 'deep research' feature has raised concerns about cybersecurity and the potential misuse of AI models for bio-weapons and autonomous capabilities, prompting new safety and governance measures.
Google's extensive $3 billion investment in Anthropic is revealed, aligning with their AI strategy and reinforcing the importance of multiple technology partnerships.
Huawei's advancements in the AI chip industry are highlighted, with significant progress in producing chips comparable to Nvidia's H100, despite export control challenges.
China's recent directive discourages AI executives from traveling to the US, reflecting heightened security concerns and potentially signaling a more adversarial stance in the AI race.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:30) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:30) OpenAI launches new tools to help businesses build AI agents
(00:08:50) You can now test Gemini 2.0 Flash’s native image output
(00:13:32) Waymo is now offering 24/7 robotaxi rides in Silicon Valley
(00:17:19) Moonvalley releases a video generator it claims was trained on licensed content
(00:21:11) Snap introduces AI Video Lenses powered by its in-house generative model
(00:23:37) Sudowrite Launches Muse AI Model That Can Generate Narrative-Driven Fiction
Applications & Business
(00:27:48) In another chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is pouring $12B into CoreWeave
(00:30:54) Huawei’s Ascend 910C Takes on NVIDIA as China’s AI Race Heats Up: More Alleged Details
(00:36:26) Huawei reportedly acquired two million Ascend 910 AI chips from TSMC last year through shell companies
(00:40:27) Inside Google’s Investment in the A.I. Start-Up Anthropic
(00:43:26) Meta is reportedly testing in-house chips for AI training
(00:46:48) Elon Musk's xAI buys 1 million sq ft site for second Memphis data center
(00:50:02) Superintelligence startup Reflection AI launches with $130M in funding
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:11) Google calls Gemma 3 the most powerful AI model you can run on one GPU
(00:58:18) Sesame, the startup behind the viral virtual assistant Maya, releases its base AI model
(01:01:13) Reka AI Open Sourced Reka Flash 3: A 21B General-Purpose Reasoning Model that was Trained from Scratch
(01:04:19) Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in $200k
Research & Advancements
(01:06:25) Google’s Gemini Robotics AI Model Reaches Into the Physical World
(01:14:33) Optimizing Test-Time Compute via Meta Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
(01:23:29) Deep Research System Card
(01:29:50) Claude 3.7 Sonnet System Card
Policy & Safety
(01:33:24) Detecting misbehavior in frontier reasoning models
(01:39:30) China tells its AI leaders to avoid US travel over security concerns, WSJ reports
(01:43:48) Outro
Sunday Mar 09, 2025
Sunday Mar 09, 2025
Our 202nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 03/07/2025
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/.
Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP
In this episode:
Alibaba released Qwen-32B, their latest reasoning model, on par with leading models like DeepMind’s R1.
Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a funding round, valuing the company at $61.5 billion, solidifying its position as a key competitor to OpenAI.
DeepMind introduced BigBench Extra Hard, a more challenging benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
Reinforcement Learning pioneers Andrew Bartow and Rich Sutton were awarded the prestigious Turing Award for their contributions to the field.
Timestamps + Links:
cle picks:
(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:41) Episode Preview
(00:02:50) GPT-4.5 Discussion
(00:14:13) Alibaba’s New QwQ 32B Model is as Good as DeepSeek-R1 ; Outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini
(00:21:29) With Alexa Plus, Amazon finally reinvents its best product
(00:26:08) Another DeepSeek moment? General AI agent Manus shows ability to handle complex tasks
(00:29:14) Microsoft’s new Dragon Copilot is an AI assistant for healthcare
(00:32:24) Mistral’s new OCR API turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file
(00:33:19) A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Closes Deal That Values It at $61.5 Billion
(00:35:49) Nvidia-Backed CoreWeave Files for IPO, Shows Growing Revenue
(00:38:05) Waymo and Uber's Austin robotaxi expansion begins today
(00:38:54) UK competition watchdog drops Microsoft-OpenAI probe
(00:41:17) Scale AI announces multimillion-dollar defense deal, a major step in U.S. military automation
(00:44:43) DeepSeek Open Source Week: A Complete Summary
(00:45:25) DeepSeek AI Releases DualPipe: A Bidirectional Pipeline Parallelism Algorithm for Computation-Communication Overlap in V3/R1 Training
(00:53:00) Physical Intelligence open-sources Pi0 robotics foundation model
(00:54:23) BIG-Bench Extra Hard
(00:56:10) Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners
(01:01:49) The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems
(01:05:32) Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning Win the Turing Award
(01:06:56) OpenAI launches $50M grant program to help fund academic research
(01:07:25) The Nuclear-Level Risk of Superintelligent AI
(01:13:34) METR’s GPT-4.5 pre-deployment evaluations
(01:17:16) Chinese buyers are getting Nvidia Blackwell chips despite US export controls
Tuesday Mar 04, 2025
Tuesday Mar 04, 2025
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
Monday Feb 17, 2025
Monday Feb 17, 2025
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
Tuesday Feb 11, 2025
Tuesday Feb 11, 2025
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
Sunday Feb 02, 2025
Sunday Feb 02, 2025
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
Wednesday Jan 29, 2025
Wednesday Jan 29, 2025
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
Monday Jan 20, 2025
Monday Jan 20, 2025
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
Monday Jan 13, 2025
Monday Jan 13, 2025
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.
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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