#206 - Llama 4, Nova Act, xAI buys X, PaperBench

Our 206th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/07/2025

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Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
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In this episode:

• Meta releases LlAMA-4, a series of advanced large language models, sparking debate on performance and release timing, with models featuring up to 2 trillion parameters for different configurations and applications.
• Amazon's AGI Lab debuts NOVA Act, an AI agent for web browser control, boasting competitive benchmarking against OpenAI's and Anthropic's best agents.
• OpenAI's image generation capabilities and ongoing financing developments, notably a $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, highlight significant advancements and strategic shifts in the tech giant’s operations.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter

Tools & Apps

• (00:01:46) Meta releases Llama 4, a new crop of flagship AI models
• (00:13:55) Amazon unveils Nova Act, an AI agent that can control a web browser
• (00:17:06) Alibaba Preparing for Flagship AI Model Release as Soon as April
• (00:17:59) Runway releases an impressive new video-generating AI model
• (00:19:10) Adobe launches Premiere Pro’s generative AI video extender
• (00:20:54) OpenAI prepares reasoning slider and memory update for ChatGPT users

Applications & Business

• (00:21:28) Nvidia H20 Chips: $16 Billion Orders from ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent
• (00:24:45) Elon Musk sells X for $33 billion to his own AI startup company xAI
• (00:28:00) SoftBank dethroned Microsoft as OpenAI's largest investor, pushing the ChatGPT maker's market cap to $300 billion — but reportedly buried itself in debt
• (00:30:48) DeepMind is holding back release of AI research to give Google an edge
• (00:34:06) SMIC Is Rumored To Complete 5nm Chip Development By 2025; Costs Could Be Up To 50 Percent Higher Than TSMC’s Version Due To The Use Of Older-Generation Equipment
• (00:36:04) Google-backed Isomorphic Labs raises $600m to advance AI drug discovery

Research & Advancements

• (00:38:03) PaperBench: Evaluating AI's Ability to Replicate AI Research
• (00:43:50) Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding RL with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains
• (00:48:39) Inference-Time Scaling for Complex Tasks: Where We Stand and What Lies Ahead
• (00:54:34) Overtrained Language Models Are Harder to Fine-Tune

Policy & Safety

• (00:58:28) Taking a responsible path to AGI
• (01:02:32) This A.I. Forecast Predicts Storms Ahead
• (01:06:24) The Secrets and Misdirection Behind Sam Altman’s Firing From OpenAI