Last Week in AI

Latest Episodes:

#218 - Github Spark, MegaScience, US AI Action Plan Jul 31, 2025

Show notes

Our 218th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/25/2025

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/.

In this episode:

GitHub introduces Vibe Coding with Spark, engaging users with natural language and visual controls to develop full-stack applications.
AI coding tools from Gemin, CLI and RepleIt face significant issues, inadvertently deleting user data and highlighting the importance of careful management.
US release never Award Americans, AI Action Plan outlining economic, technical, and policy strategies to maintain leadership in AI technology.
Newly released Mega Science and SWE-Perf data sets evaluate AI reasoning and performance capabilities in diverse scientific and software engineering tasks.

Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:31) News Preview
Tools & Apps

Applications & Business

Projects & Open Source

- (00:32:05) MegaScience: Pushing the Frontiers of Post-Training Datasets for Science Reasoning
- (00:43:09) TikTok Researchers Introduce SWE-Perf: The First Benchmark for Repository-Level Code Performance Optimization - MarkTechPost
Research & Advancements

- (00:47:17) Subliminal Learning: Language models transmit behavioral traits via hidden signals in data
- (00:55:34) Inverse Scaling in Test-Time Compute
- (01:02:34) Scaling Laws for Optimal Data Mixtures
Policy & Safety

- (01:07:35) White House Unveils America’s AI Action Plan
- (01:16:55) Chain of Thought Monitorability: A New and Fragile Opportunity for AI Safety
- (01:20:20) Self-preservation or Instruction Ambiguity? Examining the Causes of Shutdown Resistance
- (01:24:00) People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"
- (01:28:03) Meta refuses to sign EU’s AI code of practice

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

#217 - ChatGPT Agent, Kimi k2, Hiring Drama Jul 23, 2025

Show notes

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 guest co-host Jon Krohn.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

Check out Jon's workshop on Agentic AI Engineering, and find his consultancy here.

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

Applications & Business

Research & Advancements

Policy & Safety

Synthetic Media & Art

(00:48:47) Video game actors' strike officially ends after AI deal

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

#216 - Grok 4, Project Rainier, Kimi K2 Jul 14, 2025

Show notes

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 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:

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

Projects & Open Source

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

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

#215 - Runway games, Meta Superintelligence, ERNIE 4.5, Adaptive Tree Search Jul 08, 2025

Show notes

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 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:

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

Applications & Business

Projects & Open Source

Research & Advancements

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

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

#214 - Gemini CLI, io drama, AlphaGenome, copyright rulings Jul 04, 2025

Show notes

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 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:

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

Research & Advancements

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

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

#213 - Midjourney video, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, LiveCodeBench Pro Jun 26, 2025

Show notes

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 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:

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

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

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

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

#212 - o3 pro, Cursor 1.0, ProRL, Midjourney Sued Jun 17, 2025

Show notes

Our 212th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/13/2025

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/.

In this episode:

OpenAI introduces O3 PRO for ChatGPT, highlighting significant improvements in performance and cost-efficiency.
Anthropic sees an influx of talent from OpenAI and DeepMind, with significantly higher retention rates and competitive advantages in AI capabilities.
New research indicates that reinforcing negative responses in LLMs significantly improves performance across all metrics, highlighting novel approaches in reinforcement learning.
A security flaw in Microsoft Copilot demonstrates the growing risk of AI agents being hacked, emphasizing the need for robust protection against zero-click attacks.

Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:11) Intro / Banter
(00:01:31) News Preview
(00:02:46) Response to Listener Reviews
Tools & Apps
Applications & Business
Projects & Open Source
- (00:51:26) ProRL: Prolonged Reinforcement Learning Expands Reasoning Boundaries in Large Language Models
Research & Advancements
- (00:57:27) Kinetics: Rethinking Test-Time Scaling Laws
- (01:05:12) The Surprising Effectiveness of Negative Reinforcement in LLM Reasoning
- (01:10:45) Predicting Empirical AI Research Outcomes with Language Models
- (01:15:02) EXP-Bench: Can AI Conduct AI Research Experiments?
Policy & Safety
Synthetic Media & Art
- (01:37:32) Disney And NBCUniversal Sue AI Company Midjourney For Copyright Infringement
- (01:40:39) AMC Networks is teaming up with AI company Runway

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

#211 - Claude Voice, Flux Kontext, wrong RL research? Jun 03, 2025

Show notes

Our 211th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/31/2025

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:

Recent AI podcast covers significant AI news: startups, new tools, applications, investments in hardware, and research advancements.
Discussions include the introduction of various new tools and applications such as Flux's new image generating models and Perplexity's new spreadsheet and dashboard functionalities.
A notable segment focuses on OpenAI's partnership with the UAE and discussions on potential legislation aiming to prevent states from regulating AI for a decade.
Concerns around model behaviors and safety are discussed, highlighting incidents like Claude Opus 4's blackmail attempt and Palisade Research's tests showing AI models bypassing shutdown commands.

Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:39) News Preview
(00:02:50) Response to Listener Comments
Tools & Apps

(00:07:10) Anthropic launches a voice mode for Claude
(00:10:35) Black Forest Labs’ Kontext AI models can edit pics as well as generate them
(00:15:30) Perplexity’s new tool can generate spreadsheets, dashboards, and more
(00:18:43) xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
(00:22:42) Opera’s new AI browser promises to write code while you sleep
(00:24:17) Google Photos debuts redesigned editor with new AI tools

Applications & Business

Projects & Open Source

(00:41:11) DeepSeek’s distilled new R1 AI model can run on a single GPU
(00:45:19) Google Unveils SignGemma, an AI Model That Can Translate Sign Language Into Spoken Text
(00:47:08) Open-sourcing circuit tracing tools
(00:49:42) Hugging Face unveils two new humanoid robots

Research & Advancements

(00:52:33) PANGU PRO MOE: MIXTURE OF GROUPED EXPERTS FOR EFFICIENT SPARSITY
(00:58:55) DataRater: Meta-Learned Dataset Curation
(01:05:05) Incorrect Baseline Evaluations Call into Question Recent LLM-RL Claims
(01:10:17) Maximizing Confidence Alone Improves Reasoning
(01:11:00) Guided by Gut: Efficient Test-Time Scaling with Reinforced Intrinsic Confidence
(01:11:44) One RL to See Them All
(01:15:05) Efficient Reinforcement Finetuning via Adaptive Curriculum Learning

Policy & Safety

(01:17:58) Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' could ban states from regulating AI for a decade
(01:24:31) Researchers claim ChatGPT o3 bypassed shutdown in controlled test
(01:30:10) Anthropic’s new AI model turns to blackmail when engineers try to take it offline
(01:31:09) Anthropic Faces Backlash As Claude 4 Opus Can Autonomously Alert Authorities
(01:35:37) Claude helps users make bioweapons
(01:35:49) The Claude 4 System Card is a Wild Read

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

#210 - Claude 4, Google I/O 2025, OpenAI+io, Gemini Diffusion May 26, 2025

Show notes

Our 210th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/23/2025

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:

Google's Gemini diffusion technology showcases significant improvements in speed and efficiency for generating text, potentially revolutionizing the auto-regressive generation paradigm.
Anthropic activates AI Safety Level 3 protections for Claude Opus 4, implementing robust measures such as bug bounties, synthetic jailbreak data, and preliminary egress bandwidth controls to mitigate bio-risk threats.
OpenAI responds to the California Attorney General, refuting claims by the not-for-private-gain coalition and defending their controversial restructuring plans amidst ongoing criticism.
Mistral delays the release of its Llama 4 Behemoth model due to training challenges, while Meta faces similar obstacles in rolling out its large-scale AI models, signaling difficulties in reaching frontier level performance.

Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:43) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:58) Anthropic’s new Claude 4 AI models can reason over many steps
(00:09:58) Google Unveils A.I. Chatbot, Signaling a New Era for Search
(00:14:04) Google rolls out Project Mariner, its web-browsing AI agent
(00:16:40) Veo 3 can generate videos — and soundtracks to go along with them
(00:21:26) Imagen 4 is Google’s newest AI image generator
(00:23:15) Google Meet is getting real-time speech translation
(00:25:36) Google’s new Jules AI agent will help developers fix buggy code
(00:26:43) GitHub’s new AI coding agent can fix bugs for you
(00:28:50) Mistral’s new Devstral model was designed for coding
Applications & Business
(00:29:53) OpenAI Unites With Jony Ive in $6.5 Billion Deal to Create A.I. Devices
(00:36:10) OpenAI’s planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco
(00:41:18) LM Arena, the organization behind popular AI leaderboards, lands $100M
(00:45:21) Nvidia CEO says next chip after H20 for China won't be from Hopper series
(00:46:39) Google’s Gemini AI app has 400M monthly active users
(00:51:15) AI Servers: End demand intact, but rising gap between upstream build and system production (2025.5.18)
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:46) Meta Is Delaying the Rollout of Its Flagship AI Model
Research & Advancements
(00:57:53) Gemini Diffusion
(01:03:07) Chain-of-Model Learning for Language Model
(01:09:16) Seek in the Dark: Reasoning via Test-Time Instance-Level Policy Gradient in Latent Space
(01:15:38) Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training
(01:20:16) Lessons from Defending Gemini Against Indirect Prompt Injections
(01:23:35) How Fast Can Algorithms Advance Capabilities?
(01:30:20) Reinforcement Learning Finetunes Small Subnetworks in Large Language Models
Policy & Safety
(01:31:12) Exclusive: What OpenAI Told California's Attorney General
(01:38:25) Activating AI Safety Level 3 Protections

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

#209 - OpenAI non-profit, US diffusion rules, AlphaEvolve May 19, 2025

Show notes

Our 209th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/16/2025

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 has decided not to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, instead opting to become a public benefit corporation influenced by legal and civic discussions.
Trump administration meetings with Saudi Arabia and the UAE have opened floodgates for AI deals, leading to partnerships with companies like Nvidia and aiming to bolster AI infrastructure in the Middle East.
DeepMind introduced Alpha Evolve, a new coding agent designed for scientific and algorithmic discovery, showing improvements in automated code generation and efficiency.
OpenAI pledges greater transparency in AI safety by launching the Safety Evaluations Hub, a platform showcasing various safety test results for their models.

Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:01:41) News Preview
(00:02:26) Response to listener comments
Applications & Business
Tools & Apps
- (00:26:39) The Day Grok Told Everyone About ‘White Genocide’
- (00:32:58) Figma releases new AI-powered tools for creating sites, app prototypes, and marketing assets
- (00:36:12) Google’s bringing Gemini to your car with Android Auto
- (00:38:49) Google debuts an updated Gemini 2.5 Pro AI model ahead of I/O
- (00:45:09) Hugging Face releases a free Operator-like agentic AI tool
Projects & Open Source
Research & Advancements
- (01:05:40) DeepMind claims its newest AI tool is a whiz at math and science problems
- (01:12:31) Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data
- (01:19:44) How far can reasoning models scale?
- (01:26:47) HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health
Policy & Safety
- (01:34:10) Trump administration officially rescinds Biden’s AI diffusion rules
- (01:37:08) Trump’s Mideast Visit Opens Floodgate of AI Deals Led by Nvidia
- (01:44:04) Scaling Laws For Scalable Oversight
- (01:49:43) OpenAI pledges to publish AI safety test results more often

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

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected