Last Week in AI

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**Last Week in AI**

Weekly summaries of the AI news that matters!

Latest Episodes:

#258 - Opus 5.5, Sol and Luna, Muse, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Xi Oct 02, 2026

Show notes

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

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

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.

#257 - GPT 6 Astra, AI Extinction, Security Incidents Sep 24, 2026

Show notes

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:

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

#256 - Fable 5.1, Astra Tease, Gemini 3.8 Flash Sep 08, 2026

Show notes

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

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

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.

#255 - Gemini 3.7, Jalapeño, Qwen 3.8, Drones Aug 31, 2026

Show notes

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

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

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.

#254 - Rogue AI hacking, bio-weapons, Dean & Hassabis out Aug 11, 2026

Show notes

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

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.

#253 - Opus 5, Gemini 3.6, Kimi K3, Hugging Face Hack Aug 03, 2026

Show notes

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

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

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.

#252 - GPT 5.6, Grok 4.5, Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion, AI 2040 Jul 15, 2026

Show notes

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

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.

#251 - Mythos Back, Sonnet 5, Etched, LongCat Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

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

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.

#250 - Mythos Mess, GPT 5.6-Sol, GLM 5.2 Jul 07, 2026

Show notes

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

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

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.

#249 - Fable 5 ban, SpaceX Cursor + IPO, OSS Aplenty Jun 25, 2026

Show notes

Our 249th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 06/17/2026

Note: work has kept me from publishing episodes promptly, apologies! I'll get back on schedule soon.

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 cut off access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 after a US government order tied to alleged jailbreaks, prompting debate over inconsistent policy, export controls, and the practicality of preventing jailbreaks.
SpaceX completed an IPO at a roughly $1.75T valuation and then moved to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60B, positioning xAI with Cursor’s talent, data, and product to compete more effectively in coding.
Infrastructure and business updates include Anthropic pursuing direct US data center leases backed by Google, leaked documents showing OpenAI’s revenue growth alongside large losses, and chatbot market share shifting with ChatGPT below 50% as Gemini and Claude gain.
Projects and policy highlights include OpenRouter’s Fusion multi-model synthesis, new open releases from Moonshot, Qwen, and NVIDIA, DOJ support for xAI’s unpermitted gas turbines in Memphis, and a Munich court ruling Google liable for false AI Overview statements.

A thank you to our current sponsors:

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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):