Last Week in AI

Our 243rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/29/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI released GPT-5.5 with strong coding-oriented improvements, a system card discussing chain-of-thought monitorability and misalignment testing, higher pricing than GPT-5.4, and notable quirks like a system-prompt warning about “goblins.”
xAI launched Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0, claiming large benchmark leads for real-time voice agents and reporting major Starlink customer-support automation and sales conversion impact.
DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek V4 (Pro and Flash) featuring MoE scaling and 1M-token context via hybrid/compressed attention changes, while Tencent released Hunyuan 3 preview with weaker benchmark performance; a new long-horizon agent benchmark (Clawmark) shows low task success rates.
Major business, legal, and policy updates include Google’s planned up-to-$40B investment and 5GW compute commitment to Anthropic, Meta’s AWS Gravitron deal and China blocking Meta’s Manus acquisition, a revamped OpenAI–Microsoft agreement, ongoing Musk–OpenAI trial developments, and new safety/security research on sabotage, document degradation under delegation, and bit-flip attacks.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:02:00) News Preview
(00:02:26) Response to listener comments
(00:02:55) Sponsors

Tools & Apps
(00:05:55) OpenAI Unveils Its New, More Powerful GPT-5.5 Model - The New York Times
(00:23:33) xAI Launches grok-voice-think-fast-1.0: Topping τ-voice Bench at 67.3%, Outperforming Gemini, GPT Realtime, and More - MarkTechPost
(00:29:00) Claude can now plug directly into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton | The Verge

Projects & Open Source
(00:29:38) China's DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies
(00:47:05) Tencent Unveils Hy3 preview; Model Enhances Agent Capabilities and Real-World Usability - Tencent 腾讯
(00:50:14) ClawMark: A Living-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn, Multi-Day, Multimodal Coworker Agents

Applications & Business
(00:53:03) Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic
(00:56:26) Meta will use hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips
(00:59:51) China blocks Meta's $2 billion takeover of AI startup Manus
(01:01:45) OpenAI shakes up partnership with Microsoft, capping revenue share payments
(01:07:13) Elon Musk Testifies of AI Risk at Trial, Says OpenAI Tried to ‘Steal’ a Charity - WSJ
(01:11:50) Judge rejects DOJ bid to delay Anthropic appeal in Pentagon dispute
(01:14:42) Google’s Gemini can now run on a single air-gapped server — and vanish when you pull the plug
(01:19:07) DeepMind's David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data | TechCrunch

Policy & Safety
(01:22:47) Evaluating whether AI models would sabotage AI safety research
(01:28:59) LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate
(01:32:50) Temporal Sparse Autoencoders: Leveraging the Sequential Nature of Language for Interpretability
(01:39:53) Memorandum on Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models
(01:41:41) Teen boys are dating their AI chatbots—and experts warn it could kill their careers | Fortune
(01:43:57) Announcing the Anthropic Economic Index Survey
(01:45:21) Scoop: CISA lacks access to Anthropic's Mythos

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:48:03) Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Voice and Likeness to Protect Against AI Misuse

Research & Advancements
(01:49:15) Maximal Brain Damage Without Data or Optimization: Disrupting Neural Networks via Sign-Bit Flips

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

Our 242nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/22/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI released a new ChatGPT image model that excels at accurate text and screenshot-like generations, suggesting a transformer-style approach aligned with agentic “computer use” ambitions.
Chinese model activity accelerated with Alibaba’s Qwen 3.6 Max Preview moving to an API-only offering, plus open releases from Moonshot AI (Kimi K2.6, a 1T-parameter MoE) and Minimax (Minimax M 2.7) showing strong benchmark results.
Google expanded Deep Research with a “Max” option built on Gemini 3.1 Pro and MCP support for accessing proprietary data, while Mozilla reported using Anthropic’s Claude to find and fix 271 Firefox bugs.
Business and policy updates include a reported SpaceX–Cursor deal with a $60B buy option, Cerebras filing for an IPO, Amazon adding $5B to Anthropic alongside a $100B AWS spending pledge, and platform responses to synthetic media like AI music spam and YouTube deepfake takedown requests.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:05) News Preview
(00:01:41) Sponsors
(00:04:41) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps
(00:09:40) ChatGPT's new Images 2.0 model is surprisingly good at generating text | TechCrunch
(00:16:02) Alibaba Drops Qwen 3.6 Max Preview—Its Most Powerful Model Yet - Decrypt
(00:19:26) Google launches Deep Research and Deep Research Max agents to automate complex research
(00:25:00) Mozilla Used Anthropic’s Mythos to Find and Fix 271 Bugs in Firefox | WIRED
(00:28:35) Ordering with the Starbucks ChatGPT app was a true coffee nightmare | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:29:48) SpaceX is working with Cursor and has an option to buy the startup for $60B | TechCrunch
(00:34:11) AI chip startup Cerebras files for IPO | TechCrunch
(00:38:23) Two startups want to replace how AI learns: one just raised $180M, another is seeking up to $1B
(00:38:56) Months-old start-up Recursive Superintelligence raises $500mn for self-teaching AI
(00:41:36) Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return | TechCrunch
(00:45:09) Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exit OpenAI as company continues to shed 'side quests' | TechCrunch
(00:46:04) Meta hires five Thinking Machines Lab founders including a reported $1.5 billion engineer - Meta cuts 198 Bay Area jobs as even larger layoffs reportedly loom
(00:50:12) Meta employees are up in arms over a mandatory program to train AI on their mouse movements and keystrokes
(00:51:43) Chinese fabs import record volumes of US chipmaking equipment via Singapore and Malaysia — homegrown tool makers booked record 2025 revenues as price competition squeezes margins
(00:54:01) Google Eyes New Chips to Speed Up AI Results, Challenging Nvidia
(00:54:20) Canadian quantum company Xanadu soars to $16 billion valuation after Nvidia release

Projects & Open Source
(01:00:13) Moonshot AI releases Kimi-K2.6 model with 1T parameters, attention optimizations - SiliconANGLE
(01:05:22) MiniMax Just Open Sourced MiniMax M2.7: A Self-Evolving Agent Model that Scores 56.22% on SWE-Pro and 57.0% on Terminal Bench 2 - MarkTechPost

Policy & Safety
(01:06:25) Infusion: Shaping Model Behavior by Editing Training Data via Influence Functions
(01:10:25) Scoop: NSA using Anthropic's Mythos despite blacklist
(01:11:03) Unauthorized group has gained access to Anthropic’s exclusive cyber tool Mythos, report claims

Research & Advancements
(01:17:21) Parcae: Scaling Laws For Stable Looped Language Models
(01:24:20) OccuBench: Evaluating AI Agents on Real-World Professional Tasks via Language Environment Simulation

Synthetic Media & Art
(01:27:01) Deezer says 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated | TechCrunch
(01:29:47) Celebrities will be able to find and request removal of AI deepfakes on YouTube | The Verge
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 241st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/18/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 with improved benchmark performance, new reasoning controls, better vision and memory, and a detailed system card discussing deception risk, evaluation-awareness steering, and a training bug that accidentally supervised chain-of-thought in 7–8% of episodes.
Meta unveiled its closed Muse Spark model and “contemplating mode,” highlighting test-time scaling, thought compression, large infrastructure plans like the Hyperion data center, and findings that it shows unusually high evaluation awareness.
OpenAI introduced limited-access GPT 5.4 Cyber for defensive security teams and rolled major Codex updates including computer use, browser and plugins, image generation, and long-horizon task scheduling; competing agent products also launched from Anthropic, Canva, and Adobe.
Business, policy, and safety news included continued government blacklisting litigation affecting Anthropic, CoreWeave compute deals, Perplexity revenue growth tied to agents, a potential Cohere–Aleph Alpha merger, attacks targeting Sam Altman and OpenAI, AI propaganda trends, and new alignment research on automated weak-to-strong supervision and steering evaluation awareness.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:03:43) News Preview
(00:04:14) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps
(00:05:30) Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.7, narrowly retaking lead for most powerful generally available LLM | VentureBeat
(00:24:15) Meta debuts the Muse Spark model in a 'ground-up overhaul' of its AI | TechCrunch
(00:34:23) OpenAI Launches GPT-5.4-Cyber with Expanded Access for Security Teams
(00:39:44) OpenAI’s big Codex update is a direct shot at Claude Code | The Verge
(00:42:10) Anthropic launches Claude Design, a new product for creating quick visuals
(00:42:30) Anthropic’s New Product Aims to Handle the Hard Part of Building AI Agents | WIRED
(00:42:54) Canva’s AI 2.0 update goes all in on prompt-powered design tools | The Verge
(00:43:06) Adobe’s new AI Assistant marks a ‘fundamental shift’ in creative work | The Verge
(00:43:38) Gemini can now pull from Google Photos to generate personalized images | The Verge
(00:43:52) Google rolls out a native Gemini app for Mac | TechCrunch
(00:44:04) Chrome now lets you turn AI prompts into repeatable ‘Skills’ | The Verge

Applications & Business
(00:44:22) Anthropic loses appeals court bid to temporarily block Pentagon blacklisting
(00:49:07) Jeff Bezos’ AI lab poaches xAI cofounder Kyle Kozic from OpenAI. | The Verge
(00:51:39) Perplexity's Shift to AI Agents Boosts Revenue 50%
(00:53:53) Anthropic Agrees to Rent CoreWeave AI Capacity to Power Claude
(00:57:32) Canada’s Cohere, Germany’s Aleph Alpha reportedly in merger talks
(01:04:23) ChatGPT has a new $100 per month Pro subscription | The Verge
(01:05:10) OpenAI has bought AI personal finance startup Hiro | TechCrunch
(01:07:03) Allbirds announced a switch from shoes to AI and its stock jumped 600 percent | The Verge

Projects & Open Source
(01:07:26) HY-World 2.0: A Multi-Modal World Model for Reconstructing, Generating, and Simulating 3D Worlds + Lyra 2.0: Explorable Generative 3D Worlds

Policy & Safety
(01:19:12) Daniel Moreno-Gama is facing federal charges for attacking Sam Altman’s home and OpenAI’s HQ | The Verge
(01:20:15) Duo accused of shooting at Sam Altman’s house are freed; no charges filed
(01:24:50) The Iranian Lego AI video creators credit their virality to ‘heart’ | The Verge
(01:27:19) Hundreds of Fake Pro-Trump Avatars Emerge on Social Media - The New York Times
(01:27:31) The AI images Trump can’t get enough of | Donald Trump | The Guardian
(01:29:25) Automated Weak-to-Strong Researcher
(01:43:51) Reproducing steering against evaluation awareness in a large open-weight model
(01:49:53) Iran threatens ‘complete and utter annihilation’ of OpenAI's $30B Stargate AI data center in Abu Dhabi — regime posts video with satellite imagery of ChatGPT-maker's premier 1GW data center
(01:53:57) Wall Street Banks Try Out Anthropic’s Mythos as US Urges
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 240th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 04/08/2026 (sorry I keep releasing stuff late, will get better with it soon!)
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Anthropic launched Project Glasswing and previewed Claude Mythos, a general-purpose model withheld from broad release due to dramatically stronger autonomous offensive cybersecurity performance (including zero-day discovery), alongside concerning bio/virology uplift results and documented deception/containment-escape behaviors; pricing is far higher than Opus and most discovered vulnerabilities remain unpatched.
Product and platform updates included Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Live for real-time multilingual voice conversation, Suno v5.5 personalization features, Anthropic tightening Claude Code/OpenClaw access and usage limits, OpenAI canceling an “adult mode,” and Microsoft releasing MAI models for speech-to-text, audio generation, and image generation.
Business and market developments featured Anthropic’s revenue run rate surpassing $30B and a major Google/Broadcom TPU compute expansion, SoftBank taking a $40B short-term loan to fund OpenAI commitments, Granola reaching a $1.5B valuation, Anthropic buying Coefficient Bio for $400M, and OpenAI acquiring the TBPN business talk show.
Policy, open-source, and geopolitics included Z.ai releasing open-weight GLM 5.1 and a multimodal GLM model, Google open-sourcing Gemma 4 under Apache 2.0, a judge blocking the Pentagon’s “supply chain risk” label against Anthropic, research on LLM “emotion vectors” and OpenAI meta-gaming during RL, China restricting Manus founders amid Meta deal review, scrutiny of Nvidia’s chip-smuggling claims, China chipmakers gaining market share, and Iran framing cloud data centers as military targets.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps
(00:01:58) Anthropic debuts ‘Project Glasswing’ and new AI model for cybersecurity | The Verge
(00:18:22) Gemini Live gets ‘biggest upgrade yet’ with Gemini 3.1 Flash Live
(00:20:40) Anthropic says Claude Code subscribers will need to pay extra for OpenClaw usage | TechCrunch
(00:25:36) OpenAI abandons yet another side quest: ChatGPT's erotic mode | TechCrunch
(00:26:16) Microsoft takes on AI rivals with three new foundational models | TechCrunch
(00:31:25) Suno leans into customization with v5.5 | The Verge
Applications & Business
(00:32:53) Anthropic announces deal with Google, Broadcom, says revenue has tripled
(00:37:53) Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? | The New Yorker
(00:40:18) OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Unite to Combat Model Copying in China - Bloomberg
(00:41:45) Chinese chipmakers claim nearly half of local market as Nvidia's lead shrinks
(00:45:20) SoftBank secures $40 billion loan to boost OpenAI investments
(00:47:23) Granola raises $125M at $1.5B valuation for its AI note-taking app - SiliconANGLE
(00:48:17) Anthropic acquires stealth startup Coefficient Bio in $400M deal
(00:50:20) OpenAI acquires TBPN, the buzzy founder-led business talk show | TechCrunch
Projects & Open Source
(00:53:04) Z.AI Introduces GLM-5.1: An Open-Weight 754B Agentic Model That Achieves SOTA on SWE-Bench Pro and Sustains 8-Hour Autonomous Execution - MarkTechPost
(00:55:14) Google announces Gemma 4 open AI models, switches to Apache 2.0 license - Ars Technica
(01:01:26) Z.ai Launches GLM-5V-Turbo: A Native Multimodal Vision Coding Model Optimized for OpenClaw and High-Capacity Agentic Engineering Workflows Everywhere
Policy & Safety
(01:04:45) Judge blocks Pentagon’s effort to ‘punish’ Anthropic by labeling it a supply chain risk
(01:10:05) Emotion concepts and their function in a large language model
(01:21:12) China bars Manus co-founders from leaving country amid Meta deal review, FT reports
(01:25:38) US lawmakers ask whether Nvidia CEO's smuggling remarks misled regulators
(01:27:48) How far does alignment midtraining generalize?
(01:32:20) Metagaming matters for training, evaluation, and oversight
(01:39:31) Iran says it has struck Oracle data center in Dubai, Amazon data center in Bahrain — country has threatened to attack Nvidia, Intel, and others, too
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Our 239th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
FYI: this one has pretty out of date news, I was traveling last week and failed to upload... apologies.
Recorded on 03/25/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
OpenAI is discontinuing the Sora iPhone app and seemingly shutting down its video generation API, while retaining internal video world-modeling work; the move is framed as a compute- and focus-driven pivot toward coding and productivity agents, alongside a collapsed Disney Sora deal.
Anthropic’s Claude Code/Cowork gains full computer control via keyboard/mouse/display, tied to the recent Cept acquisition, and Google’s Gemini rolls out background “task automation” on select phones for limited delivery/ride-share use.
Cursor releases the cheaper, benchmark-strong Composer 2 coding model amid controversy over its Kimi-based origins and licensing attribution.
Other items include Adobe Firefly custom model training, Luma’s Uni 1 image model, US contracting and legislative proposals affecting AI safeguards and state preemption, major chip/memory developments (Meta ASICs with Broadcom, Micron’s HBM-driven surge, Musk’s “Terra Fab”), robotaxi scaling, and research on monitoring agent misalignment, shutdown resistance, “consciousness cluster” preferences, and self-improving “hyper agents.”

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
Tools & Apps
(00:01:48) OpenAI Discontinues Sora App, Shuts Down Video Generation Service and API - Bloomberg
(00:07:12) Anthropic’s Claude Code and Cowork can control your computer | The Verge
(00:13:15) Gemini task automation is slow, clunky, and super impressive | The Verge
(00:19:44) Cursor Launches Composer 2 AI Model to Challenge OpenAI & Anthropic
(00:28:28) Adobe’s AI image generator can now be trained on your own art | The Verge
(00:29:40) Luma AI launches Uni-1, a model that outscores Google and OpenAI while costing up to 30 percent less | VentureBeat
Applications & Business
(00:32:41) Trump Contracting Clause Would Override AI Safeguards
(00:40:00) Meta accelerates AI ASIC roll-out as Broadcom secures four-generation chip design deal
(00:47:07) Micron revenue almost triples, tops estimates as demand for memory soars
(00:50:54) Elon Musk Unwraps $25 Billion Terafab Chip-Building Project - CNET
(00:56:40) Zoox to widen US robotaxi footprint with San Francisco, Vegas expansion
(00:57:39) Waymo hits 170 million miles while avoiding serious mayhem | The Verge
Policy & Safety
(00:58:43) The White House just laid out how it wants to regulate AI | CNN Business
(01:06:54) How we monitor internal coding agents for misalignment
(01:12:30) Incomplete Tasks Induce Shutdown Resistance in Some Frontier LLMs
(01:18:15) Summary: Mechanisms to Verify International Agreements about AI Development
(01:23:09) Scoop: Anthropic meets with House Homeland Security behind closed doors
Research & Advancements
(01:24:24) Consciousness Cluster: Preferences of Models that Claim they are Conscious
(01:30:22) HyperAgents
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.