Elon Musk Loses $150 Billion Suit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman - The New York Times

Related:

• Musk loses OpenAI court battle as he waited too long to sue

• All of the updates from Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s battle over OpenAI

• Elon Musk said Sam Altman ‘stole’ a non-profit — but the trial showed he had similar aims

• Five Takeaways From the Blockbuster Trial Pitting Elon Musk Against OpenAI

• OpenAI Prepares to File to Go Public in Coming Weeks

A federal jury in Oakland, California unanimously rejected Elon Musk’s $150 billion lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman on May 18, 2026, after less than two hours of deliberation. The nine-member jury found that Musk’s claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment were barred by statutes of limitations of two and three years respectively, as Musk filed his suit in 2024 despite being aware of the alleged misconduct — OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit structure — as early as 2021. Presiding Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers agreed, dismissing the case entirely.

Musk had accused Altman and Brockman of “stealing a charity” by attaching a commercial entity to OpenAI’s nonprofit foundation and accepting billions in investment from Microsoft, and had sought damages of up to $150 billion, the removal of Altman and Brockman, and the dismantling of the for-profit arm. The three-week trial featured testimony from over 20 witnesses including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, and surfaced damaging revelations about Musk himself — including that he had OpenAI researchers, including Andrej Karpathy and Ilya Sutskever, work for free at Tesla without reimbursement, and that he had aggressively sought sole control of any OpenAI for-profit structure in 2017 before leaving the board in 2018.

The verdict clears the path for what could be one of the largest IPOs in history: just two days after the ruling, OpenAI confirmed it is preparing to confidentially file an IPO prospectus with the SEC, targeting a fall 2026 public debut. The company is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is currently valued at $852 billion by private investors, and could reach a $1 trillion valuation at IPO. OpenAI reported $30 billion in annualized revenue as of April 2026 and has raised more than $180 billion from investors, though it continues to burn cash at a historic pace and has missed internal revenue and user-growth targets.

CEO Sam Altman reportedly hopes the company will be ready to list by September, though CFO Sarah Friar stressed the company would not go public until it is ready.

Google updates its Gemini app to take on ChatGPT and Claude at IO 2026

Related:

• Google debuts new AI models, personal AI agents in effort to keep pace with OpenAI and Anthropic

• Google’s Gemini Omni turns images, audio, and text into video — and that’s just the start

• Google launches Antigravity 2.0 with an updated desktop app and CLI tool at IO 2026

• Google’s Genie world model can now simulate real streets with Street View

• Google introduces Gemini Spark, a 24/7 agentic assistant with Gmail integration, at IO 2026

• You can now talk to your Gmail inbox, as seen at Google IO 2026

• Google’s new anything-to-anything AI model is wild

• Google Search’s AI evolution includes more ads

• The future of Google is a search box that does everything

• Google just declared itself a contender in AI design at IO 2026

At Google I/O 2026, Google unveiled a sweeping set of AI updates across its product lineup aimed at competing with OpenAI and Anthropic. Here’s the highlights:

• A rebuilt Gemini app with a new “Neural Expressive” design language featuring fluid animations and haptic feedback

• Gemini 3.5 Flash, a lightweight frontier model that costs half to one-third the price of comparable models and is now the default model for the Gemini app and Search globally, while the heavier Gemini 3.5 Pro remains internal until next month.

• Gemini Spark, a 24/7 cloud-based personal AI agent built on Gemini base models and the Antigravity agentic harness. Spark runs on dedicated virtual machines so it continues working when your phone is locked, integrates natively with Gmail, Google Docs, and Workspace via MCP, and lets users email it directly through a dedicated Gmail address.

• Gemini Omni, a new family of models designed to take any input — images, video, audio, text — and generate video output grounded in real-world knowledge; the first release, Omni Flash, renders 10-second clips and is rolling out to the Gemini app, YouTube Shorts, and Google Flow, with an API coming in weeks and a more powerful Omni Pro to follow.

• Gmail Live adds conversational AI to inbox search, allowing natural-language voice queries with follow-up questions.

• Google Antigravity 2.0 debuts a desktop app, CLI, and SDK for orchestrating multi-agent coding workflows, with a new $100 AI Ultra plan (5x limits) and a price cut on the top tier from $250 to $200. Additional launches include

• Pics, an AI design app for Workspace powered by Nano Banana 2 to compete with Canva and Claude Design, and

• Street View integration with Genie 3, Google’s world model, which can now simulate real-world environments with weather and lighting changes for robotics training and consumer use, currently rolling out to Ultra subscribers in the U.S.

AI just solved an 80-year-old ‘Erdős problem,’ and mathematicians are amazed

Related:

• OpenAI claims it solved an 80-year-old math problem — for real this time

• https://openai.com/index/model-disproves-discrete-geometry-conjecture/

• Google Deepmind’s AlphaProof Nexus solves decades-old math problems for a few hundred dollars

OpenAI announced on May 20, 2026 that an internal general-purpose reasoning model disproved a central conjecture in the planar unit distance problem, one of combinatorial geometry’s most famous open questions first posed by Paul Erdős in 1946. For 80 years, the best known constructions for maximizing unit-distance pairs among n points were based on square grid arrangements, and it was conjectured it is not possible to do better than that. ChatGPT proved that it is. Fields Medalist Timothy Gowers called it “a milestone in AI-driven mathematics,” and mathematician Daniel Litt confirmed it would merit publication in a top math journal — something no prior AI proof had achieved.

Meanwhile, Google DeepMind released AlphaProof Nexus, a complementary framework that combines Gemini 3.1 Pro with Lean formal verification, where compiler error messages feed back into successive proof attempts. The system autonomously solved 9 out of 353 open Erdős problems, proved 44 out of 492 OEIS conjectures, and settled a 15-year-old question in algebraic geometry — all at inference costs of just a few hundred dollars per problem. Unlike OpenAI’s purely natural-language approach, AlphaProof Nexus grounds LLM reasoning with symbolic feedback, though a post-hoc analysis found that even its simplest agent (just LLM + compiler loop) could solve all nine Erdős problems.

Both efforts collectively signal a new phase in AI-assisted mathematics, though Terence Tao cautioned that AI’s overall success rate on Erdős problems remains around 1–2%, concentrated on easier tasks, and experts note that genuinely new groundbreaking mathematical theory remains beyond current models. Human mathematicians also flagged concerns about AI failing to credit prior literature — what Melanie Wood called potential “professional malpractice” — as a cultural norm the community urgently needs to address.

America’s dangerous, messy deepfakes crackdown is here

Related:

• Google is trying to make deepfake detection more accessible for everyone

• OpenAI is making it easier to check if an image was made by their models

The Take It Down Act, signed by President Trump last May and fully in force as of May 19th, 2026, requires online platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) — including AI-generated sexual deepfakes — within 48 hours or face civil penalties exceeding $53,000 per violation. The FTC, tasked with enforcement, sent letters to over a dozen major platforms including Meta, Google, Amazon, TikTok, X, Snapchat, and Microsoft, requiring them to offer easy takedown request processes and remove “known identical copies.” Major platforms have expressed support and claimed compliance, with Meta citing existing anti-NCII tools and TikTok pointing to partnerships with NCMEC and StopNCII.org. In its first year, the law’s criminal provision was used in just one conviction — an Ohio man who produced AI deepfakes to harass victims.

Despite broad platform support, experts are raising serious concerns. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Cato Institute, and Public Knowledge warn the takedown provision could enable censorship and over-moderation. Mary Anne Franks of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative fears the law will be a “paper tiger” against major offenders while being weaponized against disfavored platforms, noting Trump’s own State of the Union quip that he’d use the bill “for myself.” The law also has technical gaps — it’s unclear whether AI tools like Grok qualify as “creators” of NCII or whether privately generated images fall under the takedown provision.

On the detection front, Google is expanding SynthID watermark verification to Chrome and Search via Gemini, and adding support for C2PA content credentials, while OpenAI is adopting both C2PA metadata and SynthID watermarking for its image generators.

SpaceX Is Said to Plan to Buy Startup Cursor 30 Days After IPO - Bloomberg

Related:

• Musk’s SpaceX Reveals Its Finances for the First Time

• SpaceX faces talent drain as 50+ xAI staff reportedly exit for Meta, Thinking Machines

• Musk’s xAI is being sued over its data center generators — now it’s buying $2.8B more

• Elon, stop trying to make Grok happen

• Heavy losses and weak revenue: xAI’s brutal numbers

• Musk’s xAI Warns Staffers to Limit Contact With Cursor Employees

• xAI introduces its coding agent called Grok Build

SpaceX filed its S-1 IPO prospectus on May 20, 2026, targeting a $1.75–$2 trillion valuation and seeking to raise $75 billion on the Nasdaq under ticker SPCX. The filing reveals 2025 revenue of $18.7 billion (up 33% YoY) but a net loss of $4.9 billion, with Q1 2026 showing $4.7 billion in revenue alongside $4.3 billion in net losses. The losses are in significant part due to the capital expenditures associated with the construction of xAI’s data centers (xAI is now part of SpaceX).

According to “people familiar with the matter”, SpaceX also plans to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion approximately 30 days after the IPO. SpaceX and Cursor already confirmed having made a deal last month that would give SpaceX the right to do this aquisition, but this is the first reporting suggested that SpaceX is planning to go through with it.

This acquisition appears driven by the poor performance of xAI’s own products: Grok has roughly $270 million in annualized subscription revenue versus OpenAI’s $24 billion and Anthropic’s $30 billion, appeared in only 3 of 400+ government AI use cases reviewed by Reuters, and xAI posted a $6.4 billion operating loss in 2025. The internal situation is also dire: all 11 original xAI co-founders have departed, 50+ researchers and engineers have left for Meta and Thinking Machines Lab, the pre-training team has shrunk to a handful of people, and Musk ordered layoffs in March after Grok lagged behind Claude Code and OpenAI Codex — even as SpaceX launched a competing coding agent, Grok Build, now in early beta at $300/month.

Additional controversies include xAI’s Memphis data center operating 46 unregulated gas turbines despite permits for only 15, facing an NAACP lawsuit, while SpaceX’s IPO filing reveals plans to spend another $2.8 billion on turbines over three years.

Pope Leo Uses First Major Papal Text to Warn About Dangers of AI

Related:

• To Understand Pope Leo’s Efforts on A.I., Look at the Man Shaking His Hand

• At the Epicenter of A.I., Pope Leo’s Warnings Are Dismissed

Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence, on May 25, 2026 — a 42,300-word document representing the Catholic Church’s most comprehensive theological statement on AI to date. Signed on May 15 (the 135th anniversary of Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum), the text frames AI as a “new industrial revolution” and calls for AI to be “disarmed, freed from logics that turn it into an instrument of domination, exclusion, and death.” The encyclical demands robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, and international regulation of AI companies, while condemning the concentration of data and power in Big Tech’s hands. Pope Leo also declared the Catholic “just war” theory “outdated” given AI-driven warfare, stating it is “not permissible to entrust lethal decisions” to AI systems — a direct clash with the Trump administration’s push to deregulate AI.

In a break with tradition, Pope Leo personally presented the encyclical alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah, who acknowledged that “every frontier AI lab operates inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing,” and warned of AI displacing human labor “at very large scale.”

Other News

Tools

OpenAI’s Codex is now in the ChatGPT mobile app. Users can now control Codex, OpenAI’s desktop tool for writing code and automating computer tasks, remotely from the ChatGPT mobile app, with real-time updates and command approvals flowing back to their phone.

xAI introduces its coding agent called Grok Build. The tool is currently available only to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers for $300 per month as xAI attempts to compete with competitors like Anthropic’s Claude Code and improve its coding capabilities.

Cursor’s Composer 2.5 matches Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 benchmarks at a fraction of the cost. The model achieves comparable performance to Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s flagship models on coding benchmarks while costing significantly less per token.

Google debuts AI-powered tools to optimize scientific research workflows. The suite includes tools for generating research hypotheses backed by citations, running computational experiments at scale, and summarizing scientific literature in multiple formats, with access rolling out through Google Labs and Google Cloud.

ChatGPT for PowerPoint generates presentations with prompts.. Users can create or edit slides by providing text prompts and uploading supporting documents, images, and other materials through a new sidebar interface.

You can now remix other people’s YouTube Shorts with AI. The feature uses Gemini Omni to let creators stylize videos with effects like pixel art or anime, alter video contents, and insert themselves into clips, while original creators can disable remixing for their videos.

Spotify is launching AI-generated remixes. Users will be able to create AI remixes and covers of songs through a paid Premium add-on, with artists able to opt out and those who participate earning royalties from the generated content.

Spotify takes on Google’s NotebookLM with its new app. The app lets users generate personalized podcasts from their emails, calendar, and web browsing, which are saved privately to their Spotify library and synced across devices.

Figma adds an AI assistant to its collaborative canvas. The agent accepts natural language prompts to generate new designs, modify existing ones, or automate repetitive tasks, with support for running multiple agents simultaneously on the shared canvas.

Stability AI releases a new audio model that can create 6-minute songs. The three smaller open-weight models can generate up to two minutes of audio, while the larger models create full compositions of over six minutes, with the largest available only through paid API and enterprise services.

Business

Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shake-Up. The reorganization consolidates ChatGPT, Codex, and the company’s developer API into a single product team as OpenAI prepares to launch a unified “super app” combining its major offerings.

OpenAI-Apple Partnership Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight - Bloomberg. OpenAI is preparing potential legal action against Apple, claiming the integration has underperformed financially and that Apple hasn’t adequately promoted ChatGPT features within its operating systems, while Apple disputes the complaints and is exploring partnerships with other AI providers like Google and Anthropic.

AI chipmaker Cerebras soars 90% in year’s biggest IPO so far. The AI chipmaker’s debut marks strong investor appetite for artificial intelligence-related companies, though it will likely be surpassed later this year when SpaceX goes public.

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pre-training team. He will lead a new team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research, joining Anthropic’s pre-training group under Nick Joseph.

Another ‘DeepSeek moment’? Huawei milestone alters China trajectory in chip race: analysts. Huawei introduced a new scaling law that could enable it to produce chips with performance matching 1.4-nanometre processes by 2031 without relying on US-restricted advanced chipmaking equipment.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek slashes price of flagship model. The permanent price cut makes DeepSeek’s model over 10 times cheaper than OpenAI’s offering, as Chinese AI companies compete on cost rather than capabilities to gain market share.

Anthropic is paying $15 billion a year for access to Elon Musk’s data centers. According to SpaceX’s IPO filing, Anthropic will pay $1.25 billion monthly through May 2029 for access to SpaceX’s Colossus data centers, with an exit clause allowing either party to terminate with 90 days’ notice.

Meta Lays Off 8,000 Employees, as A.I. Casualties Mount - The New York Times. The cuts, which affect 10 percent of Meta’s workforce while reassigning 7,000 others to AI initiatives, are part of the company’s pivot toward artificial intelligence as it aims to develop “superintelligence” and compete with rivals like OpenAI.

Universal Music Group and TikTok renew agreement to combat unauthorized AI music. The renewed agreement includes commitments to remove unauthorized AI-generated music from the platform and improve how artists and songwriters are credited, following a 2024 dispute that led UMG to temporarily pull its catalog from TikTok.

Nvidia posts another record quarter, reveals $43B of holdings in startups. The company nearly doubled its private equity holdings to $43 billion in the quarter, acquiring $18.5 billion in stakes across startups while forecasting slower growth ahead.

Hark raises $700M Series A for its secretive ‘universal’ AI interface. The company, founded by Brett Adcock, plans to launch multimodal AI models this summer followed by custom hardware devices, positioning itself to build a consumer-facing AI assistant distinct from competitors focused on coding tools.

Policy

Trump Cancels Signing of Executive Order Granting Oversight of A.I. Models - The New York Times. Trump canceled the order because he worried it could hinder U.S. competitiveness with China by imposing restrictions on AI model development, despite the measure having been designed to allow the government to pre-evaluate new AI systems for security vulnerabilities on a voluntary basis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom to Sign Executive Order Aimed at A.I. Job Loss - The New York Times. The executive order directs state agencies to study AI’s potential workforce impact and develop recommendations on worker support policies, job training modernization, and early-warning systems for layoffs, responding to over 114,000 tech-sector job losses already recorded in 2026.

Concerns

AI warfare is already here. Military forces are increasingly embedding AI into weapons systems and targeting processes, with the US Pentagon actively pursuing greater autonomy in lethal decision-making despite pushback from companies like Anthropic and international efforts to establish restrictions.

Waymo Suspends Service in Six Cities After Cars Drove Into Flooded Roads - The New York Times. The company paused service after its autonomous vehicles drove into flooded roads during heavy storms, revealing gaps in the software’s ability to detect standing water on streets and highways.

Research

Research repository ArXiv will ban authors for a year if they let AI do all the work | TechCrunch. ArXiv will prohibit researchers who use AI to write their entire papers without human contribution from submitting for 12 months, marking a shift toward enforcing human authorship standards in academic publishing.

Language Models Need Sleep. Researchers propose a “sleep” mechanism where language models pause to consolidate context into persistent memory through multiple forward passes, enabling improved reasoning over information that has been removed from the active context window.

Delta Attention Residuals. This paper proposes routing attention over layer-wise differences (deltas) rather than cumulative states to prevent attention weights from becoming near-uniform in deep transformer networks, showing consistent improvements across model sizes from 220M to 7.6B parameters.

Gated DeltaNet-2: Decoupling Erase and Write in Linear Attention. The paper proposes decoupling the erase and write operations in linear attention’s delta rule by using separate channel-wise gates for each, rather than a single scalar gate, to better manage competing associations in fixed-size memory during long-context processing.

TerminalWorld: Benchmarking Agents on Real-World Terminal Tasks. The benchmark automatically converts real developer terminal session recordings from the asciinema platform into 1,530 validated evaluation tasks, addressing scalability limitations of manually-curated benchmarks while maintaining authenticity to actual workflows.

SANA-WM: Efficient Minute-Scale World Modeling with Hybrid Linear Diffusion Transformer. The model uses a hybrid linear diffusion transformer architecture to generate one-minute 720p videos from camera trajectories and text prompts while requiring only 64 H100 GPUs for training and supporting single-GPU inference on consumer hardware.

Test-Time Reasoners Are Strategic Multiple-Choice Test-Takers. Models with test-time reasoning capabilities can successfully answer multiple-choice questions even with incomplete information, indicating they use genuine logical inference rather than relying on surface-level patterns.

The MiniMax-M2 Series: Mini Activations Unleashing Max Real-World Intelligence. MiniMax introduces a family of mixture-of-experts language models with 9.8B activated parameters per token that achieve competitive performance on agentic coding, workplace automation, and reasoning tasks through specialized data pipelines and a reinforcement learning system designed for agent training.

Our 246th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 05/22/2026

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

In this episode:

• Google I/O highlights included Gemini 3.5 (with 3.5 Flash emphasized for speed and benchmarks), the always-on agent Gemini Spark running on Google Cloud with MCP tool support, and Gemini Omni multimodal video generation/editing, plus updates like Anti-Gravity 2.0, Gemini for Science, and Genie world-model navigation using Street View and Waymo simulation.

• Coding-agent competition accelerated with Cursor Composer 2.5 (fine-tuned on Moonshot’s Kimi K2.5) and xAI’s early Grok Build release, alongside discussion of potential Cursor–xAI ties and xAI’s talent churn and compute utilization concerns.

• Business and legal updates included Elon Musk losing his OpenAI lawsuit on statute-of-limitations grounds, reported OpenAI–Apple partnership tensions, Anthropic agreeing to a $30B funding round at a $900B valuation and projecting its first profitable quarter, and Cerebras’ IPO surging about 90%.

• Research and safety stories covered OpenAI’s result on an 80-year-old Erdős geometry problem, findings on “negation neglect” in training, interpretability work showing multiple redundant circuits per capability, agent benchmarks like Terminal World, new deepfake takedown enforcement under the Take It Down Act, demonstrations of autonomous hacking/self-replication, rapidly improving AI cyber capabilities, and steps toward image provenance metadata and watermarks.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:15) News Preview

• Tools & Apps

• (00:05:05) Google unveils AI model Gemini 3.5 and AI agent Gemini Spark

• (00:11:43) Google’s Gemini Omni turns images, audio, and text into video — and that’s just the start | TechCrunch

• (00:17:27) Google launches Antigravity 2.0 with an updated desktop app and CLI tool at IO 2026 | TechCrunch

• (00:22:35) Google Debuts AI-Powered Tools To Optimize Scientific Research Workflows

• (00:27:20) Google’s Genie world model can now simulate real streets with Street View | TechCrunch

• (00:29:51) Cursor’s Composer 2.5 matches Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 benchmarks at a fraction of the cost

• (00:37:37) xAI Introduces Its Coding Agent Called Grok Build

• Applications & Business

• (00:41:55) Musk loses OpenAI court battle as he waited too long to sue

• (00:48:08) Anthropic agrees terms of $30bn funding deal at $900bn valuation

• (00:53:12) OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pre-training team | TechCrunch

• (00:56:49) Greg Brockman Officially Takes Control of OpenAI’s Products in Latest Shake-Up | WIRED

• (00:58:15) OpenAI-Apple Partnership Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight - Bloomberg

• (01:01:13) AI chipmaker Cerebras soars 90% in year’s biggest IPO so far

• Research & Advancements

• (01:07:10) AI just solved an 80-year-old ‘Erdős problem,’ and mathematicians are amazed | Scientific American

• (01:11:50) Negation Neglect: When models fail to learn negations in training

• (01:13:18) All Circuits Lead to Rome: Rethinking Functional Anisotropy in Circuit and Sheaf Discovery for LLMs

• (01:16:20) Autonomous AI research for nanogpt speedrun

• (01:21:59) TerminalWorld: Benchmarking Agents on Real-World Terminal Tasks

• Policy & Safety

• (01:23:15) America’s dangerous, messy deepfakes crackdown is here | The Verge

• (01:25:17) Language Models Can Autonomously Hack and Self-Replicate

• (01:28:48) How fast is autonomous AI cyber capability advancing?

• (01:31:32) Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing

• Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:33:15) OpenAI is making it easier to check if an image was made by their models | TechCrunch

• (01:33:56) How Chinese short dramas became AI content machines | MIT Technology Review

Our 245th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 05/13/2026

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

In this episode:

• OpenAI released new voice intelligence API features including GPT Realtime 2 (GPT-5-powered) plus realtime translation and Whisper transcription, emphasizing the latency–reasoning tradeoff, larger context, and new guardrails amid fraud risks.

• Thinking Machines previewed a low-latency, full‑duplex conversational system with a two-model architecture and custom inference stack, reporting strong interactivity benchmark results but without public access or third‑party validation yet.

• Anthropic pushed further into vertical products with Claude for Legal and deeper AWS availability, while ongoing ecosystem tension grows as platform model providers compete with application-layer companies.

• Safety, policy, and research updates included OpenAI’s self-harm trusted contact feature, Anthropic work on reducing agent misalignment by training ethical “why” reasoning, OpenAI’s investigation of accidental chain-of-thought grading in RL, and Meta horizon eval updates showing benchmarking limits for long task horizons.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:35) Response to listener comments

• (00:03:27) Sponsor Break

Tools & Apps

• (00:06:27) OpenAI launches new voice intelligence features in its API | TechCrunch

• (00:15:52) Thinking Machines drops a new, highly responsive model designed for humanlike interactions in real time - SiliconANGLE

• (00:27:49) Claude For Legal Launches, May Reshape the Legal Tech World – Artificial Lawyer

• (00:40:27) Threads tests a Meta AI integration that works similarly to Grok | TechCrunch

• (00:43:08) Google brings agentic AI and vibe-coded widgets to Android | TechCrunch

• (00:45:33) Google updates AI search to include quotes from Reddit and other sources | TechCrunch

Applications & Business

• (00:47:38) Sam Altman was winning on the stand, but it might not be enough | The Verge

• (00:55:04) Nvidia C.E.O. Jensen Huang Hitches Ride With Trump to China After Last-Minute Invite - The New York Times

• (00:58:40) AWS expands Anthropic partnership with Claude Platform launch

• (01:01:13) Chinese grey market sells Claude API access at 90% off by using stolen credentials, model substitution, and harvesting users’ prompts and outputs for resale as AI training data — ‘transfer stations’ operate through proxy networks that harvest user data

• (01:06:43) DeepMind Spinout Isomorphic Labs Raises $2.1 Billion to Design Drugs With AI - Bloomberg

Projects & Open Source

• (01:09:04) Petri: Anthropic Hands Its Alignment Toolbox to Meridian Labs with 3.0 Update

• (01:12:25) Daybreak’: OpenAI’s Answer to Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Has Arrived

Policy & Safety

• (01:14:04) Teaching Claude why

• (01:21:45) Import AI 455: Automating AI Research

• (01:28:31) ChatGPT’s New Safety Feature Could Alert ‘Trusted Contact’ to Risk of Self-Harm - CNET

• (01:30:09) Investigating the consequences of accidentally grading CoT during RL

• (01:34:46) Natural Language Autoencoders criticism

• (01:39:15) Review of the “Risks from automated R&D” section in the Anthropic Risk Report (February 2026)

Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:43:39) George Clooney, Tom Hanks, and Meryl Streep back new ‘Human Consent Standard’ for AI licensing | The Verge

Research & Advancements

• (01:45:10) METR says Claude Mythos is testing the limits of AI evaluation – Startup Fortune

Related:

• All the evidence revealed so far in Musk v. Altman

• Musk texted OpenAI’s Brockman about settlement two days before trial began

• The Elon Musk v. Sam Altman trial is now on YouTube

• Elon Musk Seemingly Admits xAI Has Used OpenAI’s Models to Train Its Own

• Musk and Broc…

Read more

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 andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.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

• Tools & Apps

• (00:02:55) OpenAI Unveils Its New, More Powerful GPT-5.5 Model - The New York Times

• (00:20:33) xAI Launches grok-voice-think-fast-1.0: Topping τ-voice Bench at 67.3%, Outperforming Gemini, GPT Realtime, and More - MarkTechPost

• (00:26:00) Claude can now plug directly into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton | The Verge

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:26:38) China’s DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies

• (00:44:05) Tencent Unveils Hy3 preview; Model Enhances Agent Capabilities and Real-World Usability - Tencent 腾讯

• (00:47:14) ClawMark: A Living-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn, Multi-Day, Multimodal Coworker Agents

• Applications & Business

• (00:50:03) Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic

• (00:53:26) Meta will use hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips

• (00:56:51) China blocks Meta’s $2 billion takeover of AI startup Manus

• (00:58:45) OpenAI shakes up partnership with Microsoft, capping revenue share payments

• (01:04:13) Elon Musk Testifies of AI Risk at Trial, Says OpenAI Tried to ‘Steal’ a Charity - WSJ

• (01:08:50) Judge rejects DOJ bid to delay Anthropic appeal in Pentagon dispute

• (01:11:42) Google’s Gemini can now run on a single air-gapped server — and vanish when you pull the plug

• (01:16:07) DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data | TechCrunch

• Policy & Safety

• (01:19:47) Evaluating whether AI models would sabotage AI safety research

• (01:26:59) LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate

• (01:29:50) Temporal Sparse Autoencoders: Leveraging the Sequential Nature of Language for Interpretability

• (01:36:53) Memorandum on Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models

• (01:38:41) Teen boys are dating their AI chatbots—and experts warn it could kill their careers | Fortune

• (01:40:57) Announcing the Anthropic Economic Index Survey

• (01:42:21) Scoop: CISA lacks access to Anthropic’s Mythos

• Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:45:03) Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Voice and Likeness to Protect Against AI Misuse

• Research & Advancements

• (01:46:15) Maximal Brain Damage Without Data or Optimization: Disrupting Neural Networks via Sign-Bit Flips

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 andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.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

Note from Andrey: this ep came out a week ago on RSS, but I was delayed posting it to youtube and therefore also Substack. My bad!

Our 238th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 03/18/2026

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

In this episode:

* OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano with 400k-token context windows, higher per-token prices but claimed token-efficiency gains in Codex; nano is API-only and pitched for high-volume classification/data extraction despite a major price increase.

* Mistral open-sourced the Small 4 model family (MoE, 119B total/6B active) combining reasoning, multimodal, and coding-agent capabilities, and announced Forge to help businesses train or post-train custom models.

* Agent “operating system” competition intensified with Meta’s acquired Manus launching a local Mac agent, Nvidia announcing NeMo/“Open Shell” sandboxed agent runtime, and Nvidia also unveiling DLSS 5 plus major hardware forecasts including Groq LPU integration.

* Business and safety updates included OpenAI shifting focus toward productivity/enterprise amid competition, Microsoft reorganizing Copilot and frontier-model efforts, Meta delaying its next model, China-linked ByteDance deploying large Nvidia clusters abroad, and new safety work on steganography, chain-of-thought faithfulness, fine-tuning defenses, cyber-attack evals, and constitution/spec compliance.

A thank you to our current sponsors:

• Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more

• ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.

• Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:56) News Preview

• Tools & Apps

• (00:02:39) OpenAI ships GPT-5.4 mini and nano, faster and more capable but up to 4x pricier

• (00:08:04) Mistral’s new Small 4 model punches above its weight with 128 expert modules

• (00:14:03) Meta’s Manus launches ‘My Computer’ to turn your Mac into an AI agent - 9to5Mac

• (00:17:57) NVIDIA Announces NemoClaw for the OpenClaw Community | NVIDIA Newsroom + Nvidia boosts knowledge work with Open Agent Development Platform

• (00:24:09) DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games | The Verge

• (00:26:36) OpenAI to Launch ChatGPT ‘Adult Mode’ Despite Warnings From Its Own Advisers - CNET

• Applications & Business

• (00:33:46) OpenAI Reportedly Pivoting to a Focus on Business and Productivity Only

• (00:41:25) Nvidia GTC 2026: CEO Jensen Huang sees $1 trillion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin through ’27

• (00:45:44) Mistral launches Forge to help enterprises build their own AI models

• (00:54:17) China’s ByteDance gets access to top Nvidia AI chips, WSJ reports

• (00:57:57) Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns

• (01:02:50) Microsoft Shakes Up AI Division As Copilot Falls Behind Google and OpenAI

• Policy & Safety

• (01:07:26) A Decision-Theoretic Formalisation of Steganography With Applications to LLM Monitoring

• (01:13:09) Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought

• (01:18:29) In-Training Defenses against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models

• (01:23:07) How do frontier AI agents perform in multi-step cyber-attack scenarios?

• (01:25:20) Eval awareness in Claude Opus 4.6’s BrowseComp performance

• (01:29:49) Introducing Bloom: an open source tool for automated behavioral evaluations

• (01:32:26) How well do models follow their constitutions?

• (01:37:11) Nvidia’s H200 License Stirs Security Concern Among Top Democrats

• Research & Advancements

• (01:40:050) [2603.15031] Attention Residuals

• (01:47:11) Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling using State Space Principles

Related:

• Nvidia’s DLSS 5 uses generative AI to boost photorealism in video games, with ambitions beyond gaming

Read more

Our 237th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 03/13/2026

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

In this episode:

* Perplexity announced “Personal Computer,” a local Mac-based AI agent positioned as a safer alternative to OpenAI’s computer-use agents, while Anthropic added GitHub PR code review pricing reviews at $15–$25 and Cursor launched trigger-based “Automations” for always-on coding agents.

* ChatGPT introduced interactive math/science visuals and Anthropic added in-chat interactive charts/diagrams; Nvidia released open weights for its 120B-parameter Natron Free Super hybrid Transformer–Mamba latent-MoE model trained natively at 4-bit for Blackwell GPUs.

* Nvidia halted H200 production for China amid customs blocks and domestic chip pressure; xAI saw major co-founder departures; Anthropic previewed a Claude Marketplace for enterprise procurement; Yann LeCun’s aMI raised $1.3B; humanoid robot maker Sanctuary reached a $1.15B valuation.

* Anthropic sued the Pentagon over a “supply chain risk” designation as memos ordered removal within 180 days; research covered models resisting activation steering, limits of chain-of-thought control, inference-scaling boosting cyber-task success, low-probability risky actions, weaknesses in SWE-bench, multimodal pretraining, long-context RNN memory caching, context-parallel training efficiency, RL for CUDA kernel optimization, and latent introspection detecting concept injection.

A thank you to our current sponsors:

• Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more

• ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.

• Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:23) Response to listener comments

• Tools & Apps

• (00:02:06) Perplexity’s Personal Computer turns your spare Mac into an AI agent | The Verge

• (00:04:22) Anthropic launches code review tool to check flood of AI-generated code | TechCrunch

• (00:08:08 ) Cursor is rolling out a new kind of agentic coding tool | TechCrunch

• (00:11:14) ChatGPT can now create interactive visuals to help you understand math and science concepts | TechCrunch

• (00:11:56) Anthropic’s Claude AI can respond with charts, diagrams, and other visuals now | The Verge
  

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:13:54) Introducing Nemotron 3 Super: An Open Hybrid Mamba-Transformer MoE for Agentic Reasoning | NVIDIA Technical Blog
  

• Applications & Business

• (00:21:22) Nvidia halts H200 production as China backs Huawei AI chips

• (00:28:33) Another XAI Cofounder Has Left, and Another Says He’s Leaving. - Business Insider

• (00:34:04) Anthropic’s Claude Marketplace allows customers to buy third-party cloud services | TechRadar

• (00:37:57) Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs raises $1.03 billion to build world models | TechCrunch

• (00:44:52) Humanoid robotics maker Sunday reaches $1.15B valuation to build household robots | TechCrunch
  

• Policy & Safety

• (00:46:09) Anthropic Sues Department of Defense Over ‘Supply Chain Risk’ Label - The New York Times + Google and OpenAI Just Filed a Legal Brief in Support of Anthropic

• (00:53:24) Internal Pentagon memo orders military commanders to remove Anthropic AI technology from key systems - CBS News

• (00:58:15) Endogenous Resistance to Activation Steering in Language Models

• (01:06:27) Reasoning Models Struggle to Control their Chains of Thought

• (01:09:52) ‘It means missile defence on datacentres’: drone strikes raise doubts over Gulf as AI superpower

• (01:14:57) Evidence for inference scaling in AI cyber tasks: Increased evaluation budgets reveal higher success rates

• (01:18:24) Frontier Models Can Take Actions at Low Probabilities
  

• Research & Advancements

• (01:24:20) Research note: Many SWE-bench-Passing PRs Would Not Be Merged into Main

• (01:28:26) [2603.03276] Beyond Language Modeling: An Exploration of Multimodal Pretraining

• (01:40:09) Memory Caching: RNNs with Growing Memory

• (01:48:47) Untied Ulysses: Memory-Efficient Context Parallelism via Headwise Chunking

• (01:58:41) CUDA Agent: Large-Scale Agentic RL for High-Performance CUDA Kernel Generation

• (02:08:57) Latent Introspection: Models Can Detect Prior Concept Injections

• (02:16:45) Physics of RL: Toy scaling laws for the emergence of reward-seeking

Related:

• OpenAI and Google Workers File Amicus Brief in Support of Anthropic Against the US Government

• Internal Pentagon memo orders military commanders to remove Anthropic AI technology from key systems

Summary: Anthropic filed two lawsuits—one in the Northern District of California and …

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Our 236th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 03/06/2026

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

In this episode:

* OpenAI released GPT-5.4 Pro with a 1M-token context window, mid-response course correction, native computer-use capabilities, improved tool use, higher GPT-VAL performance (83%), and “high cyber capability” safety measures; OpenAI also launched GPT-5.3 Instant with a less “preachy” tone and a claimed 26.8% hallucination reduction.

* Google upgraded Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite with faster time-to-first-token and higher throughput, released a CLI for integrating agents with Gmail/Drive/Docs, and discussion highlighted real-world agent failure risks (including an example of an AI-driven mass email deletion).

* Luma launched unified multimodal models and Luma Agents for end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio, including a reported ad localization use case completed in 40 hours for under $20,000.

* Defense-contract controversy escalated: Anthropic was labeled a supply chain risk (later narrowed), OpenAI’s DoD contract language emphasized “all lawful uses,” consumer cancellations boosted Claude’s app rankings, OpenAI saw departures and announced a $110B raise at a $730B valuation, Alibaba lost key Qwen leaders, a lawsuit alleged Gemini contributed to a suicide, Anthropic warned of major labor disruption, and METR corrected its AI time-horizon estimates.

A thank you to our current sponsors:

• Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more

• ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.

• Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

PS my company Astrocade is hiring for engineers, marketing, product, growth, and more! If you’re in the bay area, would like to join a small but growing startup, and think building a youtube-of-games sounds exciting, feel free to email me at andrey@astroblox.ai or message me on LinkedIn.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:19) News Preview

• Tools & Apps

• (00:02:10) OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 with Pro and Thinking versions | TechCrunch

• (00:12:31) OpenAI GPT-5.3 Instant less likely to beat around the bush • The Register

• (00:16:07) Google releases Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite at 1/8th the cost of Pro | VentureBeat

• (00:19:23) Google makes Gmail, Drive, and Docs ‘agent-ready’ for OpenClaw | PCWorld

• (00:27:02) Luma launches creative AI agents powered by its new ‘Unified Intelligence’ models | TechCrunch

• Applications & Business

• (00:30:05) Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies,’ report says | TechCrunch

• (00:41:56) No ethics at all’: the ‘cancel ChatGPT’ trend is growing after OpenAI signs a deal with the US military | TechRadar

• (00:45:54) OpenAI raises $110B in one of the largest private funding rounds in history | TechCrunch

• (00:56:07) Alibaba scrambles after sudden departure of Qwen tech lead

• Policy & Safety

• (01:00:12) Pentagon approves OpenAI safety red lines after dumping Anthropic + Where things stand with the Department of War Anthropic + Microsoft says Anthropic’s products remain available to customers after Pentagon blacklist

• (01:09:11) A new lawsuit claims Gemini assisted in suicide | Semafor

• (01:15:24) Anthropic just mapped out which jobs AI could potentially replace. A ‘Great Recession for white-collar workers’ is absolutely possible | Fortune

• (01:21:54) We’re correcting a mistake in our modeling that inflated recent 50%-time horizons by 10-20%

PS we are hiring for engineers, marketing, product, growth, and more! If you’re in the bay area, would like to joi…

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Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 02/27/2026. Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Note from Andrey: my startup Astrocade is hiring for engineers, marketing, product, growth, and more! If you’re in the bay area, would like to join a small but growing startup, and think building a youtube-of-games sounds exciting, feel free to email me at andrey@astroblox.ai

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

In this episode:

• Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI’s Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic’s Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity’s multi-agent “Computer” coordinator.

• Compute and business moves include Meta’s reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior.

• Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China’s plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints.

• Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic’s report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI’s report on disrupting malicious use.

A thank you to our current sponsors:

• Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn more

• ODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.

• Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:52) News Preview
  

  Tools & Apps

• (00:03:20) Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch

• (00:11:24) Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET

• (00:14:54) Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India

• (00:18:06) Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat

• (00:21:01) Perplexity announces “Computer,” an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars Technica
  

  Applications & Business

• (00:23:40) Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases ‘personal superintelligence’ | TechCrunch

• (00:27:05) Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch

• (00:31:00) World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch

• (00:33:07) Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior

• (00:33:52) Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers

• (00:36:43) China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030
  

  Research & Advancements

• (00:40:33) On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers

• (00:48:03) Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens

• (00:54:52) models have some pretty funny attractor states

• (01:01:41) When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task

• (01:05:16) BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance

• (01:12:00) NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist

• (01:13:15) The least understood driver of AI progress

• (01:21:45) The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans
  

  Policy & Safety

• (01:25:04) Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon’s threats ‘do not change our position’ on AI

• (01:33:04) Musk’s xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems

• (01:34:17) Detecting and preventing distillation attacks

• (01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLE

Related:

• Claude Sonnet 4.6 model brings ‘much-improved coding skills’ and upgraded free tier

• Claude Sonnet 4.6 delivers frontier-level AI for free and cheap-seat users

• Anthropic releases Claude Sonnet 4.6, continuing breakneck pace of AI model releases

Read more

Our 234th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 01/02/2026

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

In this episode:

• Major model launches include Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 with a 1M-token context window and “agent teams,” OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex and faster Codex Spark via Cerebras, and Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think posting big jumps on ARC-AGI-2 and other STEM benchmarks amid criticism about missing safety documentation.

• Generative media advances feature ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video with high realism and broad prompting inputs, new image models Seedream 5.0 and Alibaba’s Qwen Image 2.0, plus xAI’s Grok Imagine API for text/image-to-video.

• Open and competitive releases expand with Zhipu’s GLM-5, DeepSeek’s 1M-token context model, Cursor Composer 1.5, and open-weight Qwen3 Coder Next using hybrid attention aimed at efficient local/agentic coding.

• Business updates include ElevenLabs raising $500M at an $11B valuation, Runway raising $315M at a $5.3B valuation, humanoid robotics firm Apptronik raising $935M at a $5.3B valuation, Waymo announcing readiness for high-volume production of its 6th-gen hardware, plus industry drama around Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad and departures from xAI.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:02:05) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps

• (00:03:59) Anthropic releases Opus 4.6 with new ‘agent teams’ | TechCrunch

• (00:08:00) OpenAI’s new GPT-5.3-Codex is 25% faster and goes way beyond coding now - what’s new | ZDNET

• (00:22:02) OpenAI launches new macOS app for agentic coding | TechCrunch

• (00:23:10) Google Unveils Gemini 3 Deep Think for Science & Engineering | The Tech Buzz

• (00:27:58) ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 Might be the Best AI Video Generator Yet - TechEBlog

• (00:31:46) China’s ByteDance, Alibaba unveil AI image tools to rival Google’s popular Nano Banana | South China Morning Post

• (00:33:26) DeepSeek boosts AI model with 10-fold token addition as Zhipu AI unveils GLM-5 | South China Morning Post

• (00:39:43) Cursor launches Composer 1.5 with upgrades for complex tasks

• (00:40:35) xAI launches Grok Imagine API for text and image to video

Applications & Business

• (00:42:19) Nvidia-backed AI voice startups ElevenLabs hits $11 billion valuation

• (00:48:36) AI video startup Runway raises $315M at $5.3B valuation, eyes more capable world models | TechCrunch

• (00:50:34) Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B+ valuation | TechCrunch

• (00:53:42) Anthropic says ‘Claude will remain ad-free,’ unlike an unnamed rival | The Verge

• (00:56:50) Okay, now exactly half of xAI’s founding team has left the company | TechCrunch

• (01:00:35) Waymo’s next-gen robotaxi is ready for passengers — and also ‘high-volume production’ | The Verge

Projects & Open Source

• (01:01:31) Qwen3-Coder-Next: Pushing Small Hybrid Models on Agentic Coding

• (01:05:10) OpenClaw’s AI ‘skill’ extensions are a security nightmare | The Verge

Research & Advancements

• (01:07:12) Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters

• (01:12:33) Reinforcement World Model Learning for LLM-based Agents

• (01:16:32) Opus 4.6 on Vending-Bench – Not Just a Helpful Assistant

Policy & Safety

• (01:19:00) METR GPT-5.2

(01:23:31) The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity?

I am also going to be adding an ‘Editor’s Take’ for Top News to add a bit commentary and extra cont…

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Our 233rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 01/30/2026

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

In this episode:

• Google introduces Gemini AI agent in Chrome for advanced browser functionality, including auto-browsing for pro and ultra subscribers.

• OpenAI releases ChatGPT Translator and Prism, expanding its applications beyond core business to language translation and scientific research assistance.

• Significant funding rounds and valuations achieved by startups Recursive and New Rofo, focusing on specialized AI chips and optical processors respectively.

• Political and social issues, including violence in Minnesota, prompt tech leaders in AI like Ade from Anthropic and Jeff Dean from Google to express concerns about the current administration’s actions.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• Tools & Apps

• (00:04:09) Google adds Gemini AI-powered ‘auto browse’ to Chrome | The Verge

• (00:07:11) Users flock to open source Moltbot for always-on AI, despite major risks - Ars Technica

• (00:13:25) Google Brings Genie 3 ‘World Building’ Experiment to AI Ultra Subscribers - CNET

• (00:16:17) OpenAI’s ChatGPT translator challenges Google Translate | The Verge

• (00:18:27) OpenAI launches Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists | TechCrunch

• Applications & Business

• (00:19:49) Exclusive: China gives nod to ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent to buy Nvidia’s H200 chips - sources | Reuters

• (00:22:55) AI chip startup Ricursive hits $4B valuation 2 months after launch

• (00:24:38) AI Startup Recursive in Funding Talks at $4 Billion Valuation - Bloomberg

• (00:27:30) Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI | TechCrunch

• (00:31:54) From invisibility cloaks to AI chips: Neurophos raises $110M to build tiny optical processors for inferencing | TechCrunch

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:35:34) Qwen3-Max-Thinking debuts with focus on hard math, code

• (00:38:26) China’s Moonshot releases a new open-source model Kimi K2.5 and a coding agent | TechCrunch

• (00:46:00) Ai2 launches family of open-source AI developer agents that adapt to any codebase - SiliconANGLE

• (00:47:46) Tiny startup Arcee AI built a 400B-parameter open source LLM from scratch to best Meta’s Llama

• Research & Advancements

• (00:52:53) Post-LayerNorm Is Back: Stable, ExpressivE, and Deep

• (00:58:00) [2601.19897] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning

• (01:03:04) [2601.20802] Reinforcement Learning via Self-Distillation

• (01:05:58) Teaching Models to Teach Themselves: Reasoning at the Edge of Learnability

• Policy & Safety

• (01:09:13) Amodei, Hoffman Join Tech Workers Decrying Minnesota Violence - Bloomberg

Moonshot AI unveiled Kimi K2.5, an open-source, natively multimodal model trained on 15 trillion mixed visual and text tokens that understands text, images, and video. The company emphasizes strong agentic capabilities, citing “agent swarm” orchestration where multiple agents …

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Our 232st episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 01/23/2026

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

In this episode:

• OpenAI announces testing of ads in ChatGPT and introduces child age prediction to enhance safety features, amidst ongoing ethical debates and funding expansions in AI integration with educational tools and business models.

• China’s AI landscape sees significant progress with AI firm Jpu training advanced models on domestic hardware, and strong competitive moves by data centers, highlighting the intense demand in AI manufacturing and infrastructure.

• Silicon Valley tensions rise as startup Thinking Machines experiences high-profile departures back to OpenAI, reflecting broader industry struggles and rapid shifts in organizational dynamics.

• AI legislation and safety measures advance with the US Senate’s Defiance Act addressing explicit content, and Anthropic updating Claude’s constitution to guide ethical AI interactions, while cultural pushbacks from artists signal ongoing debates in intellectual property and AI-generated content.

Timestamps:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:02:08) News Preview

• (00:02:26) Response to listener comments

• Tools & Apps

• (00:11:55) OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions - Ars Technica

• (00:18:05) OpenAI is launching age prediction for ChatGPT accounts

• (00:23:37) Google now offers free SAT practice exams, powered by Gemini | TechCrunch

• (00:24:57) Baidu’s AI Assistant Reaches Milestone of 200 Million Monthly Active Users - WSJ

• Applications & Business

• (00:26:53) The Drama at Thinking Machines, a New A.I. Start-Up, Is Riveting Silicon Valley - The New York Times

• (00:31:44) Zhipu AI breaks US chip reliance with first major model trained on Huawei stack | South China Morning Post

• (00:36:31) Elon Musk’s xAI launches world’s first Gigawatt AI supercluster to rival OpenAI and Anthropic

• (00:41:25) Sequoia to invest in Anthropic, breaking VC taboo on backing rivals: FT

• (00:45:18) Humans&, a ‘human-centric’ AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round | TechCrunch

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:48:51) Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence - MarkTechPost

• (00:50:35) [2601.10611] Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding

• (00:52:53) [2601.10547] HeartMuLa: A Family of Open Sourced Music Foundation Models

• (00:54:46) [2601.11044] AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts

• Research & Advancements

• (00:57:05) STEM: Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules

• (01:06:22) Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought

• (01:14:21) Why LLMs Aren’t Scientists Yet: Lessons from Four Autonomous Research Attempts

• Policy & Safety

• (01:19:41) Senate passes bill letting victims sue over Grok AI explicit images

• (01:22:03) Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini

• (01:27:32) Anthropic Publishes Claude AI’s New Constitution | TIME

• Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:34:13) Artists Launch Stealing Isn’t Innovation Campaign To Protest Big Tech

Related:

• ChatGPT to begin testing ads as generative AI competition heats up

OpenAI will begin testing labeled banner ads in ChatGPT for logged‑in users on the free tier and the $8/month ChatGPT Go plan, rolling out in the U.S. and other markets in the coming weeks. Ads will appear as blocked-off se…

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