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
(00:18:06) 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
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
(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
(01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLE
