Last Week in AI

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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.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
(00:02:03) Sponsor Break
(00:05:33) Response to listener comments
Tools & Apps
(00:07:27) AAnthropic releases Opus 4.6 with new 'agent teams' | TechCrunch
(00:11:28) OpenAI's new GPT-5.3-Codex is 25% faster and goes way beyond coding now - what's new | ZDNET
(00:25:30) OpenAI launches new macOS app for agentic coding | TechCrunch
(00:26:38) Google Unveils Gemini 3 Deep Think for Science & Engineering | The Tech Buzz
(00:31:26) ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 Might be the Best AI Video Generator Yet - TechEBlog
(00:35:14) China’s ByteDance, Alibaba unveil AI image tools to rival Google’s popular Nano Banana | South China Morning Post
(00:36:54) DeepSeek boosts AI model with 10-fold token addition as Zhipu AI unveils GLM-5 | South China Morning Post
(00:43:11) CCursor launches Composer 1.5 with upgrades for complex tasks
(00:44:03) xAI launches Grok Imagine API for text and image to video
Applications & Business
(00:45:47) Nvidia-backed AI voice startups ElevenLabs hits $11 billion valuation
(00:52:04) AI video startup Runway raises $315M at $5.3B valuation, eyes more capable world models | TechCrunch
(00:54:02) Humanoid robot startup Apptronik has now raised $935M at a $5B+ valuation | TechCrunch
(00:57:10) Anthropic says ‘Claude will remain ad-free,’ unlike an unnamed rival | The Verge
(01:00:18) Okay, now exactly half of xAI's founding team has left the company | TechCrunch
(01:04:03) Waymo’s next-gen robotaxi is ready for passengers — and also ‘high-volume production’ | The Verge
Projects & Open Source
(01:04:59) Qwen3-Coder-Next: Pushing Small Hybrid Models on Agentic Coding
(01:08:38) OpenClaw’s AI ‘skill’ extensions are a security nightmare | The Verge
Research & Advancements
(01:10:40) Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters
(01:16:01) Reinforcement World Model Learning for LLM-based Agents
(01:20:00) Opus 4.6 on Vending-Bench – Not Just a Helpful Assistant
Policy & Safety
(01:22:28) METR GPT-5.2
(01:26:59) The Hot Mess of AI: How Does Misalignment Scale with Model Intelligence and Task Complexity?
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.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
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.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

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

Our 231st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/16/2026
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's new cowork tool integrates Claude code, potentially simplifying multiple computing tasks from editing videos to compiling spreadsheets.
Significant funding rounds see Anthropic raising $10B at a valuation of $350B, while XAI raises $20B, underscoring the immense market interest in AI startups.
Nvidia faces supply challenges for H200 AI chips due to overwhelming demand from China, despite high costs per unit and its potential impact on U.S. company revenue.
Policy debates highlight tensions around U.S. export controls to China, with leaders like Justin Lin from Alibaba and Jake Sullivan, former national security advisor, weighing in on the ramifications for the AI industry's future.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:30) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:13) Anthropic’s new Cowork tool offers Claude Code without the code | TechCrunch
(00:09:45) Google’s Gemini AI will use what it knows about you from Gmail, Search, and YouTube | The Verge
(00:12:45) Google removes some AI health summaries after investigation finds “dangerous” flaws - Ars Technica
(00:16:29) Gmail is getting a Gemini AI overhaul
(00:18:12) Slackbot is an AI agent now | TechCrunch
Applications & Business
(00:20:11) Anthropic Raising $10 Billion at $350 Billion Value
(00:22:25) Elon Musk xAI raises $20 billion from Nvidia, Cisco, investors
(00:24:47) NVIDIA Needs a Supply Chain ‘Miracle’ From TSMC as China’s H200 AI Chip Orders Overwhelm Supply, Triggering a Bottleneck
(00:29:26) OpenAI signs deal, worth $10B, for compute from Cerebras | TechCrunch
(00:31:49) CoreWeave in focus as it amends credit agreement
(00:34:30) LMArena lands $1.7B valuation four months after launching its product | TechCrunch
Projects & Open Source
(00:35:54) Nemotron-Cascade: Scaling Cascaded Reinforcement Learning for General-Purpose Reasoning Models
(00:43:15) mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections
(00:49:53) IQuest_Coder_Technical_Report
(00:54:58) TII Abu-Dhabi Released Falcon H1R-7B: A New Reasoning Model Outperforming Others in Math and Coding with only 7B Params with 256k Context Window - MarkTechPost
Research & Advancements
(01:01:42) Deep Delta Learning
(01:07:47) Recursive Language Models
(01:13:39) Conditional memory via scalable lookup
(01:18:54) Extending the Context of Pretrained LLMs by Dropping their Positional Embeddings
Policy & Safety
(01:26:06) Constitutional Classifiers++: Efficient Production-Grade Defenses against Universal Jailbreaks
(01:31:00) Nvidia CEO says purchase orders, not formal declaration, will signal Chinese approval of H200
(01:32:24) China AI Leaders Warn of Widening Gap With US After $1B IPO Week
(01:37:25) Jake Sullivan is furious that Trump removed Biden’s AI chip export controls | 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 230th 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 [email protected] and/or [email protected]
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/
In this episode:
Nvidia's acquisition of AI chip startup Groq for $20 billion highlights a strategic move for enhanced inference technology in GPUs.
New York's RAISE Act legislation aims to regulate AI safety, marking the second major AI safety bill in the US.
The launch of GLM 4.7 by Zhipu AI marks a significant advancement in open-source AI models for coding.
Evaluation of long-horizon AI agents raises concerns about the rising costs and efficiency of AI in performing extended tasks.

Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:58) 2025 Retrospective

Tools & Apps
(00:24:39) OpenAI bets big on audio as Silicon Valley declares war on screens | TechCrunch

Applications & Business
(00:26:39) Nvidia buying AI chip startup Groq for about $20 billion, biggest deal
(00:34:28) Exclusive | Meta Buys AI Startup Manus, Adding Millions of Paying Users - WSJ
(00:38:05) Cursor continues acquisition spree with Graphite deal | TechCrunch
(00:39:15) Micron Hikes CapEx to $20B with 2026 HBM Supply Fully Booked; HBM4 Ramps 2Q26
(00:42:06) Chinese fabs are reportedly upgrading older ASML DUV lithography chipmaking machines — secondary channels and independent engineers used to soup up Twinscan NXT series

Projects & Open Source
(00:47:52) Z.AI launches GLM-4.7, new SOTA open-source model for coding
(00:50:11) Evaluating AI’s ability to perform scientific research tasks

Research & Advancements
(00:54:32) Large Causal Models from Large Language Models
(00:57:33) Universally Converging Representations of Matter Across Scientific Foundation Models
(01:02:11) META-RL INDUCES EXPLORATION IN LANGUAGE AGENTS
(01:07:16) Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?
(01:11:17) METR eval for Opus 4.5
(01:16:19) How to game the METR plot

Policy & Safety
(01:17:24) New York governor Kathy Hochul signs RAISE Act to regulate AI safety | TechCrunch
(01:20:40) Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers
(01:26:46) Monitoring Monitorability
(01:32:07) Sam Altman is hiring someone to worry about the dangers of AI | The Verge
(01:33:38) X users asking Grok to put this girl in bikini, Grok is happy obliging - India Today
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.