Last Week in AI

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#192 - ChatGPT Pro, Amazon Nova, GenFM, Llama 3.3, Genie 2
Our 192nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news! *and sometimes last last week's Note: this one was recorded on 12/04 , so the news is a bit outdated... 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/. Sponsors: The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence. The AI safety book “Uncontrollable" which is not a doomer book, but instead lays out the reasonable case for AI safety and what we can do about it. Max TEGMARK said that “Uncontrollable” is a captivating, balanced, and remarkably up-to-date book on the most important issue of our time" - find it on Amazon today! In this episode: OpenAI launches a $200 ChatGPT Pro subscription with advanced capabilities, while Amazon unveils cost-effective Nova multimodal models at the re:Invent conference. Meta releases LLAMA 3.3 70B model, showing significant gains through post-training techniques, and Alibaba introduces QWQ, a reasoning model rivaling OpenAI's O1. Amazon collaborates with Anthropic on a massive AI supercomputer project, and Black Forest Labs eyes a $200 million funding round for growth in AI tools. New research from DeepMind's Genie 2 generates interactive 3D worlds from text and images, progressing AI's understanding of world models and interactive environments. If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:02:34) Sponsor Break Tools & Apps (00:04:19) OpenAI confirms new $200 monthly subscription, which includes its o1 reasoning model (00:10:40) Amazon announces Nova, a new family of multimodal AI models (00:17:13) ElevenLabs launches GenFM to turn user content into AI-powered podcasts (00:20:21) Google’s new generative AI video model is now available Applications & Business (00:23:56) Elon Musk files for injunction to halt OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit (00:29:40) Amazon Is Building a Mega AI Supercomputer With Anthropic (00:34:15) It Sounds an Awful Lot Like OpenAI Is Adding Ads to ChatGPT (00:38:23) A16z in Talks to Lead $200 Million Round in Black Forest Labs, Startup Behind AI Images on Grok (00:41:10) Bezos Backs AI Chipmaker Vying With Nvidia at $2.6 Billion Value Projects & Open Source (00:45:25) Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model (00:50:00) Alibaba releases an ‘open’ challenger to OpenAI’s o1 reasoning model (00:55:21) DeMo: Decoupled Momentum Optimization (00:57:01) PRIME Intellect Releases INTELLECT-1 (Instruct + Base): The First 10B Parameter Language Model Collaboratively Trained Across the Globe (01:03:03) Tencent Launches HunyuanVideo, an Open-Source AI Video Model Research & Advancements (01:09:23) DeepMind’s Genie 2 can generate interactive worlds that look like video games (01:16:43) Language Models are Hidden Reasoners: Unlocking Latent Reasoning Capabilities via Self-Rewarding (01:20:40) Densing Law of LLMs (01:25:59) Monet: Mixture of Monosemantic Experts for Transformers Policy & Safety (01:30:56) Commerce Strengthens Export Controls to Restrict China’s Capability to Produce Advanced Semiconductors for Military Applications (01:37:33) China retaliates against latest US chip restrictions (01:40:52) OpenAI Is Working With Anduril to Supply the US Military With AI (01:43:24) On Targeted Manipulation and Deception when Optimizing LLMs for User Feedback (01:47:52) AI Safety Researcher Quits OpenAI, Saying Its Trajectory Alarms Her (01:51:52) Meta Claims AI Content Was Less than 1% of Election Misinformation (01:55:05) Outro
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1:58:13
#191 - Sora leak, Pixtral Large, OpenAI email archives
Our 191st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! 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/. Sponsors: The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:02:55) Response to listener comments (00:09:30) Sponsor Break Tools & Apps (00:10:52) OpenAI’s Sora video generator appears to have leaked (00:21:11) Mistral unleashes Pixtral Large and upgrades Le Chat into full-on ChatGPT competitor (00:26:39) Ignite 2024 introduces new AI agents and more for Microsoft 365 Copilot (00:28:50) H, the AI startup that raised $220M, launches its first product: Runner H for ‘agentic’ applications (00:31:20) Anthropic bets on personalization in the AI arms race with new ‘styles’ feature (00:33:42) ElevenLabs now offers ability to build conversational AI agents (00:37:08) Perplexity introduces a shopping feature for Pro users in the U.S. (00:38:49) Google’s Gemini chatbot now has memory (00:43:03) Suno V4 Ai Music Generator Is Out Now And It’s Very Impressive (00:46:28) Introducing FLUX.1 Tools (00:49:51) OpenAI just gave ChatGPT a major 'creativity' upgrade (00:51:26) Runway launches Frames — a new AI image generator that creates custom worlds Applications & Business (00:54:56) OpenAI Email Archives (from Musk v. Altman) (01:02:01) Amazon to invest another $4 billion in Anthropic, OpenAI's biggest rival (01:05:41) Amazon Robots Struggling to Keep Up With Human Workers Projects & Open Source (01:11:27) DeepSeek’s first reasoning model R1-Lite-Preview turns heads, beating OpenAI o1 performance (01:15:30) OpenScholar: The open-source A.I. that’s outperforming GPT-4o in scientific research Research & Advancements (01:18:02) A statistical approach to model evaluations (01:22:08) Scaling Laws for Precision (01:25:10) Cerebras Delivers Record-Breaking Performance with Meta’s Llama 3.1 405B Model Policy & Safety (01:28:01) Sam Altman will co-chair San Francisco mayor-elect Daniel Lurie’s transition team (01:32:21) Biden’s final meeting with Xi Jinping reaps agreement on AI and nukes Synthetic Media & Art (01:33:07) How Did You Do On The AI Art Turing Test? (01:38:27) Outro
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1:42:11
#190 - AI scaling struggles, OpenAI Agents, Super Weights
Our 190th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news! *and sometimes last last week's Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. Note from Andrey: this one is coming out a bit later than planned, apologies! Next one will be coming out sooner. 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/. Sponsors: The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence In this episode: * OpenAI's pitch for a $100 billion data center and AI strategy plan outlines infrastructure and regulatory needs, emphasizing AI's foundational role akin to electricity. * Google's Gemini model challenges OpenAI's dominance, showing strong performance in chatbot arenas alongside generative AI advancements. * DeepMind's AlphaFold3 gets open-sourced for academic use, while new chips from NVIDIA and Google show significant performance boosts. * Anthropic and TSMC updates highlight strategic funding, regulation influences, and the complex dynamics of AI hardware and international policy. If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:02:44) News Preview (00:03:34) Sponsor Break Tools & Apps (00:04:36) OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI (00:16:22) OpenAI Nears Launch of AI Agent Tool to Automate Tasks for Users (00:19:14) Google drops new Gemini model and it goes straight to the top of the LLM leaderboard (00:19:14) Chinese AI startup takes aim at OpenAI's Sora with image-to-video tool launch (00:20:04) Introducing the Forge Reasoning API Beta and Nous Chat: An Evolution in LLM Inference Applications & Business (00:23:47) OpenAI Discusses AI Data Center That Could Cost $100 Billion (00:26:48) Elon Musk's massive AI data center gets unlocked — xAI gets approved for 150MW of power, enabling all 100,000 GPUs to run concurrently (00:29:34) Newest Google and Nvidia Chips Speed AI Training (00:34:45) Ex-OpenAI CTO Murati’s New Team Takes Shape (00:34:45) Amazon Discussing New Multibillion-Dollar Investment in Anthropic Projects & Open Source (00:37:52) Google DeepMind open-sources AlphaFold 3, ushering in a new era for drug discovery and molecular biology (00:41:29) Near plans to build world’s largest 1.4T parameter open-source AI model Research & Advancements (00:45:38) The Super Weight in Large Language Models (00:55:42) Compositional Abilities Emerge Multiplicatively: Exploring Diffusion Models on a Synthetic Task (01:03:47) Mixture-of-Transformers: A Sparse and Scalable Architecture for Multi-Modal Foundation Models (01:08:14) Contextualized Evaluations: Taking the Guesswork Out of Language Model Evaluations Policy & Safety (01:11:14) The Code of Practice for general-purpose AI offers a unique opportunity for the EU (01:15:38) Three Sketches of ASL-4 Safety Case Components (01:23:05) U.S Department of Commerce finalizes $6.6 billion CHIPS Act funding for TSMC Fab 21 Arizona site , TSMC cannot make 2nm chips abroad now: MOEA (01:26:21) OpenAI to present plans for U.S. AI strategy and an alliance to compete with China (01:30:42) OpenAI loses another lead safety researcher, Lilian Weng (01:33:00) Outro
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1:37:21
#189 - Chat.com, FrontierMath, Relaxed Transformers, Trump & AI
Our 189th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! 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's acquisition of chat.com and internal shifts, including hardware lead hire and hardware model leaks, signal significant strategy pivots and challenges with model scaling and security. * Saudi Arabia plans a $100 billion AI initiative aiming to rival UAE's tech hub, highlighting the region's escalating AI investments. * U.S. penalties on GlobalFoundries for violating sanctions against SMIC underline ongoing challenges in enforcing AI-chip export controls. * Anthropic collaborates with Palantir and AWS to integrate CLAWD into defense environments, marking a significant policy shift for the company. Sponsors: The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence. The AI safety book “Uncontrollable" which is not a doomer book, but instead lays out the reasonable case for AI safety and what we can do about it. Max TEGMARK said that “Uncontrollable” is a captivating, balanced, and remarkably up-to-date book on the most important issue of our time" - find it on Amazon today! If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:01:28) News Preview (00:02:10) Response to listener comments (00:05:02) Sponsor Break Tools & Apps (00:07:31) OpenAI Introduces ‘Predicted Outputs’ Feature: Speeding Up GPT-4o by ~5x for Tasks like Editing Docs or Refactoring Code (00:11:55) Anthropic’s Haiku 3.5 surprises experts with an “intelligence” price increase (00:17:10) Introducing FLUX1.1 [pro] Ultra and Raw Modes (00:19:11) X is testing a free version of Grok AI chatbot in select regions Applications & Business (00:21:39) OpenAI acquired Chat.com (00:23:40) Saudis Plan $100 Billion AI Powerhouse to Rival UAE Tech Hub (00:28:28) Meta’s former hardware lead for Orion is joining OpenAI (00:31:38) OpenAI Accidentally Leaked Its Upcoming o1 Model to Anyone With a Certain Web Address (00:35:50) Nvidia Rides AI Wave to Pass Apple as World’s Largest Company Projects & Open Source (00:37:53) ‘Unrestricted’ AI group Nous Research launches first chatbot — with guardrails (00:41:48) FrontierMath: The Benchmark that Highlights AI’s Limits in Mathematics (00:46:29) Hunyuan-Large: An Open-Source MoE Model with 52 Billion Activated Parameters by Tencent Research & Advancements (00:49:55) Applying “Golden Gate Claude” mechanistic interpretability techniques to protein language models. (00:58:3) Relaxed Recursive Transformers: Effective Parameter Sharing with Layer-wise LoRA (01:05:55) From Naptime to Big Sleep: Using Large Language Models To Catch Vulnerabilities In Real-World Code (01:10:22) OpenAI reportedly developing new strategies to deal with AI improvement slowdown Policy & Safety (01:19:52) What Donald Trump’s Win Means For AI (01:28:44) Fab Whack-A-Mole: Chinese Companies are Evading U.S. Sanctions (01:33:57) US fines GlobalFoundries for shipping chips to sanctioned Chinese firm (01:36:55) Anthropic teams up with Palantir and AWS to sell its AI to defense customers (01:39:23) Outro
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1:42:46
#188 - ChatGPT+Search, OpenAI+AMD, SimpleQA, π0
Our 188th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! 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/. This episode was sponsored by The Generator. If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form. In this episode: * Meta's open-source models utilized by China's military prompt regulatory adjustments; US agencies gain access to counterbalance. * OpenAI partners with Broadcom and AMD to develop custom AI hardware, aiming for profitability and reducing inference costs. * Physical Intelligence unveils a generalist robot control policy with a $400M funding boost, showcasing significant advancements in zero-shot task performance. * New U.S. regulation mandates quarterly reporting for large AI model training and computing cluster acquisitions, aiming to bolster national security. Timestamps + Links: (00:00:00) Intro / Banter (00:02:16) News Preview (00:03:05) Response to listener comments / corrections (00:05:00) Sponsor Break Tools & Apps (00:06:28) OpenAI’s search engine is now live in ChatGPT (00:12:18) Image Playground, ChatGPT, and more Apple Intelligence features roll out in beta (00:14:34) GitHub Copilot will support models from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI (00:19:00) Introducing the analysis tool in Claude.ai (00:21:34) ElevenLabs Introduces Voice Design: A New AI Feature that Generates a Unique Voice from a Text Prompt Alone (00:24:18) Midjourney's new web editor lets you tweak images uploaded from your PC (00:26:02) Watch out, Midjourney — Recraft just announced new AI image generator model Applications & Business (00:29:57) Meta strikes multi-year AI deal with Reuters (00:33:15) OpenAI will start using AMD chips and could make its own AI hardware in 2026 (00:40:47) Elon Musk's xAI in talks to raise funding valuing it at $40 billion, WSJ reports (00:46:07) Physical Intelligence, a Robot A.I. Specialist, Raises Millions From Bezos (00:48:32) Waymo ramps up robotaxi push with $5.6 bn in funding (00:49:11) Alphabet's Waymo Serving Over 150,000 Paid Robotaxi Rides Every Week Now, Surging 50% In 2 Months Projects & Open Source (00:51:23) Meta AI Silently Releases NotebookLlama: An Open Version of Google’s NotebookLM (00:54:59) Meta Releases Quantized Llama 3.2 with 4x Inference Speed on Android Phones (00:59:16) OpenAI Releases SimpleQA: A New AI Benchmark that Measures the Factuality of Language Models Research & Advancements (01:08:19) This Is a Glimpse of the Future of AI Robot (01:15:06) Can Language Models Replace Programmers? REPOCOD Says 'Not Yet' (01:19:01) Brain-like Functional Organization within Large Language Models (01:21:20) Decart’s AI simulates a real-time, playable version of Minecraft (01:25:39) Raising the bar on SWE-bench Verified with Claude 3.5 Sonnet Policy & Safety (01:29:06) Commerce just proposed the most significant federal AI regulation to date – and no one noticed (01:35:04)Anthropic warns of AI catastrophe if governments don't regulate in 18 months (01:39:32) Open Source Bites Back as China’s Military Makes Full Use of Meta AI (01:46:35) Meta says it’s making its Llama models available for US national security applications (01:48:16) Outro
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1:51:50