#246 - Gemini 3.5 + Omni, Musk Loses, OpenAI vs Erdős - Last Week in AI

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

Recorded on 05/22/2026

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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.

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Timestamps:

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

#246 - Gemini 3.5 + Omni, Musk Loses, OpenAI vs Erdős