Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/29/2026
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 releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health.
- Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.
- Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments).
- Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence.
Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:01:35) News Preview
- Tools & Apps
- (00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge
- (00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times + Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival
- (00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat
- (00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge
- (00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge
- Applications & Business
- (00:19:57) Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence partners with Nvidia to scale its AI research
- (00:24:31) AMD commits up to $5 billion to Anthropic | The Verge
- (00:30:19) Meta in Talks to Lease Computing Power to Ansthropic in Potential $10 Billion Deal
- (00:32:42) Fireworks hits $17.5 billion valuation and $1B in annualized revenue
- (00:35:24) OpenAI and Google sell AI models to blacklisted China groups
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:37:53) Moonshot AI Launches Kimi K3 For Advanced Reasoning, Coding, And Knowledge Work + Moonshot AI's Kimi Halts New C-User Subscriptions Amid Compute Power Crunch — BigGo Finance
- (00:44:39) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch
- (00:48:19) Scaling Agentic RL: 365,000+ Environments for SWE, Terminal, and Search
- Policy & Safety
- (00:51:56) OpenAI says it accidentally hacked Hugging Face with a new AI system | The Verge + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face
- (01:05:28) OpenAI's Hugging Face hack triggers 'AI Kill Switch' bill in Congress
- (01:12:21) OpenAI, Anthropic Staff Share Letter Asking US to Help Pace AI Progress + How OpenAI’s human mistake led to the AI-powered hack on Hugging Face
- (01:17:26) Cheating behaviour in frontier model evaluationsClaude’s values across models and languages
- (01:24:18) OpenAI Principles for National Security Partnerships
- (01:30:45) China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns - Dexerto
- Research & Advancements
- (01:33:04) Discovering cryptographic weaknesses with Claude
- (01:36:32) AIDE²: The First Evidence of Recursive Self-Improvement
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Fler avsnitt av Last Week in AI
Visa alla avsnitt av Last Week in AILast Week in AI med Skynet Today finns tillgänglig på flera plattformar. Informationen på denna sida kommer från offentliga podd-flöden.