Last Week in AI – Details, episodes & analysis

Our 180th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

With hosts Andrey Kurenkov (https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (https://twitter.com/jeremiecharris)

If you would like to get a sneak peek and help test Andrey's generative AI application, go to Astrocade.com to join the waitlist and the discord.

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.

Email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Episode Highlights:

• Ideogram AI's new features, Google's Imagine 3, Dream Machine 1.5, and Runway's Gen3 Alpha Turbo model advancements.
• Perplexity's integration of Flux image generation models and code interpreter updates for enhanced search results. 
• Exploration of the feasibility and investment needed for scaling advanced AI models like GPT-4 and Agent Q architecture enhancements.
• Analysis of California's AI regulation bill SB1047 and legal issues related to synthetic media, copyright, and online personhood credentials.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:08) Response to Listener Comments / Corrections
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:03:58) Ideogram AI expands its features with v2 model and color palette options
  • (00:07:48) Google Releases Powerful AI Image Generator You Can Use for Free
  • (00:11:41) Perplexity adds Flux.1 model for Pro users alongside Playground v3 update
  • (00:13:58) Luma drops Dream Machine 1.5 — here’s what’s new
  • (00:17:49) Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha Turbo is here and can make AI videos faster than you can type
  • (00:20:21) Perplexity’s latest update improves code interpreter, charts included
• Applications & Business
  • (00:24:14) AMD buying server maker ZT Systems for $4.9 billion as chipmakers strengthen AI capabilities
  • (00:28:55) Ars Technica content is now available in OpenAI services
  • (00:34:08) Anysphere, a GitHub Copilot rival, has raised $60M Series A at  $400M valuation from a16z, Thrive, sources say
  • 00:38:32 Stability AI appoints new Chief Technology Officer
  • (00:41:45) Cruise’s robotaxis are coming to the Uber app in 2025
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:44:16) AI21 Introduces the Jamba Model Family: The most powerful and efficient long-context models for the enterprise
  • (00:53:47) Microsoft reveals Phi-3.5 — this new small AI model outperforms Gemini and GPT-4o
  • (00:57:33) Nvidia’s Llama-3.1-Minitron 4B is a small language model that punches above its weight
  • (01:00:58) Open source Dracarys models ignite generative AI fired coding
• Research & Advancements
  • (01:12:35) Can AI Scaling Continue Through 2030?
  • (01:15:35) Agent Q: Advanced Reasoning and Learning for Autonomous AI Agents
  • (01:23:58) Transformers to SSMs: Distilling Quadratic Knowledge to Subquadratic Models
  • (01:31:18) Loss of plasticity in deep continual learning
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:38:20) California weakens bill to prevent AI disasters before final vote, taking advice from Anthropic
  • (01:48:14) Personhood credentials: Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online
  • (01:52:44) Showing SAE Latents Are Not Atomic Using Meta-SAEs
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:58:33) Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement
  • (01:59:32) Artists’ lawsuit against Stability AI and Midjourney gets more punch
• (02:01:43) Outro

Our 179th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

With hosts Andrey Kurenkov (https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (https://twitter.com/jeremiecharris)

If you would like to get a sneak peek and help test Andrey's generative AI application, go to Astrocade.com to join the waitlist and the discord.

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

If you would like to become a sponsor for the newsletter, podcast, or both, please fill out this form.

Email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Episode Highlights:

- Grok 2's beta release features new image generation using Black Forest Labs' tech.

- Google introduces Gemini Voice Chat Mode available to subscribers and integrates it into Pixel Buds Pro 2.

- Huawei's Ascend 910C AI chip aims to rival NVIDIA's H100 amidst US export controls.

- Overview of potential risks of unaligned AI models and skepticism around SingularityNet's AGI supercomputer claims.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:02:15) Response to listener comments / corrections
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:04:24) Grok-2 is out in beta, now with added AI image generation
  • (00:11:28) OpenAI reveals an updated GPT-4o model - but can't quite explain how it's better
  • (00:13:48) Google Gemini’s voice chat mode is here
  • (00:16:18) Google’s Pixel Buds Pro 2 bring Gemini to your ears
  • (00:19:55) Google’s AI-generated search summaries change how they show their sources
  • (00:23:13) Prompt Caching is Now Available on the Anthropic API for Specific Claude Models
• Applications & Business
  • (00:26:56) Meet Black Forest Labs, the startup powering Elon Musk’s unhinged AI image generator
  • (00:26:56) Huawei readies new AI chip to challenge Nvidia in China, WSJ reports
  • (00:37:53) ASML and Imec Announce High-NA Lithography Breakthrough
  • (00:43:07) Chinese startup WeRide gets nod to test robotaxis with passengers in California
  • (00:45:49) Perplexity’s popularity surges as AI search start-up takes on Google
  • (00:51:55) Lisa Su formally welcomes Silo AI team to AMD after completing $665 million acquisition
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:54:31) FalconMamba 7B Released: The World’s First Attention-Free AI Model with 5500GT Training Data and 7 Billion Parameters
  • (00:59:25) OpenAI has introduced SWE-bench Verified to evaluate AI performance
  • (01:04:21) Nous Research presents Hermes 3
  • (01:11:07) New supercomputing network could lead to AGI, scientists hope, with 1st node coming online within weeks
• Research & Advancements
  • (01:14:40) The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery
  • (01:30:24) Imagen 3
  • (01:32:48) The Data Addition Dilemma
  • (01:37:35) LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:40:55) MIT researchers release a repository of AI risks
  • (01:44:14) Elon Musk addresses power issues at xAI supercomputer facility in Memphis
  • (01:46:52) FCC Proposes New Rules on AI-Powered Robocalls
  • Governments Adjust Policies Amid Flood of AI Record Requests
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:48:21) SAG-AFTRA Strikes Groundbreaking AI Digital Voice Replica Pact With Startup Firm Narrativ
  • (01:51:52) How ‘Deepfake Elon Musk’ Became the Internet’s Biggest Scammer
• (01:56:21) AI Song Outro

Our 170th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

With hosts Andrey Kurenkov (https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (https://twitter.com/jeremiecharris)

Feel free to leave us feedback here.

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/

Email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Timestamps + Links:

• Tools & Apps
  • (00:03:33) KLING is the latest AI video generator that could rival OpenAI's Sora
  • (00:09:16) ‘Apple Intelligence’ will automatically choose between on-device and cloud-powered AI
  • (00:12:21) Udio introduces new udio-130 music generation model and more advanced features
  • (00:14:38) Perplexity AI’s new feature will turn your searches into shareable pages
  • (00:16:35) ElevenLabs’ AI generator makes explosions or other sound effects with just a prompt
  • (00:18:37) Google’s updated AI-powered NotebookLM expands to India, UK and over 200 other countries
• Applications & Business
  • (00:19:40) OpenAI is restarting its robotics research group
  • (00:25:01) Saudi fund invests in China effort to create rival to OpenAI
  • (00:29:34) UAE seeks ‘marriage’ with US over artificial intelligence deals
  • (00:33:01) Zoox to test self-driving cars in Austin and Miami 
  • (00:35:49) Microsoft Lays Off 1,500 Workers, Blames "AI Wave"
  • (00:38:28) Avengers, assemble—Google, Intel, Microsoft, AMD and more team up to develop an interconnect standard to rival Nvidia's NVLink
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:40:39) GLM-4-9B-Chat-1M
  • (00:46:37) Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics show off first project: an open source robot that does chores
  • (00:49:40) Zyphra debuts Zyda, a 1.3T language modeling dataset it claims outperforms Pile, C4, arxiv
  • (00:51:59) Stability AI debuts new Stable Audio Open for sound design
• Research & Advancements
  • (00:54:05) Scaling and evaluating sparse autoencoders
  • (01:04:54) Improving Alignment and Robustness with Short Circuiting
  • (01:12:11) Automatic Data Curation for Self-Supervised Learning: A Clustering-Based Approach
  • (01:16:20) GPT-4 didn't ace the bar exam after all, MIT research suggests — it didn't even break the 70th percentile
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:20:11) Former OpenAI researcher foresees AGI reality in 2027
  • (01:28:03) OpenAI Insiders Warn of a ‘Reckless’ Race for Dominance
  • (01:33:52) Testing and mitigating elections-related risks
  • (01:36:26) Teams of LLM Agents can Exploit Zero-Day Vulnerabilities
• Synthetic Media & Art
  • (01:43:23) The Uncanny Rise of the World's First AI Beauty Pageant
• (01:46:25) Outro + AI Song

Happy new year!

Our last episode of 2021 is also our 82th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Outline:

• Intro
• This AI-powered art app lets you paint pictures with words
• AI Dungeon’s creators are launching an experimental AI-powered game platform
• Announcing the Transactions on Machine Learning Research
• Bigger’s Not Always Better: DeepMind’s New Language AI Is Small But Mighty 
• 2021 was the year of monster AI models 
• U.N. talks adjourn without deal to regulate ‘killer robots’
• Face Recognition Is Being Banned—but It’s Still Everywhere
• Better Images of AI

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Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at [email protected]

Our 81th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Outline:

• (0:00) Intro
• (1:30) Meet your new A.I. best friend
• (6:37) The Beatles: Get Back Used High-Tech Machine Learning To Restore The Audio
• (10:26) Google, Cambridge U & Alan Turing Institute Propose PolyViT: A Universal Transformer for Image, Video, and Audio Classification
• (14:00) Deep-learning model speeds extreme weather predictions
• (18:23) How We Determined Crime Prediction Software Disproportionately Targeted Low-Income, Black, and Latino Neighborhoods
• (23:44) Inside Tesla as Elon Musk Pushed an Unflinching Vision for Self-Driving Cars 
• (27:18) Alarmed by Tesla’s public self-driving test, state legislators demand answers from DMV 
• (30:15) A ​Quadruped Humanoid Robot Might Be Able To Do It All
• (34:05) Forging New Pathways: Boys & Girls Clubs Teens Take AI From Idea to Application
• (38:00) Outro

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Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at [email protected]

Our 80th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at [email protected]

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

Check our text version of this news roundup over at lastweekin.ai.

Outline:

(01:10) Procedural storytelling is exploding the possibilities of video game narratives  (04:16) Twitch Introduces Machine Learning Feature to Detect Suspicious Users (07:28) DeepMind’s AI helps untangle the mathematics of knots (11:06) Yale researchers combat biases in machine learning algorithms (13:40) Ex-Googler Timnit Gebru Starts Her Own AI Research Center (17:20) US rejects calls for regulating or banning ‘killer robots (19:50) Who, exactly, authored this AI-generated spin on Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo?  (25:00) Outro

Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Our 79th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Feel free to email us your thoughts or feedback at [email protected]

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

Check our text version of this news roundup over at lastweekin.ai.

Outline:

(00:00) Intro (01:10) Alphabet is putting its prototype robots to work cleaning up around Google’s offices (04:42) Grammarly raises $200M at a $13B valuation to make you an even better writer using AI  / AI-powered writing assistant Writer nabs $21M (07:03) A Leap Forward in Computer Vision: Facebook AI Says Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners (09:27) Research Professor Adji Bousso Dieng Is Out to Change the World With AI (11:42) A Utah company says it’s revolutionized truth-telling technology. Experts are highly skeptical (13:45) South Korea is Selling Millions of Photos To Facial Recognition Researchers (16:00) AWS makes AI and machine learning tangible with first major art debut at Smithsonian (19:00) ‘Paint Me a Picture’: NVIDIA Research Shows GauGAN AI Art Demo Now Responds to Words (21:45) Outro Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

A special discussion episode, where we do not cover AI news but instead chat about our experiences teaching AI classes at Stanford with Abigail See, a graduate from the Stanford AI Lab and a good friend of ours.

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Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Our 78th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

Check our text version of this news roundup over at lastweekin.ai.

This week:

(00:00) Intro (01:40) Walmart is using fully driverless trucks to ramp up its online grocery business (05:20) AI startup funding hits record high of $17.9B in Q3 / Robot orders by companies surge as labor shortages linger (09:50) University of Waterloo AI Researchers Introduce A New NLP Model ‘AfriBERTa’ For African Languages Using Deep Learning Techniques   (12:40) AI skin cancer diagnoses risk being less accurate for dark skin – study (16:55) Israel escalates surveillance of Palestinians with facial recognition program in West Bank (22:15) Tesla vehicle in ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta mode ‘severely damaged’ after crash in California (26:15) CMU opens first AI maker space to let students 'sharpen the cutting edge of AI' (28:25) Machine Learning Shushes Stressed Dogs (31:05) Outro

Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Our 77th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes | Spotify | YouTube

Check our text version of this news roundup over at lastweekin.ai.

This week:

• (01:06) Landing AI brings in $57M for its machine learning operations tools
• (05:13) As the Arctic Warms, AI Forecasts Scope Out Shifting Sea Ice
• (09:07) Why Facebook (Or Meta) Is Making Tactile Sensors for Robots 
• (14:12) Google AI Introduces ‘GoEmotions’: An NLP Dataset for Fine-Grained Emotion Classification
• (18:28) Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans to Shut Down Facial Recognition System
• (21:40) Google Wants to Work With the Pentagon Again, Despite Employee Concerns
• (25:50) Australia Ordered Clearview AI to Destroy its Database, As Its Violating Privacy Laws 
• (27:54) AIBA uses AI technology to vet judges and refs at Belgrade worlds
• (30:40) Miso Introduces Second Generation Restaurant Kitchen Robot, the Flippy 2

Music: Deliberate Thought, Inspired by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)