Power Moves in AI: Funding and Leadership Insights

Our 214th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/27/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

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

In this episode:

• Meta's hiring of key engineers from OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab securing a $2 billion seed round with a valuation of $10 billion.
• DeepMind introduces Alpha Genome, significantly advancing genomic research with a model comparable to Alpha Fold but focused on gene functions.
• Taiwan imposes technology export controls on Huawei and SMIC, while Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI in a groundbreaking legal case.
• A new DeepMind research paper introduces a transformative approach to cognitive debt in AI tasks, utilizing EEG to assess cognitive load and recall in essay writing with LLMs.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:22) News Preview
• (00:02:15) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps

• (00:06:18) Google is bringing Gemini CLI to developers’ terminals
• (00:12:09) Anthropic now lets you make apps right from its Claude AI chatbot

Applications & Business

• (00:15:54) Sam Altman takes his ‘io’ trademark battle public
• (00:21:35) Huawei Matebook Contains Kirin X90, using SMIC 7nm (N+2) Technology
• (00:26:05) AMD deploys its first Ultra Ethernet ready network card — Pensando Pollara provides up to 400 Gbps performance
• (00:31:21) Amazon joins the big nuclear party, buying 1.92 GW for AWS
• (00:33:20) Nvidia goes nuclear — company joins Bill Gates in backing TerraPower, a company building nuclear reactors for powering data centers
• (00:36:18) Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab closes on $2B at $10B valuation
• (00:41:02) Meta hires key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models

Research & Advancements

• (00:49:46) Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work
• (00:55:13) Direct Reasoning Optimization: LLMs Can Reward And Refine Their Own Reasoning for Open-Ended Tasks
• (01:01:54) Farseer: A Refined Scaling Law in Large Language Models
• (01:06:28) LLM-First Search: Self-Guided Exploration of the Solution Space

Policy & Safety

• (01:11:20) Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models
• (01:16:04) Taiwan Imposes Technology Export Controls on Huawei, SMIC
• (01:18:22) Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task

Synthetic Media & Art

• (01:23:41) Judge Rejects Authors’ Claim That Meta AI Training Violated Copyrights
• (01:29:46) Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI, but UK lawsuit continues