#232 - ChatGPT Ads, Thinking Machines Drama, STEM
Last Week in AI
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Debating Recursive Self-Improvement Risks
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Episode notes
Our 232st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 01/23/2026
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:
- OpenAI announces testing of ads in ChatGPT and introduces child age prediction to enhance safety features, amidst ongoing ethical debates and funding expansions in AI integration with educational tools and business models.
- China's AI landscape sees significant progress with AI firm Jpu training advanced models on domestic hardware, and strong competitive moves by data centers, highlighting the intense demand in AI manufacturing and infrastructure.
- Silicon Valley tensions rise as startup Thinking Machines experiences high-profile departures back to OpenAI, reflecting broader industry struggles and rapid shifts in organizational dynamics.
- AI legislation and safety measures advance with the US Senate's Defiance Act addressing explicit content, and Anthropic updating Claude's constitution to guide ethical AI interactions, while cultural pushbacks from artists signal ongoing debates in intellectual property and AI-generated content.
Timestamps:
- (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
- (00:02:08) News Preview
- (00:02:26) Response to listener comments
- Tools & Apps
- (00:11:55) OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions - Ars Technica
- (00:18:05) OpenAI is launching age prediction for ChatGPT accounts
- (00:23:37) Google now offers free SAT practice exams, powered by Gemini | TechCrunch
- (00:24:57) Baidu’s AI Assistant Reaches Milestone of 200 Million Monthly Active Users - WSJ
- Applications & Business
- (00:26:53) The Drama at Thinking Machines, a New A.I. Start-Up, Is Riveting Silicon Valley - The New York Times
- (00:31:44) Zhipu AI breaks US chip reliance with first major model trained on Huawei stack | South China Morning Post
- (00:36:31) Elon Musk’s xAI launches world’s first Gigawatt AI supercluster to rival OpenAI and Anthropic
- (00:41:25) Sequoia to invest in Anthropic, breaking VC taboo on backing rivals: FT
- (00:45:18) Humans&, a 'human-centric' AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round | TechCrunch
- Projects & Open Source
- (00:48:51) Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence - MarkTechPost
- (00:50:35) [2601.10611] Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding
- (00:52:53) [2601.10547] HeartMuLa: A Family of Open Sourced Music Foundation Models
- (00:54:46) [2601.11044] AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts
- Research & Advancements
- (00:57:05) STEM: Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules
- (01:06:22) Reasoning Models Generate Societies of Thought
- (01:14:21) Why LLMs Aren't Scientists Yet: Lessons from Four Autonomous Research Attempts
- Policy & Safety
- (01:19:41) Senate passes bill letting victims sue over Grok AI explicit images
- (01:22:03) Building Production-Ready Probes For Gemini
- (01:27:32) Anthropic Publishes Claude AI's New Constitution | TIME
- Synthetic Media & Art
- (01:34:13) Artists Launch Stealing Isn't Innovation Campaign To Protest Big Tech
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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