AI Funding and Competitive Dynamics

Our 210th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 05/23/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
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In this episode:

• Google's Gemini diffusion technology showcases significant improvements in speed and efficiency for generating text, potentially revolutionizing the auto-regressive generation paradigm.
• Anthropic activates AI Safety Level 3 protections for Claude Opus 4, implementing robust measures such as bug bounties, synthetic jailbreak data, and preliminary egress bandwidth controls to mitigate bio-risk threats.
• OpenAI responds to the California Attorney General, refuting claims by the not-for-private-gain coalition and defending their controversial restructuring plans amidst ongoing criticism.
• Mistral delays the release of its Llama 4 Behemoth model due to training challenges, while Meta faces similar obstacles in rolling out its large-scale AI models, signaling difficulties in reaching frontier level performance.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:43) News Preview
• Tools & Apps
  (00:02:58) Anthropic’s new Claude 4 AI models can reason over many steps
  (00:09:58) Google Unveils A.I. Chatbot, Signaling a New Era for Search
  (00:14:04) Google rolls out Project Mariner, its web-browsing AI agent
  (00:16:40) Veo 3 can generate videos — and soundtracks to go along with them
  (00:21:26) Imagen 4 is Google’s newest AI image generator
  (00:23:15) Google Meet is getting real-time speech translation
  (00:25:36) Google’s new Jules AI agent will help developers fix buggy code
  (00:26:43) GitHub’s new AI coding agent can fix bugs for you
  (00:28:50) Mistral’s new Devstral model was designed for coding
• Applications & Business
  (00:29:53) OpenAI Unites With Jony Ive in $6.5 Billion Deal to Create A.I. Devices
  (00:36:10) OpenAI’s planned data center in Abu Dhabi would be bigger than Monaco
  (00:41:18) LM Arena, the organization behind popular AI leaderboards, lands $100M
  (00:45:21) Nvidia CEO says next chip after H20 for China won't be from Hopper series
  (00:46:39) Google’s Gemini AI app has 400M monthly active users
  (00:51:15) AI Servers: End demand intact, but rising gap between upstream build and system production (2025.5.18)
  Projects & Open Source
  (00:53:46) Meta Is Delaying the Rollout of Its Flagship AI Model
• Research & Advancements
  (00:57:53) Gemini Diffusion
  (01:03:07) Chain-of-Model Learning for Language Model
  (01:09:16) Seek in the Dark: Reasoning via Test-Time Instance-Level Policy Gradient in Latent Space
  (01:15:38) Two Experts Are All You Need for Steering Thinking: Reinforcing Cognitive Effort in MoE Reasoning Models Without Additional Training
  (01:20:16) Lessons from Defending Gemini Against Indirect Prompt Injections
  (01:23:35) How Fast Can Algorithms Advance Capabilities?
  (01:30:20) Reinforcement Learning Finetunes Small Subnetworks in Large Language Models
• Policy & Safety
• (01:31:12) Exclusive: What OpenAI Told California's Attorney General
• (01:38:25) Activating AI Safety Level 3 Protections