Advancements in Language Model Training and Evaluation

Our 199th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 02/09/2025

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In this episode:

- OpenAI's deep research feature capability launched, allowing models to generate detailed reports after prolonged inference periods, competing directly with Google's Gemini 2.0 reasoning models. 
- France and UAE jointly announce plans to build a massive AI data center in France, aiming to become a competitive player within the AI infrastructure landscape. 
- Mistral introduces a mobile app, broadening its consumer AI lineup amidst market skepticism about its ability to compete against larger firms like OpenAI and Google. 
- Anthropic unveils 'Constitutional Classifiers,' a method showing strong defenses against universal jailbreaks; they also launched a $20K challenge to find weaknesses.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:02:27) News Preview
• (00:03:28) Response to listener comments
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:08:01) OpenAI now reveals more of its o3-mini model’s thought process
  • (00:16:03) Google’s Gemini app adds access to ‘thinking’ AI models
  • (00:21:04) OpenAI Unveils A.I. Tool That Can Do Research Online
  • (00:31:09) Mistral releases its AI assistant on iOS and Android
  • (00:36:17) AI music startup Riffusion launches its service in public beta
  • (00:39:11) Pikadditions by Pika Labs lets users seamlessly insert objects into videos
• Applications & Business
  • (00:41:19) Softbank set to invest $40 billion in OpenAI at $260 billion valuation, sources say
  • (00:47:36) UAE to invest billions in France AI data centre
  • (00:50:34) Report: Ilya Sutskever’s startup in talks to fundraise at roughly $20B valuation
  • (00:52:03) ASML to Ship First Second-Gen High-NA EUV Machine in the Coming Months, Aiming for 2026 Production
  • (00:54:38) NVIDIA’s GB200 NVL 72 Shipments Not Under Threat From DeepSeek As Hyperscalers Maintain CapEx; Meanwhile, Trump Tariffs Play Havoc With TSMC’s Pricing Strategy
• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:56:49) The Allen Institute for AI (AI2) Releases Tülu 3 405B: Scaling Open-Weight...
  • (01:00:06) SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model
  • (01:03:56) PhD Knowledge Not Required: A Reasoning Challenge for Large Language Models
  • (01:08:26) OpenEuroLLM: Europe’s New Initiative for Open-Source AI Development
• Research & Advancements
  • (01:10:34) LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning
  • (01:16:39) s1: Simple test-time scaling
  • (01:19:17) ZebraLogic: On the Scaling Limits of LLMs for Logical Reasoning
  • (01:23:55) Streaming DiLoCo with overlapping communication: Towards a Distributed Free Lunch
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:26:50) US sets AI safety aside in favor of 'AI dominance'
  • (01:29:39) Almost Surely Safe Alignment of Large Language Models at Inference-Time
  • (01:32:02) Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against Universal Jailbreaks across Thousands of Hours of Red Teaming

(01:33:16) Anthropic offers $20,000 to whoever can jailbreak its new AI safety system