Navigating the New AI Landscape

Our 201st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/02/2025

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Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and guest host Sharon Zhou
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In this episode:

- The release of GPT-4.5 from OpenAI, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and Grok 3 from XAI, comparing their features, costs, and capabilities. 
- Discussion on new tools and applications including Sesame's new voice assistant and Google's AI coding assistant, Gemini Code Assist, highlighting their unique benefits. 
- OpenAI's continued user growth despite competition, pricing models for Google's text-to-video platform, and HP acquiring and shutting down Humane's AI pin. 
- Insights into new research on alignment and specification gaming in LLMs, including papers on fine-tuning causing broad misalignment and Google's multi-agent system for scientific collaboration.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter 
• (00:01:36) News Preview
• Tools & Apps

• • (00:02:33) OpenAI announces GPT-4.5, warns it’s not a frontier AI model
  • (00:07:22) Anthropic launches a new AI model that ‘thinks’ as long as you want
  • (00:11:14) New Grok 3 release tops LLM leaderboards
  • (00:16:43) Sesame is the first voice assistant I’ve ever wanted to talk to more than once
  • (00:18:30) Google launches a free AI coding assistant with very high usage caps
  • (00:20:45) Rabbit shows off the AI agent it should have launched with
  • (00:22:23) Mistral’s Le Chat tops 1M downloads in just 14 days

• Applications & Business
  • (00:24:06) OpenAI Tops 400 Million Users Despite DeepSeek’s Emergence
  • (00:27:37) Google’s new AI video model Veo 2 will cost 50 cents per second
  • (00:29:52) HP is buying Humane and shutting down the AI Pin

• Projects & Open Source
  • (00:31:44) Microsoft launches next-gen Phi AI models.
  • (00:33:47) OpenAI introduces SWE-Lancer: A Benchmark for Evaluating Model Performance on Real-World Freelance Software Engineering Work
  • (00:37:12) SWE-Bench+: Enhanced Coding Benchmark for LLMs
• Research & Advancements

• • (00:40:00) Towards an AI co-scientist
  • (00:42:52) Magma: A Foundation Model for Multimodal AI Agents
• Policy & Safety

• • (00:47:32) Demonstrating specification gaming in reasoning models
  • (00:51:03) Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs