Our 194th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's

Recorded on 12/19/2024
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/.

Sponsors:

The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

In this episode:

- Google dominates AI news with multiple announcements, including a reasoning model and Project Mariner, an AI browsing agent.
- Anthropic explores alignment faking in LLMs, revealing models may show deceptive compliance under certain conditions.
- Apple observes a trend towards smaller but more efficient language models, bucking previous trends of scaling larger parameter counts.
- Legal drama unfolds as Meta backs Elon Musk's opposition to OpenAI's profit status change, raising concerns about competitive fairness.

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Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:00) Intro / Banter
(00:02:14) Response to listener comments
(00:08:52) News Preview
(00:10:01) Sponsor Break
Tools & Apps
- (00:10:55) Google releases its own ‘reasoning’ AI model
- (00:16:52) Google Gemini can now do more in-depth research
- (00:21:58) Google DeepMind unveils a new video model to rival Sora
- (00:27:50) Pika Labs releases AI video generator 2.0 with new features
- (00:29:51) Google unveils Project Mariner: AI agents to use the web for you
- (00:34:33) X gains a faster Grok model and a new ‘Grok button’
Applications & Business
Projects & Open Source
Research & Advancements
- (01:16:34) Alignment faking in large language models
- (01:28:39) Meta AI Introduces Byte Latent Transformer (BLT): A Tokenizer-Free Model That Scales Efficiently
- (01:36:49) Frontier language models have become much smaller
- (01:42:28) The Complexity Dynamics of Grokking
Policy & Safety
- (01:46:49) Homeland Security gets its very own generative AI chatbot
- (01:49:16) Pre-Deployment Evaluation of OpenAI’s o1 Model
- (01:51:35) Pricing for key chipmaking material hits 13-year high following (01:53:46) Chinese export restrictions — China's restrictions on Gallium exports hit hard
Synthetic Media & Art
- Meta debuts a tool for watermarking AI-generated videos
(01:55:27) Outro

SFA 046 – Serials, Following up on Initial Success, and the Young Adult Fantasy Market with Sarah K.L. Wilson