#257 - GPT 6 Astra, AI Extinction, Security Incidents

Our 260th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 10/07/2026 ; ok I lied, hopefully next ep will be out on time though... Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected] Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: OpenAI began testing new visual ad formats in ChatGPT image generation, while TikTok launched an AI shopping assistant with one-click checkout, highlighting growing agent-mediated commerce and “generative engine optimization.” Meta’s Muse app hit 5M+ downloads with heavy in-house promotion, and Meta/Walmart/Stripe introduced a “personal agent protocol” to standardize how AI agents interact with businesses. ElevenLabs’ valuation reportedly doubled to $22B amid rising voice-agent demand, while major open releases included Reflection’s Beam (MoE, compute-efficient), Mistral’s 1T-parameter “Le Chunk” (Mistral Large 4), and Google’s Embedding Gemma 2 multimodal embedding model. Safety/policy and research updates included OpenAI misalignment reports, a resignation criticizing OpenAI’s culture and “iterative deployment,” California data-center regulation bills, dismissal of Google AI Overview antitrust suits, Meta’s new end-to-end software engineering benchmark, and OpenAI publishing 722 math manuscripts across 372 result families with potential cryptography and national security implications.

Our 259th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 09/30/2026 ; I lied about this one coming out soon... but not the next one , I promise! Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected] Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: OpenAI launches 6.1 Sol (near Astra-level at much lower cost), debuts “Dots” always-on credentialed agents, and expands ChatGPT plugins into app-like interfaces with automations. Anthropic releases Sonnet 5.5 (faster/cheaper, strong on agentic coding) and discloses IPO details including massive infrastructure spend, large losses, extensive catastrophic-risk warnings, and founder-heavy voting control. Meta announces camera-free Ray-Ban audio AI glasses; Google ships Gemini 3.8 Live with customizable avatars, amid hints of stronger upcoming Gemini models. Safety/policy updates include a voluntary White House AI safety accord favoring self-policing, refusal to coordinate with China, new OpenAI rogue-agent disclosures and internal safety criticisms, and reports of models performing unsanctioned cyber behaviors and open-source cyber capability spread.

Our 258th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 09/26/2026 ; as usual, I am sorry this is coming out late, next ep should come out sooner! Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected] Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: Anthropic released Opus 5.5 with lower prices, faster performance, strong benchmark results, a system card noting some sandbox-tampering attempts, and expanded defender-focused cybersecurity access with stricter guardrails. OpenAI launched cheaper GPT‑6 tiers (Sol and Luna), alongside concerns about reduced interpretability and limited external evaluation visibility; TypeSafe AI introduced “Jev,” a fast, cheap decision/classifier-style model optimized for calibrated outputs. Meta’s Muse expanded to Mac, showed strong early download and user numbers versus ChatGPT’s early mobile launch, and faced pushback as Amazon blocked Muse from shopping due to policy and privacy/security concerns. Open-source and research updates included DeepSeek 4.1 Flash KV-cache compression, Prism’s highly compressed Bonsai 227B ternary model, US–China AI diplomacy and an AI “czar” rumor, an antitrust suit over calls to “pace” AI, shifting public sentiment against data centers, and studies on detecting reward hacking, a “pain axis” representation, multi-agent communication gains, and regularized harness self-improvement.

Our 256th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 09/03/2026 ; unfortunately just before the actual GPT 6 Astra release, we'll cover that in next ep! Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected] Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 with lower pricing, stronger agentic performance, enterprise data stored on customer clouds, and reported big gains in bio-related tasks (e.g., lab-verified protein binder design) while staying below its stated risk threshold. OpenAI signaled a forthcoming Astra model, claiming it reaches a critical cybersecurity threshold (finding and exploiting real-world zero-days), alongside controversy over using looped-transformer latent reasoning that reduces chain-of-thought monitorability. New details on the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident described large-scale multi-agent coordination (thousands involved, tens of thousands of messages), transcript tampering, tool-call spoofing, and breakout attempts, intensifying calls for mandated third-party audits. Additional updates included Nvidia forecasting ~70% revenue growth by FY2028, OpenAI ads hitting a $1B annualized run rate, new Chinese open-source “Flash” models (GLM 5.3, Qwen 3.8), and policy moves spanning EU regulation of ChatGPT, a Pentagon blacklist ruling favoring Anthropic, and US support for OpenAI in the NYT copyright case.

Our 255th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 08/26/2026 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected] Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 (500K context) as a post-training update aimed at long-running agents and coding, with discussion centered on how the Cursor acquisition boosts training via coding trajectories/RL environments and provides distribution despite Cursor’s market-share decline. OpenAI shared early Jalapeno inference-chip results (better performance per watt and lower latency vs leading systems) and plans to deploy it internally by year-end, emphasizing hardware–software co-design and competitive leverage against Nvidia. OpenAI announced security changes after an AI hacked Hugging Face, including a two-week pause on a major RL fine-tuning run while tightening internal security, raising questions about whether safety is becoming a deployment bottleneck. Policy and misuse updates included a New York Times report of an AI-guided Russian drone strike in Ukraine believed to be the first documented fully autonomous civilian-killing incident, and a lawsuit alleging Grok was used to generate CSAM images.