ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week Podcast By From Weights & Biases Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week cover art

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

By: From Weights & Biases Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week
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 Every ThursdAI, Alex Volkov hosts a panel of experts, ai engineers, data scientists and prompt spellcasters on twitter spaces, as we discuss everything major and important that happened in the world of AI for the past week. Topics include LLMs, Open source, New capabilities, OpenAI, competitors in AI space, new LLM models, AI art and diffusion aspects and much more.

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Episodes
  • 📆 ThursdAI - Jun 5, 2025 - Live from AI Engineer with Swyx, new Gemini 2.5 with Logan K and Jack Rae, Self Replicating agents with Morph Labs

    📆 ThursdAI - Jun 5, 2025 - Live from AI Engineer with Swyx, new Gemini 2.5 with Logan K and Jack Rae, Self Replicating agents with Morph Labs
    Jun 6 2025
    Hey folks, this is Alex, coming to you LIVE from the AI Engineer Worlds Fair! What an incredible episode this week, we recorded live from floor 30th at the Marriott in SF, while Yam was doing live correspondence from the floor of the AI Engineer event, all while Swyx, the cohost of Latent Space podcast, and the creator of AI Engineer (both the conference and the concept itself) joined us for the whole stream - here’s the edited version, please take a look. We've had around 6500 people tune in, and at some point we got 2 surprise guests, straight from the keynote stage, Logan Kilpatrick (PM for AI Studio and lead cheerleader for Gemini) and Jack Rae (principal scientist working on reasoning) joined us for a great chat about Gemini! Mind was absolutely blown! They have just launched the new Gemini 2.5 Pro and I though it would only be fitting to let their new model cover this podcast this week (so below is fully AI generated ... non slop I hope). The show notes and TL;DR is as always in the end. Okay, enough preamble… let's dive into the madness!🤯 Google Day at AI Engineer: New Gemini 2.5 Pro and a Look Inside the Machine's MindFor the first year of this podcast, a recurring theme was us asking, "Where's Google?" Well, it's safe to say that question has been answered with a firehose of innovation. We were lucky enough to be joined by Google DeepMind's Logan Kilpatrick and Jack Rae, the tech lead for "thinking" within Gemini, literally moments after they left the main stage.Surprise! A New Gemini 2.5 Pro Drops LiveLogan kicked things off with a bang, officially announcing a brand new, updated Gemini 2.5 Pro model right there during his keynote. He called it "hopefully the final update to 2.5 Pro," and it comes with a bunch of performance increases, closing the gap on feedback from previous versions and hitting SOTA on benchmarks like Aider.It's clear that the organizational shift to bring the research and product teams together under the DeepMind umbrella is paying massive dividends. Logan pointed out that Google has seen a 50x increase in AI inference over the past year. The flywheel is spinning, and it's spinning fast.How Gemini "Thinks"Then things got even more interesting. Jack Rae gave us an incredible deep dive into what "thinking" actually means for a language model. This was one of the most insightful parts of the conference for me.For years, the bottleneck for LLMs has been test-time compute. Models were trained to respond immediately, applying a fixed amount of computation to go from a prompt to an answer, no matter how hard the question. The only way to get a "smarter" response was to use a bigger model.Jack explained that "Thinking" shatters this limitation. Mechanically, Gemini now has a "thinking stage" where it can generate its own internal text—hypothesizing, testing, correcting, and reasoning—before committing to a final answer. It's an iterative loop of computation that the model can dynamically control, using more compute for harder problems. It learns how to think using reinforcement learning, getting a simple "correct" or "incorrect" signal and backpropagating that to shape its reasoning strategies.We're already seeing the results of this. Jack showed a clear trend: as models get better at reasoning, they're also using more test-time compute. This paradigm also gives developers a "thinking budget" slider in the API for Gemini 2.5 Flash and Pro, allowing a continuous trade-off between cost and performance.The future of this is even wilder. They're working on DeepThink, a high-budget mode for extremely hard problems that uses much deeper, parallel chains of thought. On the tough USA Math Olympiad, where the SOTA was negligible in January, 2.5 Pro reached the 50th percentile of human participants. DeepThink pushes that to the 65th percentile.Jack’s ultimate vision is inspired by the mathematician Ramanujan, who derived incredible theorems from a single textbook by just thinking deeply. The goal is for models to do the same—contemplate a small set of knowledge so deeply that they can push the frontiers of human understanding. Absolutely mind-bending stuff.🤖 MorphLabs and the Audacious Quest for Verified SuperintelligenceJust when I thought my mind couldn't be bent any further, we were joined by Jesse Han, the founder and CEO of MorphLabs. Fresh off his keynote, he laid out one of the most ambitious visions I've heard: building the infrastructure for the Singularity and developing "verified superintelligence."The big news was that Christian Szegedy is joining MorphLabs as Chief Scientist. For those who don't know, Christian is a legend—he invented batch norm and adversarial examples, co-founded XAI, and led code reasoning for Grok. That's a serious hire.Jesse’s talk was framed around a fascinating question: "What does it mean to have empathy for the machine?" He argues that as AI develops personhood, we need to think about what it wants. And what it wants, according ...
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    1 hr and 44 mins
  • 📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news

    📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news
    May 29 2025
    Hey everyone, Alex here 👋Welcome back to another absolutely wild week in AI! I'm coming to you live from the Fontainebleau Hotel in Vegas at the Imagine AI conference, and wow, what a perfect setting to discuss how AI is literally reimagining our world. After last week's absolute explosion of releases (Claude Opus 4, Google I/O madness, OpenAI Codex and Jony colab), this week gave us a chance to breathe... sort of. Because even in a "quiet" week, we still got a new DeepSeek model that's pushing boundaries, and the entire internet discovered that we might all just be prompts. Yeah, it's been that kind of week!Before we dive in, quick shoutout to everyone who joined us live - we had some technical hiccups with the Twitter Spaces audio (sorry about that!), but the YouTube stream was fire. And speaking of fire, we had two incredible guests join us: Charlie Holtz from Chorus (the multi-model chat app that's changing how we interact with AI) and Linus Eckenstam, who's been traveling the AI conference circuit and bringing us insights from the frontlines of the generative AI revolution.Open Source AI & LLMs: DeepSeek Whales & Mind-Bending PapersDeepSeek dropped R1-0528 out of nowhere, an update to their reasoning beast with some serious jumps in performance. We’re talking AIME at 91 (beating previous scores by a mile), LiveCodeBench at 73, and SWE verified at 57.6. It’s edging closer to heavyweights like o3, and folks on X are already calling it “clearer thinking.” There was hype it might’ve been R2, but the impact didn’t quite crash the stock exchange like past releases. Still, it’s likely among the best open-weight models out there.So what's new? Early reports and some of my own poking around suggest this model "thinks clearer now." Nisten mentioned that while previous DeepSeek models sometimes liked to "vibe around" and explore the latent space before settling on an answer, this one feels a bit more direct.And here’s the kicker—they also released an 8B distilled version based on Qwen3, runnable on your laptop. Yam called it potentially the best 8B model to date, and you can try it on Ollama right now. No need for a monster rig! The Mind-Bending "Learning to Reason Without External Rewards" PaperOkay, this paper result broke my brain, and apparently everyone else's too. This paper shows that models can improve through reinforcement learning with its own intuition of whether or not it's correct. 😮It's like the placebo effect for AI! The researchers trained models without telling them what was good or bad, but rather, utilized a new framework called Intuitor, where the reward was based on how the "self certainty". The thing that took my whole timeline by storm is, it works! GRPO (Group Policy Optimization) - the framework that DeepSeek gave to the world with R1 is based on external rewards (human optimize) and Intuitor seems to be mathcing or even exceeding some of GRPO results when Qwen2.5 3B was used to finetune. Incredible incredible stuffBig Companies LLMs & APIsClaude Opus 4: A Week Later – The Dev Darling?Claude Opus 4, whose launch we celebrated live on the show, has had a week to make its mark. Charlie Holtz, who's building Chorus (more on that amazing app in a bit!), shared that while it's sometimes "astrology" to judge the vibes of a new model, Opus 4 feels like a step change, especially in coding. He mentioned that Claude Code, powered by Opus 4 (and Sonnet 4 for implementation), is now tackling GitHub issues that were too complex just weeks ago. He even had a coworker who "vibe coded three websites in a weekend" with it – that's a tangible productivity boost!Linus Eckenstam highlighted how Lovable.dev saw their syntax error rates plummet by nearly 50% after integrating Claude 4. That’s quantifiable proof of improvement! It's clear Anthropic is leaning heavily into the developer/coding space. Claude Opus is now #1 on the LMArena WebDev arena, further cementing its reputation.I had my own magical moment with Opus 4 this week. I was working on an MCP observability talk for the AI Engineer conference and trying to integrate Weave (our observability and evals framework at Weights & Biases) into a project. Using Windsurf's Cascade agent (which now lets you bring your own Opus 4 key, by the way – good move, Windsurf!), Opus 4 not only tried to implement Weave into my agent but, when it got stuck, it figured out it had access to the Weights & Biases support bot via our MCP tool. It then formulated a question to the support bot (which is also AI-powered!), got an answer, and used that to fix the implementation. It then went back and checked if the Weave trace appeared in the dashboard! Agents talking to agents to solve a problem, all while I just watched – my jaw was on the floor. Absolutely mind-blowing.Quick Hits: Voice Updates from OpenAI & AnthropicOpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode finally sings—yes, I’ve been waiting for this! It can belt out tunes like Mariah Carey, ...
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    1 hr and 28 mins
  • 📆 ThursdAI - Veo3, Google IO25, Claude 4 Opus/Sonnet, OpenAI x Jony Ive, Codex, Copilot Agent - INSANE AI week

    📆 ThursdAI - Veo3, Google IO25, Claude 4 Opus/Sonnet, OpenAI x Jony Ive, Codex, Copilot Agent - INSANE AI week
    May 23 2025
    Hey folks, Alex here, welcome back to ThursdAI! And folks, after the last week was the calm before the storm, "The storm came, y'all" – that's an understatement. This wasn't just a storm; it was an AI hurricane, a category 5 of announcements that left us all reeling (in the best way possible!). From being on the ground at Google I/O to live-watching Anthropic drop Claude 4 during our show, it's been an absolute whirlwind.This week was so packed, it felt like AI Christmas, with tech giants and open-source heroes alike showering us with gifts. We saw OpenAI play their classic pre-and-post-Google I/O chess game, Microsoft make some serious open-source moves, Google unleash an avalanche of updates, and Anthropic crash the party with Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet live stream in the middle of ThursdAI!So buckle up, because we're about to try and unpack this glorious chaos. As always, we're here to help you collectively know, learn, and stay up to date, so you don't have to. Let's dive in! (TL;DR and links in the end) Open Source LLMs Kicking Things OffEven with the titans battling, the open-source community dropped some serious heat this week. It wasn't the main headline grabber, but the releases were significant!Gemma 3n: Tiny But Mighty MatryoshkaFirst up, Google's Gemma 3n. This isn't just another small model; it's a "Nano-plus" preview, a 4-billion parameter MatFormer (Matryoshka Transformer – how cool is that name?) model designed for mobile-first multimodal applications. The really slick part? It has a nested 2-billion parameter sub-model that can run entirely on phones or Chromebooks.Yam was particularly excited about this one, pointing out the innovative "model inside another model" design. The idea is you can use half the model, not depth-wise, but throughout the layers, for a smaller footprint without sacrificing too much. It accepts interleaved text, image, audio, and video, supports ASR and speech translation, and even ships with RAG and function-calling libraries for edge apps. With a 128K token window and responsible AI features baked in, Gemma 3n is looking like a powerful tool for on-device AI. Google claims it beats prior 4B mobile models on MMLU-Lite and MMMU-Mini. It's an early preview in Google AI Studio, but it definitely flies on mobile devices.Mistral & AllHands Unleash Devstral 24BThen we got a collaboration from Mistral and AllHands: Devstral, a 24-billion parameter, state-of-the-art open model focused on code. We've been waiting for Mistral to drop some open-source goodness, and this one didn't disappoint.Nisten was super hyped, noting it beats o3-Mini on SWE-bench verified – a tough benchmark! He called it "the first proper vibe coder that you can run on a 3090," which is a big deal for coders who want local power and privacy. This is a fantastic development for the open-source coding community.The Pre-I/O Tremors: OpenAI & Microsoft Set the StageAs we predicted, OpenAI couldn't resist dropping some news right before Google I/O.OpenAI's Codex Returns as an AgentOpenAI launched Codex – yes, that Codex, but reborn as an asynchronous coding agent. This isn't just a CLI tool anymore; it connects to GitHub, does pull requests, fixes bugs, and navigates your codebase. It's powered by a new coding model fine-tuned for large codebases and was SOTA on SWE Agent when it dropped. Funnily, the model is also called Codex, this time, Codex-1. And this gives us a perfect opportunity to talk about the emerging categories I'm seeing among Code Generator agents and tools:* IDE-based (Cursor, Windsurf): Live pair programming in your editor* Vibe coding (Lovable, Bolt, v0): "Build me a UI" style tools for non-coders* CLI tools (Claude Code, Codex-cli): Terminal-based assistants* Async agents (Claude Code, Jules, Codex, GitHub Copilot agent, Devin): Work on your repos while you sleep, open pull requests for you to review, asyncCodex (this new one) falls into category number 4, and with today's release, Cursor seems to also strive to get to category number 4 with background processing. Microsoft BUILD: Open Source Copilot and Copilot Agent ModeThen came Microsoft Build, their huge developer conference, with a flurry of announcements.The biggest one for me? GitHub Copilot's front-end code is now open source! The VS Code editor part was already open, but the Copilot integration itself wasn't. This is a massive move, likely a direct answer to the insane valuations of VS Code clones like Cursor. Now, you can theoretically clone GitHub Copilot with VS Code and swing for the fences.GitHub Copilot also launched as an asynchronous coding assistant, very similar in function to OpenAI's Codex, allowing it to be assigned tasks and create/update PRs. This puts Copilot right into category 4 of code assistants, and with the native Github Integration, they may actually have a leg up in this race!And if that wasn't enough, Microsoft is adding MCP (Model Context Protocol) support directly into the Windows OS. The ...
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    1 hr and 28 mins
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