Our 214th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 06/27/2025
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:
Meta's hiring of key engineers from OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab securing a $2 billion seed round with a valuation of $10 billion.
DeepMind introduces Alpha Genome, significantly advancing genomic research with a model comparable to Alpha Fold but focused on gene functions.
Taiwan imposes technology export controls on Huawei and SMIC, while Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI in a groundbreaking legal case.
A new DeepMind research paper introduces a transformative approach to cognitive debt in AI tasks, utilizing EEG to assess cognitive load and recall in essay writing with LLMs.
Timestamps + Links:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:22) News Preview
(00:02:15) Response to listener comments
Tools & Apps
(00:06:18) Google is bringing Gemini CLI to developers’ terminals)
(00:12:09) Anthropic now lets you make apps right from its Claude AI chatbot)
Applications & Business
(00:15:54) Sam Altman takes his ‘io’ trademark battle public)
(00:21:35) Huawei Matebook Contains Kirin X90, using SMIC 7nm (N+2) Technology)
(00:26:05) AMD deploys its first Ultra Ethernet ready network card — Pensando Pollara provides up to 400 Gbps performance)
(00:31:21) Amazon joins the big nuclear party, buying 1.92 GW for AWS)
(00:33:20) Nvidia goes nuclear — company joins Bill Gates in backing TerraPower, a company building nuclear reactors for powering data centers)
(00:36:18) Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab closes on $2B at $10B valuation)
(00:41:02) Meta hires key OpenAI researcher to work on AI reasoning models)
Research & Advancements
(00:49:46) Google’s new AI will help researchers understand how our genes work)
(00:55:13) Direct Reasoning Optimization: LLMs Can Reward And Refine Their Own Reasoning for Open-Ended Tasks)
(01:01:54) Farseer: A Refined Scaling Law in Large Language Models)
(01:06:28) LLM-First Search: Self-Guided Exploration of the Solution Space)
Policy & Safety
(01:11:20) Unsupervised Elicitation of Language Models)
(01:16:04) Taiwan Imposes Technology Export Controls on Huawei, SMIC)
(01:18:22) Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task)
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:23:41) Judge Rejects Authors’ Claim That Meta AI Training Violated Copyrights)
(01:29:46) Getty drops key copyright claims against Stability AI, but UK lawsuit continues)
