Our 215th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/04/2025

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/.

In this episode:

Cloudflare's new AI data scraper blocking feature, its potential implications, and technical challenges
Meta's aggressive recruitment for its Super Intelligence Labs division is covered, highlighting key hires from OpenAI and other leaders in the field
Anthropic loses significant talent to Cursor, with details on their new economic futures program focusing on AI's impact on the labor market
Notable open-source AI model releases from Baidu and Tencent are also discussed, including their performance metrics and potential applications.

Timestamps + Links:

Tools & Apps

(00:02:55) Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers
(00:05:44) Runway is going to let people generate video games with AI
(00:11:24) Google embraces AI in the classroom with new Gemini tools for educators, chatbots for students, and more
(00:16:23) No one likes meetings. They’re sending their AI note takers instead.
(00:18:08) Google launches Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you
(00:19:14) Google's Imagen 4 text-to-image model promises 'significantly improved' boring images

Applications & Business

(00:22:18) Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI ‘superintelligence’ super-group
(00:29:35) Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies
(00:35:10) As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI’s economic fallout
(00:38:04) OpenAI says it has no plan to use Google's in-house chip
(00:41:08) Nvidia stakes new startup that flips script on data center power
(00:44:11) TSMC Arizona Chips Are Reportedly Being Flown Back to Taiwan For Packaging; U.S. Semiconductor Supply Chain Still Remains Dependent on Taiwan

Projects & Open Source

(00:46:57) Baidu releases open source model family ERNIE 4.5
(00:51:55) Tencent Open Sources Hunyuan-A13B: A 13B Active Parameter MoE Model with Dual-Mode Reasoning and 256K Context
(00:57:09) Together AI Releases DeepSWE: A Fully Open-Source RL-Trained Coding Agent Based on Qwen3-32B and Achieves 59% on SWEBench
(01:00:11) GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
(01:04:10) DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation

Research & Advancements

(01:06:21) Wider or Deeper? Scaling LLM Inference-Time Compute with Adaptive Branching Tree Search
(01:13:07) The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements
(01:18:04) Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet reach 50%-time-horizon point estimates of about 80 and 65 minutes, respectively
(01:21:37) Performance Prediction for Large Systems via Text-to-Text Regression
(01:25:38) Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning
(01:26:33) Correlated Errors in Large Language Models

Policy & Safety

#215 - Runway games, Meta Superintelligence, ERNIE 4.5, Adaptive Tree Search

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