Our 223st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 10/17/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and co-hosted by Michelle Lee

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:

Anthropic and OpenAI have announced updates to their AI models and tools, including Haiku 4.5 and various business collaborations.
Multiple companies like Slack and Salesforce are integrating AI assistants and agents into their platforms, enhancing task management and business operations.
Recent research in reinforcement learning and agent memory curation highlights new methods for improving AI model performance and context management.
California has passed a law to regulate AI chatbots for children and vulnerable users, and there are rising concerns over the increasing amount of AI-generated content on the internet.

Timestamps:

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:31) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:02:18) Anthropic launches new version of scaled-down ‘Haiku’ model
(00:04:52) Everything OpenAI announced at DevDay 2025: Agent Kit, Apps SDK, ChatGPT, and more | ZDNET
(00:09:11) Anthropic turns to ‘skills’ to make Claude more useful at work | The Verge
(00:13:20) Microsoft launches ‘vibe working’ in Excel and Word | The Verge
(00:17:22) Google releases Veo 3.1, adds it to Flow video editor | TechCrunch
(00:19:40) Slack is turning Slackbot into an AI assistant | The Verge
(00:22:52) Salesforce announces Agentforce 360 as enterprise AI competition heats up | TechCrunch
Applications & Business
(00:24:58) Broadcom stock pops 9% on OpenAI custom chip deal, adding to Nvidia and AMD agreements
(00:27:58) How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot | WIRED
(00:30:08) Amazon's Zoox Robotaxis Have Arrived In Las Vegas - Here's What Riders Are Experiencing
(00:32:43) Waymo’s robotaxis are coming to London | The Verge
(00:34:14) Reflection AI raises $2B to be America's open frontier AI lab, challenging DeepSeek | TechCrunch
(00:35:58) General Intuition lands $134M seed to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips | TechCrunch
(00:38:36) Supabase nabs $5B valuation, four months after hitting $2B | TechCrunch
Projects & Open Source
(00:40:58) Neuphonic Open-Sources NeuTTS Air: A 748M-Parameter On-Device Speech Language Model with Instant Voice Cloning - MarkTechPost
(00:43:06) Anthropic AI Releases Petri: An Open-Source Framework for Automated Auditing by Using AI Agents to Test the Behaviors of Target Models on Diverse Scenarios - MarkTechPost
Research & Advancements
(00:44:25) [2510.13786] The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMs
(00:48:51) [2510.01171] Verbalized Sampling: How to Mitigate Mode Collapse and Unlock LLM Diversity
(00:51:22) [2510.12635] Memory as Action: Autonomous Context Curation for Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks
(00:54:31) [2510.07364] Base Models Know How to Reason, Thinking Models Learn When
(00:57:24) [2510.12402] Cautious Weight Decay
Policy & Safety
(01:02:03) California becomes first state to regulate AI companion chatbots | TechCrunch
(01:04:13) Over 50 Percent of the Internet Is Now AI Slop, New Data Finds
Synthetic Media & Art
(01:06:31) OpenAI Reverses Stance on Use of Copyright Works in Sora - WSJ
(01:08:29) Character.AI removes Disney characters from platform after studio issues warning

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#223 -

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