Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 02/27/2026Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie HarrisFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected] out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/In this episode:Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI’s Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic’s Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity’s multi-agent “Computer” coordinator.Compute and business moves include Meta’s reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior.Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China’s plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints.Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic’s report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI’s report on disrupting malicious use.A thank you to our current sponsors:Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn moreODSC AI - go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.Factor - head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a yearTimestamps:

Intro / Banter

News PreviewTools & Apps

Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch

Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET

Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India

Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat

Perplexity announces "Computer," an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars TechnicaApplications & Business

Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases 'personal superintelligence' | TechCrunch

Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch

World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch

Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior

Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers

China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030Research & Advancements

On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers

Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens

models have some pretty funny attractor states

When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task

BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance

NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist

The least understood driver of AI progress

The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like HumansPolicy & Safety

Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon's threats 'do not change our position' on AI

Musk's xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems

Detecting and preventing distillation attacks