Show notes
Our 255th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 08/26/2026Hosted 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:SpaceXAI released Grok 4.6 (500K context) as a post-training update aimed at long-running agents and coding, with discussion centered on how the Cursor acquisition boosts training via coding trajectories/RL environments and provides distribution despite Cursor’s market-share decline.OpenAI shared early Jalapeno inference-chip results (better performance per watt and lower latency vs leading systems) and plans to deploy it internally by year-end, emphasizing hardware–software co-design and competitive leverage against Nvidia.OpenAI announced security changes after an AI hacked Hugging Face, including a two-week pause on a major RL fine-tuning run while tightening internal security, raising questions about whether safety is becoming a deployment bottleneck.Policy and misuse updates included a New York Times report of an AI-guided Russian drone strike in Ukraine believed to be the first documented fully autonomous civilian-killing incident, and a lawsuit alleging Grok was used to generate CSAM images.A thank you to our current sponsors:Box - visit Box.com/AI to learn moreNotion - go notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.ODSC 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 (these may be slightly off due to sponsor inserts):(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:01:47) News Preview(00:02:52) Response to listener commentsTools & Apps(00:03:32) Google announces Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after previous release - Ars Technica(00:13:11) SpaceXAI Releases Grok 4.6: A 500K-Context Frontier Model Tuned for Long-Running Agents, Coding, and Knowledge Work - MarkTechPost(00:22:32) Claude will apply invisible watermarks to AI text and images | The Verge + Anthropic explains how Claude’s invisible text watermarks will work(00:28:50) Bringing the cybersecurity capabilities of Claude Mythos 5 to more defenders | Claude by Anthropic(00:32:20) OpenAI to Roll Out Enhanced Safety Features for Paid AI Tool Users - Bloomberg(00:33:41) ChatGPT's Stricter Teen Mode Starts Rolling Out Today(00:34:43) Meta AI Now Has A Dedicated Desktop App For MacApplications & Business(00:37:33) Jalapeño’s first results show industry-leading speed and efficiency in AI inference | OpenAI(00:45:35) OpenAI loses a top data center exec as stream of high-profile departures continues | TechCrunch + OpenAI talent exodus raises 'huge red flag' ahead of IPO(00:50:29) Anthropic Taps Google Chip Veteran as Part of Push Into Hardware(00:52:30) Anthropic's annualized revenue surges to $65B | TechCrunch(00:59:30) Thomson Reuters launches in-house AI model to cut Anthropic costsProjects & Open Source(01:04:26) Qwen 3.8: How a 27B Open Model Rivals GPT-5.6 and Claude OpusPolicy & Safety(01:08:27) A Drone Killed Three Ukrainians. It Was Guided Entirely by A.I. - The New York Times(01:17:59) OpenAI lays out new security changes after its AI hacked Hugging Face | The Verge + OpenAI institutes new safeguards after Hugging Face breach + https://openai.com/index/pacing-model-development-cyber-capabilities/(01:23:31) Another Woman Joins Lawsuit Accusing Grok Of Generating CSAMResearch & Advancements(01:24:56) Small-Scale Experiments: Are We There Yet?(01:29:21) Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs(01:34:30) Massive Activations in Hybrid Linear Attention Large Language Models: Pre-Attention Spikes and Inter-Spike Plateaus Synthetic Media & Art(01:38:59) AI Slop Is Everywhere. Spotify, LinkedIn and Others Have Had Enough. - The New York TimesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
