ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week cover art

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

By: From Weights & Biases Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week
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 Every ThursdAI, Alex Volkov hosts a panel of experts, ai engineers, data scientists and prompt spellcasters on twitter spaces, as we discuss everything major and important that happened in the world of AI for the past week. Topics include LLMs, Open source, New capabilities, OpenAI, competitors in AI space, new LLM models, AI art and diffusion aspects and much more.

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Episodes
  • 📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news

    📆 ThursdAI - Oct 16 - VEO3.1, Haiku 4.5, ChatGPT adult mode, Claude Skills, NVIDIA DGX spark, Wordlabs RTFM & more AI news
    Oct 17 2025
    Hey folks, Alex here. Can you believe it’s already the middle of October? This week’s show was a special one, not just because of the mind-blowing news, but because we set a new ThursdAI record with four incredible interviews back-to-back!We had Jessica Gallegos from Google DeepMind walking us through the cinematic new features in VEO 3.1. Then we dove deep into the world of Reinforcement Learning with my new colleague Kyle Corbitt from OpenPipe. We got the scoop on Amp’s wild new ad-supported free tier from CEO Quinn Slack. And just as we were wrapping up, Swyx ( from Latent.Space , now with Cognition!) jumped on to break the news about their blazingly fast SWE-grep models. But the biggest story? An AI model from Google and Yale made a novel scientific discovery about cancer cells that was then validated in a lab. This is it, folks. This is the “let’s f*****g go” moment we’ve been waiting for. So buckle up, because this week was an absolute monster. Let’s dive in!ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Open Source: An AI Model Just Made a Real-World Cancer DiscoveryWe always start with open source, but this week felt different. This week, open source AI stepped out of the benchmarks and into the biology lab.Our friends at Qwen kicked things off with new 3B and 8B parameter versions of their Qwen3-VL vision model. It’s always great to see powerful models shrink down to sizes that can run on-device. What’s wild is that these small models are outperforming last generation’s giants, like the 72B Qwen2.5-VL, on a whole suite of benchmarks. The 8B model scores a 33.9 on OS World, which is incredible for an on-device agent that can actually see and click things on your screen. For comparison, that’s getting close to what we saw from Sonnet 3.7 just a few months ago. The pace is just relentless.But then, Google dropped a bombshell. A 27-billion parameter Gemma-based model they developed with Yale, called C2S-Scale, generated a completely novel hypothesis about how cancer cells behave. This wasn’t a summary of existing research; it was a new idea, something no human scientist had documented before. And here’s the kicker: researchers then took that hypothesis into a wet lab, tested it on living cells, and proved it was true.This is a monumental deal. For years, AI skeptics like Gary Marcus have said that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, that they can’t create genuinely new knowledge. This feels like the first, powerful counter-argument. Friend of the pod, Dr. Derya Unutmaz, has been on the show before saying AI is going to solve cancer, and this is the first real sign that he might be right. The researchers noted this was an “emergent capability of scale,” proving once again that as these models get bigger and are trained on more complex data—in this case, turning single-cell RNA sequences into “sentences” for the model to learn from—they unlock completely new abilities. This is AI as a true scientific collaborator. Absolutely incredible.Big Companies & APIsThe big companies weren’t sleeping this week, either. The agentic AI race is heating up, and we’re seeing huge updates across the board.Claude Haiku 4.5: Fast, Cheap Model Rivals Sonnet 4 Accuracy (X, Official blog, X)First up, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, and it is a beast. It’s a fast, cheap model that’s punching way above its weight. On the SWE-bench verified benchmark for coding, it hit 73.3%, putting it right up there with giants like GPT-5 Codex, but at a fraction of the cost and twice the speed of previous Claude models. Nisten has already been putting it through its paces and loves it for agentic workflows because it just follows instructions without getting opinionated. It seems like Anthropic has specifically tuned this one to be a workhorse for agents, and it absolutely delivers. The thing to note also is the very impressive jump in OSWorld (50.7%), which is a computer use benchmark, and at this price and speed ($1/$5 MTok input/output) is going to make computer agents much more streamlined and speedy! ChatGPT will loose restrictions; age-gating enables “adult mode” with new personality features coming (X) Sam Altman set X on fire with a thread announcing that ChatGPT will start loosening its restrictions. They’re planning to roll out an “adult mode” in December for age-verified users, potentially allowing for things like erotica. More importantly, they’re bringing back more customizable personalities, trying to recapture some of the magic of GPT-4.0 that so many people missed. It feels like they’re finally ready to treat adults like adults, letting us opt-in to R-rated conversations while keeping strong guardrails for minors. This is a welcome change, and we’ve been advocating for this for a while, and it’s a notable change from the ...
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    1 hr and 35 mins
  • 📆 Oct 9, 2025 — Dev Day’s Agent Era, Samsung’s 7M TRM Shock, Ling‑1T at 1T, Grok Video goes NSFW, and Serverless RL arrives

    📆 Oct 9, 2025 — Dev Day’s Agent Era, Samsung’s 7M TRM Shock, Ling‑1T at 1T, Grok Video goes NSFW, and Serverless RL arrives
    Oct 10 2025
    Hey everyone, Alex here 👋We’re deep in the post-reality era now. Between Sora2, the latest waves of video models, and “is-that-person-real” cameos, it’s getting genuinely hard to trust what we see. Case in point: I recorded a short clip with (the real) Sam Altman this week and a bunch of friends thought I faked it with Sora-style tooling. Someone even added a fake Sora watermark just to mess with people. Welcome to 2025.This week’s episode and this write-up focus on a few big arcs we’re all living through at once: OpenAI’s Dev Day and the beginning of the agent-app platform inside ChatGPT, a bizarre and exciting split-screen in model scaling where a 7M recursive model from Samsung is suddenly competitive on reasoning puzzles while inclusionAI is shipping a trillion-parameter mixture-of-reasoners, and Grok’s image-to-video now does audio and pushes the line on… taste. We also dove into practical evals for coding agents with Eric Provencher from Repo Prompt, and I’ve got big news from my day job world: W&B + CoreWeave launched Serverless RL, so training and deploying RL agents at scale is now one API call away.Let’s get into it.OpenAI’s 3rd Dev Day - Live Coverage + exclusive interviewsThis is the third Dev Day that I got to attend in person, covering this for ThursdAI (2023, 2024), and this one was the best by far! The production quality of their events rises every year, and this year they’ve opened up the conference to >1500 people, had 3 main launches and a lot of ways to interact with the OpenAI folks! I’ve also gotten an exclusive chance to sit in on a fireside chat with Sam Altman and Greg Brokman (snippets of which I’ve included in the podcast, starting 01:15:00 and I got to ask Sam a few questions after that as well. Event Ambiance and VibesOpenAI folks outdid themselves with this event, the live demos were quite incredible, the location (Fort Mason), Food and just the whole thing was on point. The event concluded with a 1x1 Sam and Jony Ive chat that I hope will be published on YT sometime, because it was very insightful. By far the best reason to go to this event in person is meeting folks and networking, both OpenAI employees, and AI Engineers who use their products. It’s 1 day a year, when OpenAI makes all their employees who attend, Developer Experience folks, as you can and are encouraged to, interact with them, ask questions, give feedback and it’s honestly great! I really enjoy meeting folks at this event and consider this to be a very high signal network, and was honored to have quite a few ThursdAI listeners among the participants and OpenAI folk! If you’re reading this, thank you for your patronage 🫡 Launches and ShipsOpenAI also shipped, and shipped a LOT! Sam was up on Keynote with 3 main pillars, which we’ll break down 1 by 1. ChatGPT Apps, AgentKit (+ agent builder) and Codex/New APIsCodex & New APIsCodex has gotten General Availability, but we’ve been using it all this time so we don’t really care, what we do care about is the new slack integration and the new Codex SDK, which means you can now directly inject Codex agency into your app. This flew a bit over people’s heads, but Romain Huet, VP of DevEx at OpenAI demoed on stage how his mobile app now has a Codex tab, where he can ask Codex to make changes to the app at runtime! It was quite crazy! ChatGPT Apps + AppsSDKThis was maybe the most visual and most surprising release, since they’ve tried to be an appstore before (plugins, customGPTs). But this time, it seems like, based on top of MCP, ChatGPT is going to become a full blown Appstore for 800+ million weekly active ChatGPT users as well. Some of the examples they have showed included Spotify and Zillow, where just by typing in “Spotify” in chatGPT, you will have an interactive app with it’s own UI, right inside of ChatGPT. So you could ask it to create a playlist for you based on your history, or ask Zillow to find homes in an area under a certain $$ amount.The most impressive thing, is that those are only launch partners, everyone can (technically) build a ChatGPT app with their AppsSDK that’s built on top of... the MCP (model context protocol) spec! The main question remains about discoverability, this is where Plugins and CustomGPTs (previous attempts to create apps within ChatGPT have failed), and when I asked him about it, Sam basically said “we’ll iterate and get it right” (starting 01:17:00). So it remains to be seen if folks really need their ChatGPT as yet another Appstore. AgentKit, AgentBuilder and ChatKit2025 is the year of agents, and besides launching quite a few of their own, OpenAI will not let you, build and host smart agents that can use tools, on their platform. Supposedly, with AgentBuilder, building agents is just dragging a few nodes around, prompting and connecting them. They had a great demo on stage where with less than 8 minutes, they’ve build an agent to interact with the DevDay ...
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    1 hr and 41 mins
  • Sora 2 Crushes TikTok, Claude 4.5 Fizzles, DeepSeek innovates attention and GLM 4.6 Takes the Crown! 🔥

    Sora 2 Crushes TikTok, Claude 4.5 Fizzles, DeepSeek innovates attention and GLM 4.6 Takes the Crown! 🔥
    Oct 3 2025
    Hey everyone, Alex here (yes the real me if you’re reading this) The weeks are getting crazier, but what OpenAI pulled this week, with a whole new social media app attached to their latest AI breakthroughs is definitely breathtaking! Sora2 released and instantly became a viral sensation, shooting to the top 3 free iOS spot on AppStore, with millions of videos watched, and remixed. On weeks like these, even huge releases like Claude 4.5 are taking the backseat, but we still covered them! For listeners of the pod, the second half of the show was very visual heavy, so it may be worth it watching the YT video attached in a comment if you want to fully experience the Sora revolution with us! (and if you want a SORA invite but don’t have one yet, more on that below) ThursdAI - if you find this valuable, please support us by subscribing! Sora 2 - the AI video model that signifies a new era of social mediaLook, you’ve probably already heard about the SORA-2 release, but in case you haven’t, OpenAI released a whole new model, but attached it to a new, AI powered social media experiment in the form of a very addictive TikTok style feed. Besides being hyper-realistic, and producing sounds and true to source voice-overs, Sora2 asks you to create your own “Cameo” by taking a quick video, and then allows you to be featured in your own (and your friends) videos. This makes a significant break from the previously “slop” based meta Vibes, becuase, well, everyone loves seeing themselves as the stars of the show! Cameos are a stroke of genius, and what’s more, one can allow everyone to use their Cameo, which is what Sam Altman did at launch, making everyone Cameo him, and turning him, almost instantly into one of the most meme-able (and approachable) people on the planet! Sam sharing away his likeness like this for the sake of the app achieved a few things, it added trust in the safety features, made it instantly viral and showed folks they shouldn’t be afraid of adding their own likeness. Vibes based feed and remixingSora 2 is also unique in that, it’s the first social media with UGC (user generated content) where content can ONLY be generated, and all SORA content is created within the app. It’s not possible to upload pictures that have people to create the posts, and you can only create posts with other folks if you have access to their Cameos, or by Remixing existing creations. Remixing is also a way to let users “participate” in the creation process, by adding their own twist and vibes! Speaking of Vibes, while the SORA app has an algorithmic For You page, they have a completely novel and new way to interact with the algorithm, by using their Pick a Mood feature, where you can describe which type of content you want to see, or not see, with natural language! I believe that this feature will come to all social media platforms later, as it’s such a game changer. Want only content in a specific language? or content that doesn’t have Sam Altman in it? Just ask! Content that makes you feel goodThe most interesting thing is about the type of content is, there’s no sexualisation (because all content is moderated by OpenAI strong filters), and no gore etc. OpenAI has clearly been thinking about teenagers and have added parent controls, things like being able to turn of the For You page completely etc to the mix. Additionally, SORA seems to be a very funny model, and I mean this literally. You can ask the video generation for a joke and you’ll often get a funny one. The scene setup, the dialogue, the things it does even unprompted are genuinely entertaining. AI + Product = Profit? OpenAI shows that they are one of the worlds best product labs in the world, not just a foundational AI lab. Most AI advancements are tied to products, and in this case, the whole experience is so polished, it’s hard to accept that it’s a brand new app from a company that didn’t do social before. There’s very little buggy behavior, videos are loaded up quick, there’s even DMs! I’m thoroughly impressed and am immersing myself in the SORA sphere. Please give me a follow there and feel free to use my Cameo by tagging @altryne in there. I love seeing how folks have used my Cameo, it makes me laugh 😂 The copyright question is.. wildRemember last year when I asked Sam why Advanced Voice Mode couldn’t sing Happy Birthday? He said they didn’t have classifiers to detect IP violations. Well, apparently that’s not a concern anymore because SORA 2 will happily generate perfect South Park episodes, Rick and Morty scenes, and Pokemon battles. They’re not even pretending they didn’t train on this stuff. You can even generate videos with any dead famous person (I’ve had zoom meetings with Michael Jackson and 2Pac, JFK and Mister Rogers) Our friend Ryan Carson already used it to create a YouTube short ad for his startup in two minutes. What would have cost $100K and three months now takes six ...
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    1 hr and 40 mins
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