Note from Andrey: this ep came out a week ago on RSS, but I was delayed posting it to youtube and therefore also Substack. My bad!
Our 238th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!
Recorded on 03/18/2026
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
In this episode:
* OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano with 400k-token context windows, higher per-token prices but claimed token-efficiency gains in Codex; nano is API-only and pitched for high-volume classification/data extraction despite a major price increase.
* Mistral open-sourced the Small 4 model family (MoE, 119B total/6B active) combining reasoning, multimodal, and coding-agent capabilities, and announced Forge to help businesses train or post-train custom models.
* Agent “operating system” competition intensified with Meta’s acquired Manus launching a local Mac agent, Nvidia announcing NeMo/“Open Shell” sandboxed agent runtime, and Nvidia also unveiling DLSS 5 plus major hardware forecasts including Groq LPU integration.
* Business and safety updates included OpenAI shifting focus toward productivity/enterprise amid competition, Microsoft reorganizing Copilot and frontier-model efforts, Meta delaying its next model, China-linked ByteDance deploying large Nvidia clusters abroad, and new safety work on steganography, chain-of-thought faithfulness, fine-tuning defenses, cyber-attack evals, and constitution/spec compliance.
A thank you to our current sponsors:
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Box – visit Box.com/AI to learn more
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ODSC AI – go to odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.
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Factor – head to factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a year
Timestamps:
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(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
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(00:01:56) News Preview
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Tools & Apps
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(00:02:39) OpenAI ships GPT-5.4 mini and nano, faster and more capable but up to 4x pricier
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(00:08:04) Mistral’s new Small 4 model punches above its weight with 128 expert modules
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(00:14:03) Meta’s Manus launches ‘My Computer’ to turn your Mac into an AI agent – 9to5Mac
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(00:17:57) NVIDIA Announces NemoClaw for the OpenClaw Community | NVIDIA Newsroom + Nvidia boosts knowledge work with Open Agent Development Platform
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(00:24:09) DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games | The Verge
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(00:26:36) OpenAI to Launch ChatGPT ‘Adult Mode’ Despite Warnings From Its Own Advisers – CNET
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Applications & Business
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(00:33:46) OpenAI Reportedly Pivoting to a Focus on Business and Productivity Only
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(00:45:44) Mistral launches Forge to help enterprises build their own AI models
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(00:54:17) China’s ByteDance gets access to top Nvidia AI chips, WSJ reports
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(00:57:57) Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns
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(01:02:50) Microsoft Shakes Up AI Division As Copilot Falls Behind Google and OpenAI
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Policy & Safety
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(01:07:26) A Decision-Theoretic Formalisation of Steganography With Applications to LLM Monitoring
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(01:13:09) Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought
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(01:18:29) In-Training Defenses against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models
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(01:23:07) How do frontier AI agents perform in multi-step cyber-attack scenarios?
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(01:25:20) Eval awareness in Claude Opus 4.6’s BrowseComp performance
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(01:29:49) Introducing Bloom: an open source tool for automated behavioral evaluations
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(01:37:11) Nvidia’s H200 License Stirs Security Concern Among Top Democrats
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Research & Advancements
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(01:40:050) [2603.15031] Attention Residuals
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(01:47:11) Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling using State Space Principles
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