Our 243rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!
Recorded on 04/29/2026
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:
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OpenAI released GPT-5.5 with strong coding-oriented improvements, a system card discussing chain-of-thought monitorability and misalignment testing, higher pricing than GPT-5.4, and notable quirks like a system-prompt warning about “goblins.”
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xAI launched Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0, claiming large benchmark leads for real-time voice agents and reporting major Starlink customer-support automation and sales conversion impact.
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DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek V4 (Pro and Flash) featuring MoE scaling and 1M-token context via hybrid/compressed attention changes, while Tencent released Hunyuan 3 preview with weaker benchmark performance; a new long-horizon agent benchmark (Clawmark) shows low task success rates.
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Major business, legal, and policy updates include Google’s planned up-to-$40B investment and 5GW compute commitment to Anthropic, Meta’s AWS Gravitron deal and China blocking Meta’s Manus acquisition, a revamped OpenAI–Microsoft agreement, ongoing Musk–OpenAI trial developments, and new safety/security research on sabotage, document degradation under delegation, and bit-flip attacks.
Timestamps:
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(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
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(00:02:00) News Preview
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(00:02:26) Response to listener comments
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Tools & Apps
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(00:02:55) OpenAI Unveils Its New, More Powerful GPT-5.5 Model – The New York Times
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(00:26:00) Claude can now plug directly into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton | The Verge
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Projects & Open Source
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(00:26:38) China’s DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies
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(00:44:05) Tencent Unveils Hy3 preview; Model Enhances Agent Capabilities and Real-World Usability – Tencent 腾讯
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(00:47:14) ClawMark: A Living-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn, Multi-Day, Multimodal Coworker Agents
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Applications & Business
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(00:50:03) Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic
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(00:53:26) Meta will use hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips
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(00:56:51) China blocks Meta’s $2 billion takeover of AI startup Manus
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(00:58:45) OpenAI shakes up partnership with Microsoft, capping revenue share payments
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(01:04:13) Elon Musk Testifies of AI Risk at Trial, Says OpenAI Tried to ‘Steal’ a Charity – WSJ
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(01:08:50) Judge rejects DOJ bid to delay Anthropic appeal in Pentagon dispute
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(01:11:42) Google’s Gemini can now run on a single air-gapped server — and vanish when you pull the plug
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(01:16:07) DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data | TechCrunch
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Policy & Safety
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(01:19:47) Evaluating whether AI models would sabotage AI safety research
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(01:29:50) Temporal Sparse Autoencoders: Leveraging the Sequential Nature of Language for Interpretability
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(01:36:53) Memorandum on Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models
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(01:38:41) Teen boys are dating their AI chatbots—and experts warn it could kill their careers | Fortune
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Synthetic Media & Art
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(01:45:03) Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Voice and Likeness to Protect Against AI Misuse
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Research & Advancements
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(01:46:15) Maximal Brain Damage Without Data or Optimization: Disrupting Neural Networks via Sign-Bit Flips
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