#193 - Sora release, Gemini 2, OpenAI's AGI Rule, US AI Czar

Our 193rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's 

Note: this one was recorded on 12/13, so the news is a bit outdated... will get things back on track soon!

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.

Sponsors:

• The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

In this episode:

- OpenAI launches Sora, a text-to-video model with significant capabilities, and Gemini 2.0 from Google showcasing agentic potential in AI tools. 
- Character.ai introduces a teen model to address safety concerns following two tragic incidents linked to addiction and harmful influence. 
- The U.S. government sets up a task force to support the rapid development of AI data centers, reflecting the critical need for robust infrastructure. 
- A paper from Anthropic reveals that frontier AI systems have reached the capability of self-replication, sparking discussions on future implications and safety protocols.

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Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:02:44) News Preview
• (00:03:43) Response to listener comments
• (00:09:50) Sponsor Break
• Tools & Apps
  • (00:11:12) OpenAI has finally released Sora
  • (00:21:16) Google Reveals Gemini 2, AI Agents, and a Prototype Personal Assistant
  • (00:28:23) ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode adding video and screen sharing input (plus a Santa mode)
  • (00:30:43) Microsoft’s Copilot can browse the web with you using AI ‘Vision’
  • (00:32:31) Musk’s xAI has launched Grok image generation model
  • (00:35:22) Cognition Labs’ AI Software Engineer Devin Launched for Subscribers
  • (00:40:43) Apple launches its ChatGPT integration with Siri
  • (00:43:23) Reddit’s New AI Search Tool Helps You Find Reddit Answers Without Google
• Applications & Business
  • (00:46:35) OpenAI Aiming to Eliminate Microsoft AGI Rule to Boost Future Investment
  • (00:53:34) GM halts funding of robotaxi development by Cruise
  • (00:57:08) Largest AI data centre in the world to be built in northwest Alberta
  • (01:02:36) Meta announces 4 million sq ft, 2GW Louisiana data center campus
  • (01:05:22) Google’s future data centers will be built next to solar and wind farms
• Projects & Open Source
  • (01:08:37) Google DeepMind Just Released PaliGemma 2: A New Family of Open-Weight Vision Language Models (3B, 10B and 28B)
• Research & Advancements
  • (01:13:51) Training Large Language Models to Reason in a Continuous Latent Space
  • (01:25:37) An Evolved Universal Transformer Memory
  • (01:31:48) APOLLO: SGD-like Memory, AdamW-level Performance
  • (01:37:59) Clio: A system for privacy-preserving insights into real-world AI use
• Policy & Safety
  • (01:39:47) Character.AI steps up teen safety after bots allegedly caused suicide, self-harm
  • (01:45:22) What Trump’s New AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks Means For the Tech Industry
  • (01:49:03) Frontier AI systems have surpassed the self-replicating red line
  • (01:53:52) Chip war: China launches antitrust probe into US semiconductor giant Nvidia in sign of escalation
  • (01:56:53) White House Creating Task Force on AI Datacenter Infrastructure
  • (02:00:00) US clears export of advanced AI chips to UAE under Microsoft deal, Axios says
• (02:02:19) Outro

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