Our 176th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!
NOTE: apologies for this episode coming out about a week late, things got in the way of editing it…
With hosts Andrey Kurenkov (https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (https://twitter.com/jeremiecharris)
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(00:00:00) Intro Song
(00:00:34) Intro Banter
Tools & Apps(00:03:39) OpenAI announces SearchGPT, its AI-powered search engine
(00:08:03) Google gives free Gemini users access to its faster, lighter 1.5 Flash AI model
(00:09:10) X launches underwhelming Grok-powered ‘More About This Account’ feature
(00:11:36) Kuaishou Launches Full Beta Testing for ‘Kling AI’ to Global Users, Elevates Model Capabilities
(00:13:39) Adobe rolls out more generative AI features to Illustrator and Photoshop
(00:14:25) Meta AI gets new ‘Imagine me’ selfie feature
Projects & Open Source(00:15:19) Meta releases open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI, Google tech
(00:28:23) Mistral AI Unveils Mistral Large 2, Beats Llama 3.1 on Code and Math
(00:34:00) Groq’s open-source Llama AI model tops leaderboard, outperforming GPT-4o and Claude in function calling
(00:36:35) Apple shows off open AI prowess: new models outperform Mistral and Hugging Face offerings
Applications & Business(00:40:25) Elon Musk wants Tesla to invest $5 billion into his newest startup, xAI — if shareholders approve
(00:43:01) Nvidia said to be prepping Blackwell GPUs for Chinese market
(00:46:28) Toronto AI company Cohere to indemnify customers who are sued for any copyright violations
(00:49:09) AI startup Cohere raises US$500-million, valuing company at US$5.5-billion
Research & Advancements(00:52:01) AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems
(00:56:47) A Multimodal Automated Interpretability Agent
(01:00:56) MINT-1T: Scaling Open-Source Multimodal Data by 10x: A Multimodal Dataset with One Trillion Tokens
Policy & Safety(01:02:56) Improving Model Safety Behavior with Rule-Based Rewards
(01:06:39) Senators demand OpenAI detail efforts to make its AI safe
(01:10:59) OpenAI reassigns top AI safety executive Aleksandr Madry to role focused on AI reasoning
(01:13:08) As new tech threatens jobs, Silicon Valley promotes no-strings cash aid
(01:17:33) Democratic senators seek to reverse Supreme Court ruling that restricts federal agency power
Synthetic Media & Art(01:20:58) Video game performers will go on strike over artificial intelligence concerns
(01:23:03) Outro
(01:23:58) AI Song
Recent Stories
App Store apps are exposing data from millions of users
An effort led by security research lab CovertLabs is actively uncovering troves of (mostly) AI-related apps that leak and expose user data.
Jan 19, 2026Stop ignoring AI risks in finance, MPs tell BoE and FCA
Treasury committee urges regulators and Treasury to take more ‘proactive’ approach
Jan 19, 2026OpenAI CFO Friar: 2026 is year for ‘practical adoption’ of AI
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said the company is focused on "practical adoption" in 2026, especially in health, science, and enterprise.