ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

Hey yall, Alex here, let me catch you up!

I came back from vacation expecting to cover Fable 5 after a week of using it. The first two days after we all first got access to a Mythos level model were super exciting! But then the news hit, US Government issued an order banning Anthropic from giving access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to any foreign national, causing Anthropic to pull the models completely (even internally to their employees!).

So, this wasn’t the show I planned, but it turned into a great show about Open Source, as...

Hey folks, Alex here, and welcome to a BIG MODEL week! We finally got Mythos (well almost)! Let me catch you up!

This week started with WWDC26 from Apple, and Max Weinbach, who was in the room at Apple Park and actually has access to some of the new features including an all new SIRI AI, joined us to break down what could be the most used AI in the world very soon. At first I was skeptical, but he convinced me that the new Siri is actually good!

Then, we saw the ultimate model...

Hey folks, Alex here, let me catch you up!

I’ve had a feeling that this week is going to be crazy, as it started on the weekend MiniMax M3, then with Jensen announcing new RTX Spark, NVIDIA’s first PC chip packing 1 petaflop of local AI power into thin laptops.

A few days later at Microsoft BUILD, Satya & Mustafa from MAI dropped 7 AI models, completely pre-trained from scratch, including a new MAI-thinking-1, MAI-code and MAI-image 2.5 that started topping the image gen charts.

Then other image models started racing to the top of the...

Hey folks, this is Alex, let me catch you up!

First, Opus 4.8 dropped during the show, we immediately tested it, read on for our initial reviews. Also, we dedicated a heavy chunk of the show today to cover Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter on AI called “Magnifica Humanitas” and talked about a new bench called DeepSWE.

And then, just after the show, both ElevenLabs and Cartesia dropped released that honestly blew my mind, and I don’t get my mind blown often. I got so excited that I had to record a video on it (inst...

Hey, Alex here, just got back from the sunny Shoreline Theater in Mountain view, so let me catch you up!

This week was definitely Google heavy, we are covering Google’s IO conference for the third year in a row, and today we have a special guest, Logan Kilpatrick, is joining to discuss the announced Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google Omni model, and the new Managed Agents offerings.

Plus, this week, for the first time, OpenAI announced that AI solved a Math problem that humans couldn’t solve for 80 years, Cursor is showing off Composer 2.5 which is part...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋

I am back live on ThursdAI after a week off, and yes, I am now a married man! Thank you for all the congrats, and also thank you to Ryan and Yam for holding down the fort last week while I tried very hard to disconnect.

This week was a relatively chill one in AI land (no, really, for once), which actually let us go deep on some really fascinating stuff. We’ve got Thinking Machines Lab finally shipping their first real research with these wild interaction models, Meta Muse Spark showi...

Hey yall, Alex here (with a scheduled post)

I’m taking this week off to get married and celebrate life with family, and touch some grass, but wanted to share the awesome chats I had with some great folks at AI Engineer Europe last week.

BTW - Yam and Ryan took over the live show today, if you didn’t happen to catch that, please check out the live on our youtube channel!

Ok, now to the actual content. The best thing about the AI Engineer conferences for me is the people I meet...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋

Tomorrow is May. May! I genuinely cannot believe we’re four months into 2026 already, and the AI news cycle is showing zero signs of slowing down. This week’s show was a wild one! We opened with what is genuinely one of the most important AI stories I’ve ever covered (Mayo Clinic AI detecting pancreatic cancer THREE YEARS before human radiologists), we covered the return of the Chinese whale with DeepSeek V4, OpenAI got caught in their own system prompt begging GPT-5.5 to please stop talking about goblins, and I literally gave my coding...

Hey, Alex here, I’ll try to catch you up, but it’s one of the more intense weeks in AI in recent memory.

Here’s the TL;DR - OpenAI dominates across the board this week! Finally launches “spud”, called it GPT 5.5 (and 5.5 Pro), and it’s SOTA on most things,nearly matching the mysterious Claude Mythos but released and we can actually use it (we tested it extensively).

OpenAI also took the crown in image generate with the incredible GPT-image-v2 release, beating Nano Banana 2 and pro by a significant margin, the images are incredible...

Hey ya’ll, Alex here with your weekly AI news catch up.

It’s one of those Thursday’s where no matter how well I prep, the big AI labs are hell bent to show up before each other. Alibaba dropped Qwen 3.6 with Apache 2, confirming their commitment to Open Source, then Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 (not quite Mythos) and OpenAI followed with a huge Codex update that includes Computer Use among other things. The highlight of Computer User is the background usage, more on that below. This is all just from today!

Previously in the week w...

Hey yall, Alex here, writing this from sunny London, at the first ever AI Engineer conference in Europe!

What a show we have for you today! First, let me catch you up on what’s important: Anthropic, this week announced a whopping $30B ARR up from 19B in Feb, while also telling us about Claude Mythos Preview their next gen HUGE model that they won’t release to the public (yet?) that finds crazy vulnerabilities in existing code bases. Apparently OpenAI will follow up with a similar non-public model soon.

The Meta Superintelligence Lab led by A...

Hey Ya’ll, Alex here, let me catch you up.

What a week! Anthropic is in the spotlight again, first with #SessionGate, then with the whole Claude Code source code leak, and finally with an incredible research into LLM having feelings!? (more on this below).

And while Anthropic continues to burn through developer good will faster than their sessions, OpenAI announced a MASSIVE $122B round of funding (largest in history), Google released Gemma 4 with Apache 2 license - we had Omar Sanseviero on the show to help us cover what’s new, Microsoft dropped 3 new AI mode...

Hey y’all, Alex here, let me catch you up!

Jensen Huang went on Lex and said AGI has been achieved. We’ll get to that.

The biggest demo moment: Gemini 3.1 Flash Live launched - Google’s omni model that sees, hears, and searches the web in real time. We tested it live and I said “what the f**k” on air. It was really impressive!

Google Research also dropped TurboQuant (6x KV cache compression) which crashed Samsung and Micron stocks - we had Daniel Han from UnSloth help us make sense of why that’s...

Howdy, Alex here, let me catch you up on everything that happened in AI:

(btw; If you haven’t heard from me last week, it was a Substack glitch, it was a great episode with 3 interviews, our 3rd birthday, I highly recommend checking it out here)

This week was started on a relatively “chill” note, if you consider Anthropic enabling 1M context window chill. And then escalated from there. We covered the new GPT 5.4 Mini & Nano variants from OpenAI. How MiniMax used autoresearch loops to improve MiniMax 2.7, Cursor shipping their own updated Composer 2 model, and how NV...

Hey, Alex here 👋 Today was a special episode, as ThursdAI turns 3 🎉

We’ve been on air, weekly since Pi day, March 14th, 2023. I won’t go too nostalgic but I’ll just mention, back then GPT-4 just launched with 8K context window, could barely code, tool calls weren’t a thing, it was expensive and slow, and yet we all felt it, it’s begun!

Fast forward to today, and this week, we’ve covered Andrej Karpathy’s mini singularity moment with AutoResearcher, a whole fruit fly brain uploaded to a simulation, China’s OpenClaw embrace with 1000 peop...

Hey folks, Alex here, let me catch you up!

Most important news about this week came today, mid-show, OpenAI dropped GPT 5.4 Thinking (and 5.4 Pro), their latest flagship general model, less autistic than Codex 5.3, with 1M context, /fast mode and the ability to steet it mid-reasoning. We tested it live on the show, it’s really a beast.

Also, since last week, Anthropic said no to Department of War’s ultimatum and it looks like they are being designated as supply chain risk, OpenAI swooped in to sign a deal with DoW and the internet went ball...

Hey, it’s Alex, let me tell you why I think this week is an inflection point.

Just this week: Everyone is launching autonomous agents or features inspired by OpenClaw (Devin 2.2, Cursor, Claude Cowork, Microsoft, Perplexity and Nous announced theirs), METR and ArcAGI 2,3 benchmarks are getting saturated, 1 person companies nearing 1M ARR within months of operation by running AI agents 24/7 (we chatted with one of them on the show today, live as he broke $700K ARR barrier) and the US Department of War gives Anthropic an ultimatum to remove nearly all restrictions on Claude for war and An...

Hey, it’s Alex, let me catch you up!

Since last week, OpenAI convinced OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to join them, while keeping OpenClaw.. well... open. Anthropic dropped Sonnet 4.6 which nearly outperforms the previous Opus and is much cheaper, Qwen released 3.5 on Chinese New Year’s Eve, while DeepSeek was silent and Elon and XAI folks deployed Grok 4.20 without any benchmarks, and it’s 4 500B models in a trenchcoat?

Also, Anthropic updated rules state that it’s breaking ToS to use their plans for anything except Claude Code & Claude SDK (and then clarified that it’s OK? we’r...

Hey dear subscriber, Alex here from W&B, let me catch you up!

This week started with Anthropic releasing /fast mode for Opus 4.6, continued with ByteDance reality-shattering video model called SeeDance 2.0, and then the open weights folks pulled up!

Z.ai releasing GLM-5, a 744B top ranking coder beast, and then today MiniMax dropping a heavily RL’d MiniMax M2.5, showing 80.2% on SWE-bench, nearly beating Opus 4.6! I’ve interviewed Lou from Z.AI and Olive from MiniMax on the show today back to back btw, very interesting conversations, starting after TL;DR!

So whil...

Hey, Alex from W&B here 👋 Let me catch you up!

The most important news about AI this week today are, Anthropic updates Opus to 4.6 with 1M context window, and they held the crown for literally 1 hour before OpenAI released their GPT 5.3 Codex also today, with 25% faster speed and lower token utilization.

“GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results.”

We had VB from OpenAI jump on to tell us about t...

Hey guys, Alex here 👋 This week was so dense, that even my personal AI assistant Wolfred was struggling to help me keep up! Not to mention that we finally got to try one incredible piece of AI tech I’ve been waiting to get to try for a while!

Clawdbot we told you about last week exploded in popularity and had to rebrand to Molt...bot OpenClaw after Anthropic threatened the creators, Google is shipping like crazy, first adding Agentic features into Chrome (used by nearly 4B people daily!) then shipping a glimpse of a future where every...

Hey! Alex here, with another weekly AI update!

It seems like ThursdAI is taking a new direction, as this is our 3rd show this year, and a 3rd deep dive into topics (previously Ralph, Agent Skills), please let me know if the comments if you like this format.

This week’s deep dive is into Clawdbot, a personal AI assistant you install on your computer, but can control through your phone, has access to your files, is able to write code, help organize your life, but most importantly, it can self improve. Seeing Wolfred (my Cl...

Hey ya’ll, Alex here, and this week I was especially giddy to record the show! Mostly because when a thing clicks for me that hasn’t clicked before, I can’t wait to tell you all about it!

This week, that thing is Agent Skills! The currently best way to customize your AI agents with domain expertise, in a simple, repeatable way that doesn’t blow up the context window! We mentioned skills when Anthropic first released them (Oct 16) and when they became an open standard but it didn’t really click until last week! So more on th...

Hey folks, Alex here from Weights & Biases, with your weekly AI update (and a first live show of this year!)

For the first time, we had a co-host of the show also be a guest on the show, Ryan Carson (from Amp) went supernova viral this week with an X article (1.5M views) about Ralph Wiggum (yeah, from Simpsons) and he broke down that agentic coding technique at the end of the show.

LDJ and Nisten helped cover NVIDIA’s incredible announcements during CES with their Vera Rubin upcoming platform (4-5X improvements) and we al...

Hey all,

Happy new year! This is Alex, writing to you for the very fresh start of this year, it’s 2026 already, can you believe it?

There was no live stream today, I figured the cohosts deserve a break and honestly it was a very slow week. Even the chinese labs who don’t really celebrate X-mas and new years didn’t come out with a banger AFAIK.

ThursdAI - AI moves fast, we’re here to make sure you never miss a thing! Subscribe :)

Tho I thought it was an i...

Ho Ho Ho, Alex here! (a real human writing these words, this needs to be said in 2025)

Merry Christmas (to those who celebrate) and welcome to the very special yearly ThursdAI recap! This was an intense year in the world of AI, and after 51 weekly episodes (this is episode 52!) we have the ultimate record of all the major and most important AI releases of this year!

So instead of bringing you a weekly update (it’s been a slow week so far, most AI labs are taking a well deserved break, the Cchinese AI labs ha...

Hey folks 👋 Alex here, dressed as 🎅 for our pre X-mas episode!

We’re wrapping up 2025, and the AI labs decided they absolutely could NOT let the year end quietly. This week was an absolute banger—we had Gemini 3 Flash dropping with frontier intelligence at flash prices, OpenAI firing off GPT 5.2 Codex as breaking news DURING our show, ChatGPT Images 1.5, Nvidia going all-in on open source with Nemotron 3 Nano, and the voice AI space heating up with Grok Voice and Chatterbox Turbo. Oh, and Google dropped FunctionGemma for all your toaster-to-fridge communication needs (yes, really).

Today’s show was o...

Hey everyone,

December started strong and does NOT want to slow down!? OpenAI showed us their response to the Code Red and it’s GPT 5.2, which doesn’t feel like a .1 upgrade! We got it literally as breaking news at the end of the show, and oh boy! The new kind of LLMs is here.

GPT, then Gemini, then Opus and now GPT again... Who else feels like we’re on a trippy AI rolercoaster? Just me? 🫨

I’m writing this newsletter from a fresh “traveling podcaster” setup in SF (huge shoutout to the Chroma team...

Hey yall, Alex here 🫡

Welcome to the first ThursdAI of December! Snow is falling in Colorado, and AI releases are falling even harder. This week was genuinely one of those “drink from the firehose” weeks where every time I refreshed my timeline, another massive release had dropped.

We kicked off the show asking our co-hosts for their top AI pick of the week, and the answers were all over the map: Wolfram was excited about Mistral’s return to Apache 2.0, Yam couldn’t stop talking about Claude Opus 4.5 after a full week of using it, and Nisten...

Hey, Alex here,

I recorded these conversations just in front of the AI Engineer auditorium, back to back, after these great folks gave their talks, and at the epitome of the most epic AI week we’ve seen since I started recording ThursdAI.

This is less our traditional live recording, and more a real podcast-y conversation with great folks, inspired by Latent.Space. I hope you enjoy this format as much as I’ve enjoyed recording and editing it.

AntiGravity with Kevin

Kevin Hou and team just launched Antigravity, Google’s brand...

Hey ya’ll, Happy Thanskgiving to everyone who celebrates and thank you for being a subscriber, I truly appreciate each and every one of you!

Just wrapped up the third (1, 2) Thanksgiving special Episode of ThursdAI, can you believe November is almost over?

We had another banger week in AI, with a full feast of AI released, Anthropic dropped the long awaited Opus 4.5, which quickly became the top coding LLM, DeepSeek resurfaced with a math model, BFL and Tongyi both tried to take on Nano Banana, and Microsoft dropped a 7B computer use model in Open So...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋

I’m writing this one from a noisy hallway at the AI Engineer conference in New York, still riding the high (and the sleep deprivation) from what might be the craziest week we’ve ever had in AI.

In the span of a few days:

Google dropped Gemini 3 Pro, a new Deep Think mode, generative UIs, and a free agent-first IDE called Antigravity.xAI shipped Grok 4.1, then followed it up with Grok 4.1 Fast plus an Agent Tools API.OpenAI answered with GPT‑5.1‑Codex‑Max, a long‑horizon coding monster that can work f...

Hey, this is Alex!

We’re finally so back! Tons of open source releases, OpenAI updates GPT and a few breakthroughs in audio as well, makes this a very dense week!

Today on the show, we covered the newly released GPT 5.1 update, a few open source releases like Terminal Bench and Project AELLA (renamed OASSAS), and Baidu’s Ernie 4.5 VL that shows impressive visual understanding!

Also, chatted with Paul from 11Labs and Dima Duev from the wandb SDK team, who brought us a delicious demo of LEET, our new TUI for wandb!

To...

Hey, Alex here!

Quick note, while preparing for this week, I posted on X that I don’t remember such a quiet week in AI since I started doing ThursdAI regularly, but then 45 min before the show started, Kimi dropped a SOTA oss reasoning model, turning a quiet week into an absolute banger.

Besides Kimi, we covered the updated MCP thinking from Anthropic, and had Kenton Varda from cloudflare as a guest to talk about Code Mode, chatted about Windsurf and Cursor latest updates and covered OpenAI’s insane deals.

Also, because it was...

Hey, it’s Alex! Happy Halloween friends!

I’m excited to bring you this weeks (spooky) AI updates! We started the show today with MiniMax M2, the currently top Open Source LLM, with an interview with their head of eng, Skyler Miao, continued to dive into OpenAIs completed restructuring into a non-profit and a PBC, including a deep dive into a live stream Sam Altman had, with a ton of spicy details, and finally chatted with Arjun Desai from Cartesia, following a release of Sonic 3, a sub 49ms voice model!

So, 2 interviews + tons of news, let’...

Hey everyone, Alex here!

Welcome... to the browser war II - the AI edition! This week we chatted in depth about ChatGPT’s new Atlas agentic browser, and the additional agentic powers Microsoft added to Edge with Copilot Mode (tho it didn’t work for me)

Also this week was a kind of crazy OCR week, with more than 4 OCR models releasing, and the crown one is DeepSeek OCR, that turned the whole industry on it’s head (more later)

Quite a few video updates as well, with real time lipsync from Decart, and a...

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 wer...

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...

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 wa...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit sub.thursdai.news

Hola AI aficionados, it’s yet another ThursdAI, and yet another week FULL of AI news, spanning Open Source LLMs, Multimodal video and audio creation and more!

Shiptember as they call it does seem to deliver, and it was hard even for me to follow up on all the news, not to mention we had like 3-4 breaking news during the show today!

This week was yet another Qwen-mas, with Alibaba absolutely dominating across open source, but al...