ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week Podcast Por From Weights & Biases Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week arte de portada

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

De: From Weights & Biases Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week
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Every ThursdAI, Alex Volkov hosts a panel of experts, ai engineers, data scientists and prompt spellcasters on twitter spaces, as we discuss everything major and important that happened in the world of AI for the past week. Topics include LLMs, Open source, New capabilities, OpenAI, competitors in AI space, new LLM models, AI art and diffusion aspects and much more.

sub.thursdai.newsAlex Volkov
Política y Gobierno
Episodios
  • ThursdAI - Jan 1 2026 - Will Brown Interview + Nvidia buys Groq, Meta buys Manus, Qwen Image 2412 & Alex New Year greetings
    Jan 1 2026

    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 incredible opportunity to finally post the Will Brow interview I recorded in November during the AI Engineer conference.

    Will is a researcher at Prime Intellect (big fans on WandB btw!) and is very known on X as a hot takes ML person, often going viral for tons of memes!

    Will is the creator and maintainer of the Verifiers library (Github) and his talk at AI Engineer was all about RL Environments (what they are, you can hear in the interview, I asked him!)

    TL;DR last week of 2025 in AI

    Besides this, my job here is to keep you up to date, and honestly this was very easy this week, as… almost nothing has happened, but here we go:

    Meta buys Manus

    The year ended with 2 huge acquisitions / aquihires. First we got the news from Alex Wang that Meta has bought Manus.ai which is an agentic AI startup we covered back in March for an undisclosed amount (folks claim $2-3B)

    The most interesting thing here is that Manus is a Chinese company, and this deal requires very specific severance from Chinese operations.

    Jensen goes on a new years spending spree, Nvidia buys Groq (not GROK) for $20B

    Groq which we covered often here, and are great friends, is going to NVIDIA, in a… very interesting acqui-hire, which is a “non binding license” + most of Groq top employees apparently are going to NVIDIA. Jonathan Ross the CEO of Groq, was the co-creator of the TPU chips at Google before founding Groq, so this seems like a very strategic aquihire for NVIDIA! Congrats to our friends from Groq on this amazing news for the new year!

    Tencent open-sources HY-MT1.5 translation models with 1.8B edge-deployable and 7B cloud variants supporting 33 languages (X, HF, HF, GitHub)

    It seems that everyone’s is trying to de-throne whisper and this latest attempt from Tencent is a interesting one. a 1.8B and 7B translation models with very interesting stats.

    Alibaba’s Qwen-Image-2512 drops on New Year’s Eve as strongest open-source text-to-image model, topping AI Arena with photorealistic humans and sharper textures (X, HF, Arxiv)

    Our friends in Tongyi decided to give is a new years present in the form of an updated Qwen-image, with much improved realism

    That’s it folks, this was a quick one, hopefully you all had an amazing new year celebration, and are gearing up to an eventful and crazy 2026.

    I wish you all happiness, excitement and energy to keep up with everything in the new year, and will make sure that we’re here to keep you up to date as always!

    P.S - I got a little news of my own this yesterday, not related to AI. She said yes 🎉



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    30 m
  • 🔥 Someone Trained an LLM in Space This Year (And 50 Other Things You Missed)- ThursdAI yearly recap is here!
    Dec 25 2025
    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 haven’t yet surprised anyone), I’m dropping a comprehensive yearly AI review! Quarter by quarter, month by month, both in written form and as a pod/video! Why do this? Who even needs this? Isn’t most of it obsolete? I have asked myself this exact question while prepping for the show (it was quite a lot of prep, even with Opus’s help). I eventually landed on, hey, if nothing else, this will serve as a record of the insane week of AI progress we all witnessed. Can you imagine that the term Vibe Coding is less than 1 year old? That Claude Code was released at the start of THIS year? We get hedonicly adapt to new AI goodies so quick, and I figured this will serve as a point in time check, we can get back to and feel the acceleration! With that, let’s dive in - P.S. the content below is mostly authored by my co-author for this, Opus 4.5 high, which at the end of 2025 I find the best creative writer with the best long context coherence that can imitate my voice and tone (hey, I’m also on a break! 🎅) “Open source AI has never been as hot as this quarter. We’re accelerating as f*ck, and it’s only just beginning—hold on to your butts.” — Alex Volkov, ThursdAI Q1 2025🏆 The Big Picture — 2025 - The Year the AI Agents Became RealLooking back at 51 episodes and 12 months of relentless AI progress, several mega-themes emerged:1. 🧠 Reasoning Models Changed EverythingFrom DeepSeek R1 in January to GPT-5.2 in December, reasoning became the defining capability. Models now think for hours, call tools mid-thought, and score perfect on math olympiads.2. 🤖 2025 Was Actually the Year of AgentsWe said it in January, and it came true. Claude Code launched the CLI revolution, MCP became the universal protocol, and by December we had ChatGPT Apps, Atlas browser, and AgentKit.3. 🇨🇳 Chinese Labs Dominated Open SourceDeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax, Kimi, ByteDance — despite chip restrictions, Chinese labs released the best open weights models all year. Qwen 3, Kimi K2, DeepSeek V3.2 were defining releases.4. 🎬 We Crossed the Uncanny ValleyVEO3’s native audio, Suno V5’s indistinguishable music, Sora 2’s social platform — 2025 was the year AI-generated media became indistinguishable from human-created content.5. 💰 The Investment Scale Became Absurd$500B Stargate, $1.4T compute obligations, $183B valuations, $100-300M researcher packages, LLMs training in space. The numbers stopped making sense.6. 🏆 Google Made a ComebackAfter years of “catching up,” Google delivered Gemini 3, Antigravity, Nano Banana Pro, VEO3, and took the #1 spot (briefly). Don’t bet against Google.By the NumbersQ1 2025 — The Quarter That Changed EverythingDeepSeek R1 crashed NVIDIA’s stock, reasoning models went mainstream, and Chinese labs took over open source. The quarter that proved AI isn’t slowing down—it’s just getting started.Key Themes:* 🧠 Reasoning models went mainstream (DeepSeek R1, o1, QwQ)* 🇨🇳 Chinese labs dominated open source (DeepSeek, Alibaba, MiniMax, ByteDance)* 🤖 2025 declared “The Year of Agents” (OpenAI Operator, MCP won)* 🖼️ Image generation revolution (GPT-4o native image gen, Ghibli-mania)* 💰 Massive infrastructure investment (Project Stargate $500B)January — DeepSeek Shakes the World(Jan 02 | Jan 10 | Jan 17 | Jan 24 | Jan 30)The earthquake that shattered the AI bubble. DeepSeek R1 dropped on January 23rd and became the most impactful open source release ever:* Crashed NVIDIA stock 17% — $560B loss, largest single-company monetary loss in history* Hit #1 on the iOS App Store* Cost allegedly only $5.5M to train (sparking massive debate)* Matched OpenAI’s o1 on reasoning benchmarks at 50x cheaper pricing* The 1.5B model beat GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on math benchmarks 🤯“My mom knows about DeepSeek—your grandma probably knows about it, too” — Alex VolkovAlso this month:* OpenAI Operator — First agentic ChatGPT (browser control, booking, ordering)* Project Stargate — $500B AI infrastructure (Manhattan Project for AI)* NVIDIA Project Digits — $3,000 desktop that runs 200B parameter models* Kokoro TTS — 82M param model hit #1 on TTS Arena, Apache 2, runs in browser* MiniMax-01 — 4M context window from Hailuo* Gemini Flash Thinking — 1M token context with thinking tracesFebruary — Reasoning Mania & The Birth of Vibe Coding(Feb 07 | Feb 13 | Feb 20 | Feb 28)The month that redefined how we work with AI.OpenAI Deep ...
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    1 h y 50 m
  • 📆 ThursdAI - Dec 18 - Gemini 3 Flash, Grok Voice, ChatGPT Appstore, Image 1.5 & GPT 5.2 Codex, Meta Sam Audio & more AI news
    Dec 19 2025
    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 over three and a half hours long because we tried to cover both this week AND the entire year of 2025 (that yearly recap is coming next week—it’s a banger, we went month by month and you’ll really feel the acceleration). For now, let’s dive into just the insanity that was THIS week.00:00 Introduction and Overview00:39 Weekly AI News Highlights01:40 Open Source AI Developments01:44 Nvidia's Nemotron Series09:09 Google's Gemini 3 Flash19:26 OpenAI's GPT Image 1.520:33 Infographic and GPT Image 1.5 Discussion20:53 Nano Banana vs GPT Image 1.521:23 Testing and Comparisons of Image Models23:39 Voice and Audio Innovations24:22 Grok Voice and Tesla Integration26:01 Open Source Robotics and Voice Agents29:44 Meta's SAM Audio Release32:14 Breaking News: Google Function Gemma33:23 Weights & Biases Announcement35:19 Breaking News: OpenAI Codex 5.2 MaxTo receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Big Companies LLM updatesGoogle’s Gemini 3 Flash: The High-Speed Intelligence KingIf we had to title 2025, as Ryan Carson mentioned on the show, it might just be “The Year of Google’s Comeback.” Remember at the start of the year when we were asking “Where is Google?” Well, they are here. Everywhere.This week they launched Gemini 3 Flash, and it is rightfully turning heads. This is a frontier-class model—meaning it boasts Pro-level intelligence—but it runs at Flash-level speeds and, most importantly, Flash-level pricing. We are talking $0.50 per 1 million input tokens. That is not a typo. The price-to-intelligence ratio here is simply off the charts.I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 Flash in production for a while because it was good enough, but Gemini 3 Flash is a different beast. It scores 71 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (a 13-point jump from the previous Flash), and it achieves 78% on SWE-bench Verified. That actually beats the bigger Gemini 3 Pro on some agentic coding tasks!What impressed me most, and something Kwindla pointed out, is the tool calling. Previous Gemini models sometimes struggled with complex tool use compared to OpenAI, but Gemini 3 Flash can handle up to 100 simultaneous function calls. It’s fast, it’s smart, and it’s integrated immediately across the entire Google stack—Workspace, Android, Chrome. Google isn’t just releasing models anymore; they are deploying them instantly to billions of users.For anyone building agents, this combination of speed, low latency, and 1 million context window (at this price!) makes it the new default workhorse.Google’s FunctionGemma Open Source releaseWe also got a smaller, quirkier release from Google: FunctionGemma. This is a tiny 270M parameter model. Yes, millions, not billions.It’s purpose-built for function calling on edge devices. It requires only 500MB of RAM, meaning it can run on your phone, in your browser, or even on a Raspberry Pi. As Nisten joked on the show, this is finally the model that lets your toaster talk to your fridge.Is it going to write a novel? No. But after fine-tuning, it jumped from 58% to 85% accuracy on mobile action tasks. This represents a future where privacy-first agents live entirely on your device, handling your calendar and apps without ever pinging a cloud server.OpenAI Image 1.5, GPT 5.2 Codex and ChatGPT AppstoreOpenAI had a busy week, starting with the release of GPT Image 1.5. It’s available now in ChatGPT and the API. The headline here is speed and control—it’s 4x faster than the previous model and 20% cheaper. It also tops the LMSYS Image Arena leaderboards.However, I have to give a balanced take here. We’ve been spoiled recently by Google’s “Nano Banana Pro” image generation (which powers Gemini). When we looked at side-by-side comparisons, especially with typography and infographic generation, Gemini often looked sharper and more coherent. This is what we call “hedonistic adaptation”—GPT Image 1.5 is great, but the bar has moved so fast that it doesn’t feel like the quantum leap DALL-E 3 was back in the day. Still, for production workflows where you need to edit specific parts of an image without ruining the rest, this is a massive upgrade.🚨 BREAKING: GPT 5.2 CodexJust as we were nearing the end of the show, OpenAI decided to drop some breaking news: GPT 5.2 Codex.This is a specialized model optimized ...
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    39 m
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