ThursdAI - Oct 30 - From ASI in a Decade to Home Humanoids: MiniMax M2's Speed Demon, OpenAI's Bold Roadmap, and 2026 Robot Revolution

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’s dive in! (as always, show notes in the end)Hey, if you like this content, it would mean a lot if you subscribe as a paid subscriber.Open Source AIMiniMax M2: open-source agentic model at 8% of Claude’s price, 2× speed (X, Hugging Face )We kicked off our open-source segment with a banger of an announcement and a special guest. The new king of open-source LLMs is here, and it’s called MiniMax M2. We were lucky enough to have Skyler Miao, Head of Engineering at Minimax, join us live to break it all down.M2 is an agentic model built for code and complex workflows, and its performance is just staggering. It’s already ranked in the top 5 globally on the Artificial Analysis benchmark, right behind giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. But here’s the crazy part: it delivers nearly twice the speed of Claude 3.5 Sonnet at just 8% of the price. This is basically Sonnet-level performance, at home, in open source.Skylar explained that their team saw an “impossible triangle” in the market between performance, cost, and speed—you could only ever get two. Their goal with M2 was to build a model that could solve this, and they absolutely nailed it. It’s a 200B parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, but with only 10B active parameters per inference, making it incredibly efficient.One key insight Skylar shared was about getting the best performance. M2 supports multiple APIs, but to really unlock its reasoning power, you need to use an API that passes the model’s “thinking” tokens back to it on the next turn, like the Anthropic API. Many open-source tools don’t support this yet, so it’s something to watch out for.Huge congrats to the MiniMax team on this Open Weights (MIT licensed) release, you can find the model on HF! MiniMax had quite a week, with 3 additional releases, MiniMax speech 2.6, an update to their video model Hailuo 2.3 and just after the show, they released a music 2.0 model as well! Congrats on the shipping folks! OpenAI drops gpt-oss-safeguard - first open-weight safety reasoning models for classification ( X, HF )OpenAI is back on the open weights bandwagon, with a finetune release of their previously open weighted gpt-oss models, with gpt-oss-safeguard. These models were trained exclusively to help companies build safeguarding policies to make sure their apps remains safe! With gpt-oss-safeguards 20B and 120B, OpenAI is achieving near parity with their internal safety models, and as Nisten said on the show, if anyone knows about censorship and safety, it’s OpenAI! The highlight of this release is, unlike traditional pre-trained classifiers, these models allow for updates to policy via natural language!These models will be great for businesses that want to safeguard their products in production, and I will advocate to bring these models to W&B Inference soon! A Humanoid Robot in Your Home by 2026? 1X NEO announcement ( X, Order page, Keynote )Things got really spooky when we started talking about robotics. The company 1X, which has been on our radar for a while, officially launched pre-orders for NEO, the world’s first consumer humanoid robot designed for your home. And yes, you can order one right now for $20,000, with deliveries expected in early 2026.The internet went crazy over this announcement, with folks posting receipts of getting one, other folks stoking the uncanny valley fears that Sci-fi has built into many people over the years, of the Robot uprising and talking about the privacy concerns of having a human tele-operate this Robot in your house to do chores. It can handle chores like cleaning and laundry, and for more complex tasks that it hasn’t learned yet, it uses a teleoperation system where a human “1X Expert” can pilot the robot remotely to perform the task. This is how it collects the data to learn to do these tasks autonomously in your specific home environment.The whole release is very interesting, from the “soft and quiet” approach 1X is taking, making their robot a 66lbs short king, draped in a knit sweater, to the $20K price point (effectively at loss given how much just the hands cost), the teleoperated by humans addition, to make sure the Robot learns about your unique house layout. The conversation on the show was fascinating. We talked about all the potential use cases, from having it water your plants and look after your pets while you’re on vacation to providing remote assistance for ...