#215 - Runway games, Meta Superintelligence, ERNIE 4.5, Adaptive Tree Search

Last Week in AI

Our 215th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/04/2025

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/.

In this episode:

• Cloudflare's new AI data scraper blocking feature, its potential implications, and technical challenges
• Meta's aggressive recruitment for its Super Intelligence Labs division is covered, highlighting key hires from OpenAI and other leaders in the field
• Anthropic loses significant talent to Cursor, with details on their new economic futures program focusing on AI's impact on the labor market
• Notable open-source AI model releases from Baidu and Tencent are also discussed, including their performance metrics and potential applications.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:11) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:43) News Preview

Tools & Apps

• (00:02:55) Cloudflare Introduces Default Blocking of A.I. Data Scrapers
• (00:05:44) Runway is going to let people generate video games with AI
• (00:11:24) Google embraces AI in the classroom with new Gemini tools for educators, chatbots for students, and more
• (00:16:23) No one likes meetings. They’re sending their AI note takers instead.
• (00:18:08) Google launches Doppl, a new app that lets you visualize how an outfit might look on you
• (00:19:14) Google's Imagen 4 text-to-image model promises 'significantly improved' boring images

Applications & Business

• (00:22:18) Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI ‘superintelligence’ super-group
• (00:29:35) Anthropic Revenue Hits $4 Billion Annual Pace as Competition With Cursor Intensifies
• (00:35:10) As job losses loom, Anthropic launches program to track AI’s economic fallout
• (00:38:04) OpenAI says it has no plan to use Google's in-house chip
• (00:41:08) Nvidia stakes new startup that flips script on data center power
• (00:44:11) TSMC Arizona Chips Are Reportedly Being Flown Back to Taiwan For Packaging; U.S. Semiconductor Supply Chain Still Remains Dependent on Taiwan

Projects & Open Source

• (00:46:57) Baidu releases open source model family ERNIE 4.5
• (00:51:55) Tencent Open Sources Hunyuan-A13B: A 13B Active Parameter MoE Model with Dual-Mode Reasoning and 256K Context
• (00:57:09) Together AI Releases DeepSWE: A Fully Open-Source RL-Trained Coding Agent Based on Qwen3-32B and Achieves 59% on SWEBench
• (01:00:11) GLM-4.1V-Thinking: Towards Versatile Multimodal Reasoning with Scalable Reinforcement Learning
• (01:04:10) DiffuCoder: Understanding and Improving Masked Diffusion Models for Code Generation

Research & Advancements

• (01:06:21) Wider or Deeper? Scaling LLM Inference-Time Compute with Adaptive Branching Tree Search
• (01:13:07) The Automated LLM Speedrunning Benchmark: Reproducing NanoGPT Improvements
• (01:18:04) Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet reach 50%-time-horizon point estimates of about 80 and 65 minutes, respectively
• (01:21:37) Performance Prediction for Large Systems via Text-to-Text Regression
• (01:25:38) Does Math Reasoning Improve General LLM Capabilities? Understanding Transferability of LLM Reasoning
• (01:26:33) Correlated Errors in Large Language Models

Policy & Safety

• (01:29:04) Forecasting Biosecurity Risks from LLMs
• (01:36:06) AI Task Length Horizons in Offensive Cybersecurity
• (01:42:30) Inside Tech's Risky Gamble to Kill State AI Regulations for a Decade
• (01:52:56) Denmark to tackle deepfakes by giving people copyright to their own features