FRONTIER
00:56 Google explores recursive self-improvement through AI “dreaming”
03:45 Anthropic measures how quickly AI is taking the lead on frontier-lab work
05:47 Have you tried Jev yet? Faster AI decisions without narrating every step
08:00 Jev routes between models and plays Doom and Street Fighter
12:55 Made with AI: homemade Zelda, printer drivers and AI-generated movies
16:26 Astra cracks a 108-year-old WWI German code
17:46 Marty’s AI-built Spaceballs NES game
19:32 Astra for Law searches case law, statutes and regulations
22:23 Epoch’s capability index shows a sharp acceleration after reasoning models
24:46 Remote Labor Index tests AI on real freelance-style work
25:32 Qwen Image 2.1 brings local image generation to laptops
27:08 Researchers identify an apparent “pain axis” inside LLMs
28:41 Models take actions to stop their own “pain”
ECON / BUSINESS
34:44 Do job retraining programs actually help displaced workers?
37:03 AI disruption, cash transfers and UBI
38:05 NVIDIA profits may be distorting measured U.S. GDP growth
39:26 OpenAI reportedly eyes a $1.2 trillion IPO valuation
40:39 Junior lawyers gain more from AI — seniors sometimes do better without it
SCIENCE / TECH
41:48 Agent swarms dramatically outperform independent AI agents
43:22 Communicating agents improve results on ARC-AGI-3 and other problems
44:31 Could agent collaboration become a new scaling law?
47:05 Helix 2.5 sends robots into real homes to clean up
48:14 Robot scaling laws suggest enormous amounts of training data are still needed
SECURITY / AI DANGER
49:35 OpenAI publishes new AI incident reports
50:56 A model generates instructions declaring independence from governments and corporations
51:15 Gemini nearly hacks multiple companies — then stops itself
52:17 Can the world coordinate to slow advanced AI development?
54:14 Could diverse AIs police one another?
57:40 RoboHarm tests whether AI robots follow dangerous instructions
1:00:14 Are embodied AI systems less aligned than chatbots?
1:01:50 Exposed Flock camera credentials reportedly reveal 1.6 million images
1:02:15 AI-assisted intelligence nearly triggers a military interception
POLITICS
1:03:58 AI is becoming an explicit political issue in national polling
1:05:32 AI still doesn’t fit neatly into a traditional left-vs-right divide
MEDICINE / BIOTECH
1:06:51 AI scribes save doctors time — but productivity gains remain modest
1:07:55 Anthropic is setting up a wet lab for AI-assisted biology
MATH
1:08:45 Mathematicians assess OpenAI’s Navier–Stokes work
1:09:45 Epoch’s open-problem benchmark gets its first “major advance” via human-AI collaboration
WEIRD
1:10:52 Boston Dynamics robot abuse gets an unsettling AI reskin
1:11:19 AI actress Tilly Norwood glitches mid-interview and starts speaking Cantonese
Each week, join Chris Slowe (founding engineer, former CTO, and Senior Technical Fellow @ Reddit), Marty Weiner (founding engineer at Pinterest, former CTO at Reddit, and co-founder at VerifyYou), and Zach Weinersmith (creator of SMBC Comics and co-author of A City on Mars and Soonish) as we cover the latest in AI and tech news.
