LWiAI Podcast #193 - Sora release, Gemini 2, OpenAI's AGI Rule, US AI Czar

Our 193rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's* big AI news!
*and sometimes last last week's

Note: this one went out last week but I just got around to sending out with the newsletter now, so the news is a bit outdated... will get things back on track soon!

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

Sponsors:

The Generator - An interdisciplinary AI lab empowering innovators from all fields to bring visionary ideas to life by harnessing the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

In this episode:

- OpenAI launches Sora, a text-to-video model with significant capabilities, and Gemini 2.0 from Google showcasing agentic potential in AI tools.
- Character.ai introduces a teen model to address safety concerns following two tragic incidents linked to addiction and harmful influence.
- The U.S. government sets up a task force to support the rapid development of AI data centers, reflecting the critical need for robust infrastructure.
- A paper from Anthropic reveals that frontier AI systems have reached the capability of self-replication, sparking discussions on future implications and safety protocols.

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Timestamps + Links:

(00:00:00) Intro / Banter

(00:02:44) News Preview

(00:03:43) Response to listener comments

(00:09:50) Sponsor Break

Tools & Apps

(00:11:12) OpenAI has finally released Sora

(00:21:16) Google Reveals Gemini 2, AI Agents, and a Prototype Personal Assistant

(00:28:23) ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode adding video and screen sharing input (plus a Santa mode)

(00:30:43) Microsoft’s Copilot can browse the web with you using AI ‘Vision’

(00:32:31) Musk’s xAI has launched Grok image generation model