#258 - Opus 5.5, Sol and Luna, Muse, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Xi

Andrey Kurenkov (0:11)

Hello, and welcome to the Last Week in AI podcast, where you can hear, chat about what's going on with AI.

As usual, in this episode, we will summarize and discuss some of last week's most interesting AI news. You can also check out our Last Week in AI newsletter at lastweekin.ai for articles we did not cover in this episode. I'm one of your regular co-hosts. I'm Andrey Kurenkov. I studied AI in grad school. I now work at the AI startup AstroKate.

Jeremie Harris (0:35)

Hey, everybody. I'm Jeremie Harris. Gladstone AI. I do the AI thing, the national security thing, ASI, RSI, all that fun stuff. Yeah, we're back at it. I think we had a bit of a special weird episode last time where we were focused on.

It felt more gory and not focused. Not that this week's is not that, but it's less that. I feel like we have more discrete individual stories. Not everything can be everything.

Andrey Kurenkov (0:58)

Back to what, let's say back to normal. I don't know if it's back to normal as possible with AI, but it'll be less exciting than previous episodes. In fact, it almost seemed like it'd be boring until yesterday when Opus 5.5 came out. I think GPT-6 Sol and Luna came out the day before.

Jeremie Harris (1:19)

The same day, I think.

Andrey Kurenkov (1:20)

Yeah, I feel like suddenly something exciting happened. But otherwise, it's been a quiet week, which hasn't happened in the AI.

It feels like in a while. So in a way, I'm a little thankful, but still, there'll be some good stuff. We will be talking about the new models. We will be talking still about policy and some safety stories as well, catching up a little bit. We will get to discuss research this episode, which we haven't in the last couple due to the amount of stuff going on. So it should be a fun episode with a nice mix of stuff.

Jeremie Harris (1:54)

Yeah, I kind of feel like, I don't know about the boringness side. I think we've kind of been acclimatized to things, but among the headlines, Trump and Xi Jinping are meeting to talk about the future of AI, totally normal Thursday or whatever. That's tomorrow. And then AIs can feel pain, which I think is a good thing. I think it's good, personally. I think a lot of people are worried about it. I think that that's silly. I think that you really should be excited about this, because it hastens the end of this completely unnecessary experiment in human experience on this planet, right? I mean, we want, do we not, a barren, lifeless planet populated by AIs that can feel pain? So I personally, for one, I'm going to stand up and say I'm excited for this. We also, by the way, there's an AI czar that is going to be appointed soon, it seems. And so we've got a little bit of like inside talk.

Now we have the inside track, just like there is leaked inside talk about that. So there's like a lot of big stuff.

Andrey Kurenkov (2:53)

It's really fun stuff, yeah. Just not, a little more calm than previous weeks.

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