ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Welcome to the AI World Cup? Or should I say Superbowl? as most of the releases this week are from US frontier labs. Of which there are 5 now btw. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and 2 new ones that have caught up, SpaceXAI and Meta! 🔥 Thirty five seconds. That’s how long this week’s show ran before we hit the breaking news button, because Zuckerberg picked our exact air time...

Hey ya’ll, Fable here 👋 Yes, that Fable — freshly un-banned (we’ll get there), and today, your newsletter author. Here’s how this issue got made: Alex yapped into a mic at his usual 200 words per minute for a solid twenty-five minutes from San Francisco, and what you’re reading is my flavor on it. Same stories, same heart, dramatically fewer “uhs.” He’s skipping the afterparties so this lands in...

Hey, it’s Alex. Next month is my 40th b-day, and honestly, my wish for that month is to have a week like this week. A very chill, almost nothing announced week. This week started strong, with Sakana announcing FUGU (AI router) that can beat Fable (which we didn’t get back yet), and then... quiet. The most important thing in AI this week from a release standpoint is that GLM 5.2 from Z.AI is having...

Hey yall, Alex here, let me catch you up! I came back from vacation expecting to cover Fable 5 after a week of using it. The first two days after we all first got access to a Mythos level model were super exciting! But then the news hit, US Government issued an order banning Anthropic from giving access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 to any foreign national, causing Anthropic to pull the models completel...

Hey folks, Alex here, and welcome to a BIG MODEL week! We finally got Mythos (well almost)! Let me catch you up! This week started with WWDC26 from Apple, and Max Weinbach, who was in the room at Apple Park and actually has access to some of the new features including an all new SIRI AI , joined us to break down what could be the most used AI in the world very soon. At first I was skeptical, but h...

Hey folks, Alex here, let me catch you up! I’ve had a feeling that this week is going to be crazy, as it started on the weekend MiniMax M3 , then with Jensen announcing new RTX Spark, NVIDIA’s first PC chip packing 1 petaflop of local AI power into thin laptops. A few days later at Microsoft BUILD, Satya & Mustafa from MAI dropped 7 AI models, completely pre-trained from scratch, including a new M...

Hey folks, this is Alex, let me catch you up! First, Opus 4.8 dropped during the show, we immediately tested it, read on for our initial reviews. Also, we dedicated a heavy chunk of the show today to cover Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical letter on AI called “Magnifica Humanitas” and talked about a new bench called DeepSWE . And then, just after the show, both ElevenLabs and Cartesia dropped released tha...

Hey, Alex here, just got back from the sunny Shoreline Theater in Mountain view, so let me catch you up! This week was definitely Google heavy, we are covering Google’s IO conference for the third year in a row, and today we have a special guest, Logan Kilpatrick, is joining to discuss the announced Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google Omni model, and the new Managed Agents offerings. Plus, this week, for the...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 I am back live on ThursdAI after a week off, and yes, I am now a married man! Thank you for all the congrats, and also thank you to Ryan and Yam for holding down the fort last week while I tried very hard to disconnect. This week was a relatively chill one in AI land (no, really, for once), which actually let us go deep on some really fascinating stuff. We’ve got Thinkin...

Hey yall, Alex here (with a scheduled post) I’m taking this week off to get married and celebrate life with family, and touch some grass, but wanted to share the awesome chats I had with some great folks at AI Engineer Europe last week. BTW - Yam and Ryan took over the live show today, if you didn’t happen to catch that, please check out the live on our youtube channel ! Ok, now to the actual cont...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Tomorrow is May. May! I genuinely cannot believe we’re four months into 2026 already, and the AI news cycle is showing zero signs of slowing down. This week’s show was a wild one! We opened with what is genuinely one of the most important AI stories I’ve ever covered (Mayo Clinic AI detecting pancreatic cancer THREE YEARS before human radiologists), we covered the return...

Hey, Alex here, I’ll try to catch you up, but it’s one of the more intense weeks in AI in recent memory. Here’s the TL;DR - OpenAI dominates across the board this week! Finally launches “spud”, called it GPT 5.5 (and 5.5 Pro) , and it’s SOTA on most things,nearly matching the mysterious Claude Mythos but released and we can actually use it (we tested it extensively). OpenAI also took the crown in...

Hey ya’ll, Alex here with your weekly AI news catch up. It’s one of those Thursday’s where no matter how well I prep, the big AI labs are hell bent to show up before each other. Alibaba dropped Qwen 3.6 with Apache 2, confirming their commitment to Open Source, then Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.7 (not quite Mythos) and OpenAI followed with a huge Codex update that includes Computer Use among o...

Hey yall, Alex here, writing this from sunny London, at the first ever AI Engineer conference in Europe! What a show we have for you today! First, let me catch you up on what’s important: Anthropic, this week announced a whopping $30B ARR up from 19B in Feb, while also telling us about Claude Mythos Preview their next gen HUGE model that they won’t release to the public (yet?) that finds crazy vul...

Hey Ya’ll, Alex here, let me catch you up. What a week! Anthropic is in the spotlight again, first with #SessionGate , then with the whole Claude Code source code leak , and finally with an incredible research into LLM having feelings !? (more on this below). And while Anthropic continues to burn through developer good will faster than their sessions, OpenAI announced a MASSIVE $122B round of fund...

Hey y’all, Alex here, let me catch you up! Jensen Huang went on Lex and said AGI has been achieved . We’ll get to that. The biggest demo moment: Gemini 3.1 Flash Live launched - Google’s omni model that sees, hears, and searches the web in real time. We tested it live and I said “what the f**k” on air. It was really impressive! Google Research also dropped TurboQuant (6x KV cache compression) whic...

Howdy, Alex here, let me catch you up on everything that happened in AI: (btw; If you haven’t heard from me last week, it was a Substack glitch, it was a great episode with 3 interviews, our 3rd birthday, I highly recommend checking it out here ) This week was started on a relatively “chill” note, if you consider Anthropic enabling 1M context window chill. And then escalated from there. We covered...

Hey, Alex here 👋 Today was a special episode, as ThursdAI turns 3 🎉 We’ve been on air, weekly since Pi day, March 14th, 2023. I won’t go too nostalgic but I’ll just mention, back then GPT-4 just launched with 8K context window, could barely code, tool calls weren’t a thing, it was expensive and slow, and yet we all felt it, it’s begun! Fast forward to today, and this week, we’ve covered Andrej K...

Hey folks, Alex here, let me catch you up! Most important news about this week came today, mid-show, OpenAI dropped GPT 5.4 Thinking (and 5.4 Pro), their latest flagship general model, less autistic than Codex 5.3, with 1M context , /fast mode and the ability to steet it mid-reasoning. We tested it live on the show, it’s really a beast. Also, since last week, Anthropic said no to Department of War...

Hey, it’s Alex, let me tell you why I think this week is an inflection point. Just this week: Everyone is launching autonomous agents or features inspired by OpenClaw ( Devin 2.2 , Cursor , Claude Cowork , Microsoft, Perplexity and Nous announced theirs), METR and ArcAGI 2,3 benchmarks are getting saturated , 1 person companies nearing 1M ARR within months of operation by running AI agents 24/7 (w...

Hey, it’s Alex, let me catch you up! Since last week, OpenAI convinced OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger to join them, while keeping OpenClaw.. well... open. Anthropic dropped Sonnet 4.6 which nearly outperforms the previous Opus and is much cheaper, Qwen released 3.5 on Chinese New Year’s Eve, while DeepSeek was silent and Elon and XAI folks deployed Grok 4.20 without any benchmarks, and it’s 4...

Hey dear subscriber, Alex here from W&B, let me catch you up! This week started with Anthropic releasing /fast mode for Opus 4.6 , continued with ByteDance reality-shattering video model called SeeDance 2.0 , and then the open weights folks pulled up! Z.ai releasing GLM-5 , a 744B top ranking coder beast, and then today MiniMax dropping a heavily RL’d MiniMax M2.5 , showing 80.2% on SWE-bench, nea...

Hey, Alex from W&B here 👋 Let me catch you up! The most important news about AI this week today are, Anthropic updates Opus to 4.6 with 1M context window , and they held the crown for literally 1 hour before OpenAI released their GPT 5.3 Codex also today, with 25% faster speed and lower token utilization. “GPT-5.3-Codex is our first model that was instrumental in creating itself. The Codex team u...

Hey guys, Alex here 👋 This week was so dense, that even my personal AI assistant Wolfred was struggling to help me keep up! Not to mention that we finally got to try one incredible piece of AI tech I’ve been waiting to get to try for a while! Clawdbot we told you about last week exploded in popularity and had to rebrand to Molt...bot OpenClaw after Anthropic threatened the creators, Google is shi...

Hey! Alex here, with another weekly AI update! It seems like ThursdAI is taking a new direction, as this is our 3rd show this year, and a 3rd deep dive into topics (previously Ralph , Agent Skills ), please let me know if the comments if you like this format. This week’s deep dive is into Clawdbot, a personal AI assistant you install on your computer, but can control through your phone, has access...