ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

What a WEEK! Qwen-mass in July. Folks, AI doesn't seem to be wanting to slow down, especially Open Source! This week we see yet another jump on SWE-bench verified (3rd week in a row?) this time from our friends at Alibaba Qwen. Was a pleasure of mine to host Junyang Lin from the team at Alibaba to come and chat with us about their incredible release with, with not 1 but three new models! Then, we...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 and WHAT a week to turn a year older! Not only did I get to celebrate my birthday with 30,000+ of you live during the OpenAI stream, but we also witnessed what might be the biggest open-source AI release since DeepSeek dropped. Buckle up, because we're diving into a trillion-parameter behemoth, agentic capabilities that'll make your head spin, and somehow Elon Musk decid...

Hey everyone, Alex here Don't you just love "new top LLM" drop weeks? I sure do! This week, we had a watch party for Grok-4, with over 20K tuning in to watch together, as the folks at XAI unveiled their newest and best model around. Two models in fact, Grok-4 and Grok-4 Heavy. We also had a very big open source week, we had the pleasure to chat with the creators of 3 open source models on the show...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Welcome back to another mind-blowing week on ThursdAI! We’re diving into the first show of the second half of 2025, and let me tell you, AI is not slowing down. This week, we’ve got a massive wave of open-source models from Chinese giants like Baidu and Tencent that are shaking up the game, Meta’s jaw-dropping hiring spree with Zuck assembling an AI dream team, and Micro...

Hey folks, Alex here, writing from... a undisclosed tropical paradise location 🏝️ I'm on vacation, but the AI news doesn't stop of course, and neither does ThursdAI. So huge shoutout to Wolfram Ravenwlf for running the show this week, Nisten, LDJ and Yam who joined. So... no long blogpost with analysis this week, but I'll def. recommend tuning in to the show that the folks ran, they had a few gues...

Hey all, Alex here 👋 This week, while not the busiest week in releases (we can't get a SOTA LLM every week now can we), was full of interesting open source releases, and feature updates such as the chatGPT meetings recorder (which we live tested on the show, the limit is 2 hours!) It was also a day after our annual W&B conference called FullyConnected, and so I had a few goodies to share with you...

Hey folks, this is Alex, finally back home! This week was full of crazy AI news, both model related but also shifts in the AI landscape and big companies, with Zuck going all in on scale & execu-hiring Alex Wang for a crazy $14B dollars. OpenAI meanwhile, maybe received a new shipment of GPUs? Otherwise, it’s hard to explain how they have dropped the o3 price by 80%, while also shipping o3-pro (in...

Hey folks, this is Alex, coming to you LIVE from the AI Engineer Worlds Fair! What an incredible episode this week, we recorded live from floor 30th at the Marriott in SF, while Yam was doing live correspondence from the floor of the AI Engineer event, all while Swyx, the cohost of Latent Space podcast, and the creator of AI Engineer (both the conference and the concept itself) joined us for the w...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Welcome back to another absolutely wild week in AI! I'm coming to you live from the Fontainebleau Hotel in Vegas at the Imagine AI conference, and wow, what a perfect setting to discuss how AI is literally reimagining our world. After last week's absolute explosion of releases (Claude Opus 4, Google I/O madness, OpenAI Codex and Jony colab), this week gave us a chance to...

Hey folks, Alex here, welcome back to ThursdAI! And folks, after the last week was the calm before the storm, "The storm came, y'all" – that's an understatement. This wasn't just a storm; it was an AI hurricane, a category 5 of announcements that left us all reeling (in the best way possible!). From being on the ground at Google I/O to live-watching Anthropic drop Claude 4 during our show, it's be...

Hey yall, this is Alex 👋 What a wild week, it started super slow, and it still did feel slow as releases are concerned, but the most interesting story was yet another AI gone "rogue" (have you even heard about "kill the boar", if not, Grok will tell you all about it) Otherwise it seemed fairly quiet in AI land this week, besides another Chinese newcomer called AM-thinking 32B that beats DeepSeek...

Hey folks, Alex here (yes, real me, not my AI avatar, yet) Compared to previous weeks, this week was pretty "chill" in the world of AI, though we did get a pretty significant Gemini 2.5 Pro update, it basically beat itself on the Arena. With Mistral releasing a new medium model (not OSS) and Nvidia finally dropping Nemotron Ultra (both ignoring Qwen 3 performance) there was also a few open source...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Welcome back to ThursdAI! And wow, what a week. Seriously, strap in, because the AI landscape just went through some seismic shifts. We're talking about a monumental open-source release from Alibaba with Qwen 3 that has everyone buzzing (including us!), Microsoft dropping Phi-4 with Reasoning , a rather poignant farewell to a legend ( RIP GPT-4 – we'll get to the wake sh...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Welcome back to ThursdAI! After what felt like ages of non-stop, massive model drops (looking at you, O3 and GPT-4!), we finally got that "chill week" we've been dreaming of since maybe... forever? It seems the big labs are taking a breather, probably gearing up for even bigger things next week (maybe some open source 👀). But "chill" doesn't mean empty! This week was pa...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Wow. Just… wow. What a week, folks. Seriously, this has been one for the books. This week was dominated by OpenAI's double whammy: first the GPT-4.1 family dropped with a mind-boggling 1 million token context window, followed swiftly by the new flagship reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini , which are already blowing minds with their agentic capabilities. We also saw signifi...

Hey Folks, Alex here, celebrating an absolutely crazy (to me) milestone, of #100 episodes of ThursdAI 👏 100 episodes in a year and a half (as I started publishing much later than I started going live, and the first episode was embarrassing), 100 episodes that documented INCREDIBLE AI progress, we mention on the show today, we used to be excited by context windows jumping from 4K to 16K! I want to...

Woo! Welcome back to ThursdAI, show number 99! Can you believe it? We are one show away from hitting the big 100, which is just wild to me. And speaking of milestones, we just crossed 100,000 downloads on Substack alone! [Insert celebratory sound effect here 🎉]. Honestly, knowing so many of you tune in every week genuinely fills me with joy , but also a real commitment to keep bringing you the th...

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋 Welcome back to ThursdAI! And folks, what an absolutely insane week it's been in the world of AI. Seriously, as I mentioned on the show, we don't often get weeks this packed with game-changing releases. We saw Google emphatically reclaim the #1 LLM spot with Gemini 2.5 Pro (and OpenAI try really hard to hit back with a new ChatGPT), DeepSeek dropped a monster 685B parame...

Hey, it's Alex, coming to you fresh off another live recording of ThursdAI, and what an incredible one it's been! I was hoping that this week will be chill with the releases, because of NVIDIA's GTC conference, but no, the AI world doesn't stop, and if you blinked this week, you may have missed 2 or 10 major things that happened. From Mistral coming back to OSS with the amazing Mistral Small 3.1 (...

LET'S GO! Happy second birthday to ThursdAI, your favorite weekly AI news show! Can you believe it's been two whole years since we jumped into that random Twitter Space to rant about GPT-4? From humble beginnings as a late-night Twitter chat to a full-blown podcast, Newsletter and YouTube show with hundreds of thousands of downloads, it's been an absolutely wild ride! That's right, two whole years...

What is UP folks! Alex here from Weights & Biases (yeah, still, but check this weeks buzz section below for some news!) I really really enjoyed today's episode, I feel like I can post it unedited it was so so good. We started the show with our good friend Junyang Lin from Alibaba Qwen, where he told us about their new 32B reasoner QwQ. Then we interviewed Google's VP of the search product, Robby S...

Hey all, Alex here 👋 What can I say, the weeks are getting busier , and this is one of those "crazy full" weeks in AI. As we were about to start recording, OpenAI teased GPT 4.5 live stream, and we already had a very busy show lined up (Claude 3.7 vibes are immaculate, Grok got an unhinged voice mode) and I had an interview with Kevin Hou from Windsurf scheduled! Let's dive in! 🔥 GPT 4.5 (ORION)...

Holy moly, AI enthusiasts! Alex Volkov here, reporting live from the AI Engineer Summit in the heart of (touristy) Times Square, New York! This week has been an absolute whirlwind of announcements, from XAI's Grok 3 dropping like a bomb , to Figure robots learning to hand each other things , and even a little eval smack-talk between OpenAI and XAI. It’s enough to make your head spin – but that's w...

What a week in AI, folks! Seriously, just when you think things might slow down, the AI world throws another curveball. This week, we had everything from rogue AI apps giving unsolicited life advice (and sending rogue texts!), to mind-blowing open source releases that are pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and of course, the ever-present drama of the big AI companies with OpenAI dropping a...

What's up friends, Alex here, back with another ThursdAI hot off the presses. Hold onto your hats because this week was another whirlwind of AI breakthroughs, mind-blowing demos, and straight-up game-changers. We dove deep into OpenAI's new "Deep Research" agent – and let me tell you, it's not just hype, it's legitimately revolutionary. You also don't have to take my word for it, a new friend of t...