AI Explained Official Podcast

Sam Altman unexpectedly brings his timelines to AGI forward, while OpenAI backtrack on superintelligence. None of these changes were heralded, but they are significant. Plus the new year brings new assessments of the true capability of models to automate 'large swathes of the economy'. I'll give my prediction on that front for 2025, announcement a new Simple Bench competition, and s...

o3 isn’t one of the biggest developments in AI for 2+ years because it beats a particular benchmark. It is so because it demonstrates a reusable technique through which almost any benchmark could fall, and at short notice. I’ll cover all the highlights, benchmarks broken, and what comes next. Plus, the costs OpenAI didn’t want us to know, Genesis, ARC-AGI 2, Gemini-Thinking, and much more.  Fronti...

The ‘Gemini 2 Era’ begins … with screen-sharing? But really, it’s a great free tool, for curiosity satisfying rather than bleeding-edge intelligence. I give you the benchmarks, the highlights and of course, the latest from OpenAI Advanced Voice Mode with Vision.  Plus Deep Research in Gemini Advanced, Simple Bench updates, Santa and what might be for some of you Google’s deflating admission.  00:0...

After a 10 month wait, OpenAI have released Sora to paying users. With just a prompt it can generate videos of up to 20 seconds in lower resolutions, and 10 seconds at 1080p if you can fork out $200/month. I’ve tested it and read the system card. The user interface is quite beautiful, even if the videos themselves operate until entirely new rules of physics. But I can’t help wondering if OpenAI wa...

Oh boy. o1 pro mode out on the same night as o1 full. I read the 49 page paper, ran my own tests, spent my fuel allowance on Pro Mode and will give you all the highlights. Suffice to say the story is not as simple as it first appears.  Weights and Biases’ Weave: wandb.me/ai_explained Plus, GPT-4.5? MLE Bench, Simple Update, Image Analysis and much more    o1 System Card: https://cdn.openai.com/o1-...

Calmest before the storm? Whatever analogy you want to use things had gotten quiet toward the end of 2024. But then tonight we got Genie 2, and a series of scheduled announcements from OpenAI. Sora is soon here, and o1, but I dive deeper into what it all means and whether reliability is on a path to being solved, ft: two recent papers.  Assembly AI Speech to Text: https://www.assemblyai.com/?utm_s...

A new and mysterious Gemini model appears at the top of the leaderboard, but is that the full story? I dig behind the headline to show you some anti-climactic results, give some context with leaks in the last 48 hours of diminishing returns to scaling, and add the response of Altman, OpenAI and co. The future is about to look a lot stranger... 80,000 hours Podcast and Channel: https://open.spotify...

The last few days have seen two narratives emerge. One, derived from yesterday’s OpenAI leak in TheInformation, that GPT-5/Orion is a disappointment, and less of a leap than GPT-3 to GPT-4. The second comes from a series of 4 clips (shown in this video) from Sam Altman, regarding the ‘clear path’ to AGI. Let’s go beyond the headlines (and through papers like Frontier Math) to get closer to the gro...

The Google destroyer, the Perplexity crusher? Or just hype? ChatGPT with Search is here, and simultaneously Altman and co did an AMA on Reddit, covering GPT-5, Sora, SearchGPT and a lot more. Plus, the biggest news of them all: Simple Bench is out. ChatGPT with Search: https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-search/ Altman AMA (ask me anything): https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ggix...

A new state of the art LLM (at least for creative writing and basic reasoning) but what lies behind the numbers that were put out? Is it for real, and are AI agents about to grab your mouse and shake your cursor? Plus, results on my own Simple Bench, and new tools from Runway (Act-One), HeyGen (Zoom Calls) and an updated NotebookLM. AI, without the hype. Weights and Biases' Weave: https://wan...