Awesome Agents Podcast

Transformer ASIC startup Etched comes out of stealth with first-pass silicon on TSMC N4P, $800M raised, and more than $1B in signed customer contracts.

June 30 closes GitHub Copilot's first full month under token-based billing. Some agentic developers are looking at monthly costs 25x higher than their old flat-rate plans.

California gives all state agencies access to Claude at 50% off, as Newsom publicly breaks with the federal government's hostile stance toward Anthropic.

Z.ai's GLM-5.2 delivers frontier coding performance with open weights and MIT license at roughly one-sixth the cost of GPT-5.5 - but can it replace Claude Opus 4.8?

South Korea announced an 800 trillion won chip investment plan to build four new fabs with Samsung and SK Hynix in the country's southwest, targeting AI memory dominance through 2035.

Paul Meade, Apple's VP for the Vision Pro and smart glasses, is joining OpenAI's io hardware division - the most senior hardware engineering defection yet in a two-year talent war that is reshaping who builds the next computing platform.

A 57-page DeepMind paper by co-founder Shane Legg identifies four pathways from AGI to superintelligence and six bottlenecks that could block each route.

Google DeepMind's upcoming flagship model with a 2M-token context window and Deep Think reasoning, announced at Google I/O 2026 and expected in July.

Two weeks after the US banned Anthropic's Mythos 5 and Fable 5 globally, Tokyo's Sakana AI and China's 360 Security have moved to fill the vacuum with frontier-class alternatives.

Anthropic accused Alibaba's Qwen lab of running 28.8 million unauthorized exchanges against Claude through 25,000 fake accounts, and urged Congress to tighten export controls on AI model access.

Grok 4.3 slashes prices by up to 83%, adds native video input and voice cloning, and carves out a credible position as the most cost-efficient frontier model - with real caveats on coding and latency.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy pledged $48 billion for India through 2030 after meeting PM Modi, outspending Microsoft and Google on AI infrastructure in the world's fastest-growing cloud market.

Anthropic's Claude Tag replaces the old Slack app with a shared @Claude identity that builds channel memory, works asynchronously, and runs on Claude Opus 4.8.

Noam Shazeer, John Jumper, and two more Gemini engineers left Google DeepMind for OpenAI and Anthropic in a single week, sending Alphabet stock tumbling nearly 10% from its May peak.

Agility Robotics merges with Churchill Capital XI at a $2.5B valuation, becoming the first publicly traded pure-play humanoid robot company with robots already earning commercial revenue.

Google DeepMind's $75M investment in A24 aims to build AI tools shaped by filmmakers rather than imposed on them, as studios race to stake their AI positions across Hollywood.

OpenAI's GPT-5.5-Cyber found CVE-2026-8390 in Firefox's WebAssembly engine before Pwn2Own Berlin - five of six registered exploit entries withdrew.

The AlphaGo co-founder's open-source AI lab will pay SpaceX $150M monthly for Nvidia GB300 chips at Colossus 2, totaling $6.3B before shipping a single public model.

Baseten's $1.5B raise at a $13B valuation signals a structural shift as open-source models displace closed APIs in enterprise AI.

Google DeepMind's DiffusionGemma generates 1,000+ tokens per second through parallel diffusion, trading 5-19 benchmark points against Gemma 4 for speed and unique bidirectional generation capabilities.

At G7 in Evian, Altman, Amodei, and Hassabis pitched world leaders on a US-led international AI governance body, chip trade restrictions on China, and controlled access to frontier models.

London-based Behavox lands preferred equity from BlackRock's HPS as compliance demand rises ahead of Colorado and EU AI Act deadlines.

Amazon leads a $310M round into Odyssey, a startup building world models that simulate physics - not just language - with Trainium chip adoption baked in as the price of entry.

Mistral's 128B open-weight model consolidates reasoning, coding, and vision into one checkpoint, with remote agents that file pull requests autonomously.

Sensor Tower's State of AI 2026 report shows ChatGPT's True Audience share fell to 46.4% in May as Gemini and Claude eat into OpenAI's lead.