This week is a very exciting one in the world of AI news, as we get 3 SOTA models, one in overall LLM rankings, on in OSS coding and one in OSS voice + a bunch of new breaking news during the show (which we reacted to live on the pod, and as we're now doing video, you can see us freak out in real time at 59:32) 00:00 Welcome to ThursdAI 00:25 Meet the Hosts 02:38 Show Format and Community 03:18 TLDR Overview 04:01 Open Source Highlights 13:31 Qwen Coder 2.5 Release 14:00 Speculative Decoding...

👋 Hey all, this is Alex, coming to you from the very Sunny California, as I'm in SF again, while there is a complete snow storm back home in Denver (brrr). I flew here for the Hackathon I kept telling you about, and it was glorious, we had over 400 registered, over 200 approved hackers, 21 teams submitted incredible projects 👏 You can follow some of these here I then decided to stick around and record the show from SF, and finally pulled the plug and asked for some budget, and I present, the...

Hey everyone, Happy Halloween! Alex here, coming to you live from my mad scientist lair! For the first ever, live video stream of ThursdAI, I dressed up as a mad scientist and had my co-host, Fester the AI powered Skeleton join me (as well as my usual cohosts haha) in a very energetic and hopefully entertaining video stream! Since it's Halloween today, Fester (and I) have a very busy schedule, so no super length ThursdAI news-letter today, as we're still not in the realm of Gemini being able...

Hey all, Alex here, coming to you from the (surprisingly) sunny Seattle, with just a mind-boggling week of releases. Really, just on Tuesday there was so much news already! I had to post a recap thread, something I do usually after I finish ThursdAI! From Anthropic reclaiming close-second sometimes-first AI lab position + giving Claude the wheel in the form of computer use powers, to more than 3 AI video generation updates with open source ones, to Apple updating Apple Intelligence beta,...

Hey folks, Alex here from Weights & Biases, and this week has been absolutely bonkers. From robots walking among us to rockets landing on chopsticks (well, almost), the future is feeling palpably closer. And if real-world robots and reusable spaceship boosters weren't enough, the open-source AI community has been cooking, dropping new models and techniques faster than a Starship launch. So buckle up, grab your space helmet and noise-canceling headphones (we’ll get to why those are...

Hey Folks, we are finally due for a "relaxing" week in AI, no more HUGE company announcements (if you don't consider Meta Movie Gen huge), no conferences or dev days, and some time for Open Source projects to shine. (while we all wait for Opus 3.5 to shake things up) This week was very multimodal on the show, we covered 2 new video models, one that's tiny and is open source, and one massive from Meta that is aiming for SORA's crown, and 2 new VLMs, one from our friends at REKA that...

Hey, it's Alex. Ok, so mind is officially blown. I was sure this week was going to be wild, but I didn't expect everyone else besides OpenAI to pile on, exactly on ThursdAI. Coming back from Dev Day (number 2) and am still processing, and wanted to actually do a recap by humans, not just the NotebookLM one I posted during the keynote itself (which was awesome and scary in a "will AI replace me as a podcaster" kind of way), and was incredible to have Simon Willison who was sitting just behind...

Hey, Alex here. Super quick, as I’m still attending Dev Day, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging (if you're a paid subscriber!), I have decided to outsource my job and give the amazing podcasters of NoteBookLM the whole transcript of the opening keynote of OpenAI Dev Day. You can see a blog of everything they just posted here Here’s a summary of all what was announced: * Developer-Centric Approach: OpenAI consistently emphasized the importance of developers in their mission to build...

Hey everyone, it's Alex (still traveling!), and oh boy, what a week again! Advanced Voice Mode is finally here from OpenAI, Google updated their Gemini models in a huge way and then Meta announced MultiModal LlaMas and on device mini Llamas (and we also got a "better"? multimodal from Allen AI called MOLMO!) From Weights & Biases perspective, our hackathon was a success this weekend, and then I went down to Menlo Park for my first Meta Connect conference, full of news and updates and will...

Hey folks, Alex here, back with another ThursdAI recap – and let me tell you, this week's episode was a whirlwind of open-source goodness, mind-bending inference techniques, and a whole lotta talk about talking AIs! We dove deep into the world of LLMs, from Alibaba's massive Qwen 2.5 drop to the quirky, real-time reactions of Moshi. We even got a sneak peek at Nous Research's ambitious new project, Forge, which promises to unlock some serious LLM potential. So grab your pumpkin spice latte...

March 14th, 2023 was the day ThursdAI was born, it was also the day OpenAI released GPT-4, and I jumped into a Twitter space and started chaotically reacting together with other folks about what a new release of a paradigm shifting model from OpenAI means, what are the details, the new capabilities. Today, it happened again! Hey, it's Alex, I'm back from my mini vacation (pic after the signature) and boy am I glad I decided to not miss September 12th! The long rumored 🍓 thinking model from...

Welcome back everyone, can you believe it's another ThursdAI already? And can you believe me when I tell you that friends of the pod Matt Shumer & Sahil form Glaive.ai just dropped a LLama 3.1 70B finetune that you can download that will outperform Claude Sonnet 3.5 while running locally on your machine? Today was a VERY heavy Open Source focused show, we had a great chat w/ Niklas, the leading author of OLMoE, a new and 100% open source MoE from Allen AI, a chat with Eugene...

Hey, for the least time during summer of 2024, welcome to yet another edition of ThursdAI, also happy skynet self-awareness day for those who keep track :) This week, Cerebras broke the world record for fastest LLama 3.1 70B/8B inference (and came on the show to talk about it) Google updated 3 new Geminis, Anthropic artifacts for all, 100M context windows are possible, and Qwen beats SOTA on vision models + much more! As always, this weeks newsletter is brought to you by Weights &...

Hey there, Alex here with an end of summer edition of our show, which did not disappoint. Today is the official anniversary of stable diffusion 1.4 can you believe it? It's the second week in the row that we have an exclusive LLM launch on the show (after Emozilla announced Hermes 3 on last week's show), and spoiler alert, we may have something cooking for next week as well! This edition of ThursdAI is brought to you by W&B Weave, our LLM observability toolkit, letting you evaluate LLMs...

Look these crazy weeks don't seem to stop, and though this week started out a bit slower (while folks were waiting to see how the speculation about certain red berry flavored conspiracies are shaking out) the big labs are shipping! We've got space uncle Elon dropping an "almost-gpt4" level Grok-2, that's uncensored, has access to real time data on X and can draw all kinds of images with Flux, OpenAI announced a new ChatGPT 4o version (not the one from last week that supported structured...

Hold on tight, folks, because THIS week on ThursdAI felt like riding a roller coaster through the wild world of open-source AI - extreme highs, mind-bending twists, and a sprinkle of "wtf is happening?" conspiracy theories for good measure. 😂 Theme of this week is, Open Source keeps beating GPT-4, while we're inching towards intelligence too cheap to meter on the API fronts. We even had a live demo so epic, folks at the Large Hadron Collider are taking notice! Plus, strawberry shenanigans...

Starting Monday, Apple released iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence, then Meta dropped SAM-2 (Segment Anything Model) and then Google first open sourced Gemma 2B and now (just literally 2 hours ago, during the live show) released Gemini 1.5 0801 experimental that takes #1 on LMsys arena across multiple categories, to top it all off we also got a new SOTA image diffusion model called FLUX.1 from ex-stability folks and their new Black Forest Lab. This week on the show, we had Joseph & Piotr...

Holy s**t, folks! I was off for two weeks, last week OpenAI released GPT-4o-mini and everyone was in my mentions saying, Alex, how are you missing this?? and I'm so glad I missed that last week and not this one, because while GPT-4o-mini is incredible (GPT-4o level distill with incredible speed and almost 99% cost reduction from 2 years ago?) it's not open source. So welcome back to ThursdAI, and buckle up because we're diving into what might just be the craziest week in open-source AI...

Hey all, Alex here… well, not actually here, I’m scheduling this post in advance, which I haven’t yet done, because I'm going on vacation! That’s right, next week is my birthday 🎉 and a much needed break, somewhere with a beach is awaiting, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging for too long, so posting this episode with some amazing un-released before material. Mixture of Agents x2 Back in the far away days of June 20th (not that long ago but feels like ages!), Together AI announced a new...

Hey everyone! Happy 4th of July to everyone who celebrates! I celebrated today by having an intimate conversation with 600 of my closest X friends 😂 Joking aside, today is a celebratory episode, 52nd consecutive weekly ThursdAI show! I've been doing this as a podcast for a year now! Which means, there are some of you, who've been subscribed for a year 😮 Thank you! Couldn't have done this without you. In the middle of my talk at AI Engineer (I still don't have the video!) I had to plug...

Hey everyone, sending a quick one today, no deep dive, as I'm still in the middle of AI Engineer World's Fair 2024 in San Francisco (in fact, I'm writing this from the incredible floor 32 presidential suite, that the team here got for interviews, media and podcasting, and hey to all new folks who I’ve just met during the last two days!) It's been an incredible few days meeting so many ThursdAI community members, listeners and folks who came on the pod! The list honestly is too long but I've...

Hey, this is Alex. Don't you just love when assumptions about LLMs hitting a wall just get shattered left and right and we get new incredible tools released that leapfrog previous state of the art models, that we barely got used to, from just a few months ago? I SURE DO! Today is one such day, this week was already busy enough, I had a whole 2 hour show packed with releases, and then Anthropic decided to give me a reason to use the #breakingNews button (the one that does the news show like...

Happy Apple AI week everyone (well, those of us who celebrate, some don't) as this week we finally got told what Apple is planning to do with this whole generative AI wave and presented Apple Intelligence (which is AI, get it? they are trying to rebrand AI!) This weeks pod and newsletter main focus will be Apple Intelligence of course, as it was for most people compared to how the market reacted ($APPL grew over $360B in a few days after this announcement) and how many people watched each...

Hey hey! This is Alex! 👋 Some podcasts have 1 or maaaybe 2 guests an episode, we had 6! guests today, each has had an announcement, an open source release, or a breaking news story that we've covered! (PS, this edition is very multimodal so click into the Substack as videos don't play in your inbox) As you know my favorite thing is to host the folks who make the news to let them do their own announcements, but also, hitting that BREAKING NEWS button when something is actually breaking (as...