#213 - Midjourney video, Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite, LiveCodeBench Pro

Our 213nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 06/21/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov (twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (twitter.com/jeremiecharris).

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.comand/or hello@gladstone.ai

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at lastweekin.ai.

In this episode:

• Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, moving from text-to-image to video with a subscription model offering up to 21-second clips, highlighting the affordability and growing capabilities in AI video generation.

• Google's Gemini AI family updates include high-efficiency models for cost-effective workloads, and new enhancements in Google's search function now allow for voice interactions.

• The introduction of two new benchmarks, Live Code Bench Pro and Abstention Bench, aiming to test and improve the problem-solving and abstention capabilities of reasoning models, revealing current limitations.

• OpenAI wins a $200 million US defense contract to support various aspects of the Department of Defense, reflecting growing collaborations between tech companies and government for AI applications.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter

• (00:01:32) News Preview

• Tools & Apps

• (00:02:12) Midjourney launches its first AI video generation model, V1 (techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/midjourney-launches-…)

• (00:05:52) Google’s Gemini AI family updated with stable 2.5 Pro, super-efficient 2.5 Flash-Lite (arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/googles-gemini-ai-f…)

• (00:07:59) Google’s AI Mode can now have back-and-forth voice conversations (techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/googles-ai-mode-can-…)

• (00:10:13) YouTube to Add Google’s Veo 3 to Shorts in Move That Could Turbocharge AI on the Video Platform (hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/youtube…)

• Applications & Business

• (00:11:10) The ‘OpenAI Files’ will help you understand how Sam Altman’s company works (theverge.com/openai/688783/the-openai-files-wi…)

• (00:12:29) OpenAI drops Scale AI as a data provider following Meta deal (techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/openai-drops-scale-a…)

• (00:13:28) Amazon’s Zoox opens its first major robotaxi production facility (techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/amazons-zoox-opens-i…)

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:15:20) LiveCodeBench Pro: How Do Olympiad Medalists Judge LLMs in Competitive Programming? (arxiv.org/abs/2506.11928v1)

• (00:19:45) AbstentionBench: Reasoning LLMs Fail on Unanswerable Questions (arxiv.org/abs/2506.09038v1)

• (00:22:49) MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attention (arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585v1)

• Research & Advancements

• (00:24:33) Scaling Laws of Motion Forecasting and Planning -- A Technical Report (arxiv.org/abs/2506.08228v1)

• Policy & Safety

• (00:28:07) Universal Jailbreak Suffixes Are Strong Attention Hijackers (arxiv.org/abs/2506.12880v1)

• (00:30:52) OpenAI found features in AI models that correspond to different ‘personas’ (techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/openai-found-feature…)

• (00:33:25) OpenAI wins $200 million U.S. defense contract (cnbc.com/2025/06/16/openai-wins-200-million-us…)

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