#228 - GPT 5.2, Scaling Agents, Weird Generalization

Our 228th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 12/12/2025
Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov (twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov) and Jeremie Harris (linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris)
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:
• OpenAI's latest model GPT-5.2 demonstrates improved performance and enhanced multi-modal capabilities but comes with increased costs and a different knowledge cutoff date.
• Disney invests $1 billion in OpenAI to generate Disney character content, creating unique licensing agreements across characters from Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars franchises.
• The U.S. government imposes new AI chip export rules involving security reviews, while simultaneously moving to prevent states from independently regulating AI.
• DeepMind releases a paper outlining the challenges and findings in scaling multi-agent systems, highlighting the complexities of tool coordination and task performance.

Timestamps:
• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:19) News Preview
• Tools & Apps
• (00:01:58) GPT-5.2 is OpenAI’s latest move in the agentic AI battle | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/842529…)
• (00:08:48) Runway releases its first world model, adds native audio to latest video model | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2025/12/11/runway-releases-its-…)
• (00:11:51) Google says it will link to more sources in AI Mode | The Verge (theverge.com/news/841603/google-ai-mode-source…)
• (00:12:24) ChatGPT can now use Adobe apps to edit your photos and PDFs for free | The Verge (theverge.com/news/841369/chatgpt-apps-adobe-ph…)
• (00:13:05) Tencent releases Hunyuan 2.0 with 406B parameters (dataconomy.com/2025/12/08/tencent-releases-hun…)
• Applications & Business
• (00:16:15) China set to limit access to Nvidia’s H200 chips despite Trump export approval (ft.com/content/c4e81a67-cd5b-48b4-9749-92ecf11…)
• (00:21:02) Disney investing $1 billion in OpenAI, will allow characters on Sora (cnbc.com/2025/12/11/disney-openai-sora-charact…)
• (00:24:48) Unconventional AI confirms its massive $475M seed round (techcrunch.com/2025/12/09/unconventional-ai-co…)
• (00:29:06) Slack CEO Denise Dresser to join OpenAI as chief revenue officer | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2025/12/09/slack-ceo-denise-dre…)
• (00:31:18) The state of enterprise AI (openai.com/index/the-state-of-enterprise-ai-20…)
• Projects & Open Source
• (00:33:49) [2512.10791] The FACTS Leaderboard: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Large Language Model Factuality (arxiv.org/abs/2512.10791)
• (00:36:27) Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document (lesswrong.com/posts/vpNG99GhbBoLov9og/claude-4…)
• Research & Advancements
• (00:43:49) [2512.08296] Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems (arxiv.org/abs/2512.08296)
• (00:48:43) Evaluating Gemini Robotics Policies in a Veo World Simulator (arxiv.org/abs/2512.10675)
• (00:52:10) Guided Self-Evolving LLMs with Minimal Human Supervision (arxiv.org/abs/2512.02472)
• (00:56:08) Martingale Score: An Unsupervised Metric for Bayesian Rationality in LLM Reasoning (arxiv.org/abs/2512.02914)
• (01:00:39) [2512.07783] On the Interplay of Pre-Training, Mid-Training, and RL on Reasoning Language Models (arxiv.org/abs/2512.07783)
• (01:04:42) Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning with LLMs: Formulation and Practices (arxiv.org/abs/2512.01374)
• (01:09:42) Google’s AI unit DeepMind announces UK 'automated research lab' (cnbc.com/2025/12/11/googles-ai-unit-deepmind-a…)
• Policy & Safety
• (01:10:28) Trump Moves to Stop States From Regulating AI With a New Executive Order - The New York Times (nytimes.com/2025/12/11/technology/ai-trump-exe…)
• (01:13:54) [2512.09742] Weird Generalization and Inductive Backdoors: New Ways to Corrupt LLMs (arxiv.org/abs/2512.09742)
• (01:17:57) Forecasting AI Time Horizon Under Compute Slowdowns (joel-becker.com/images/publications/forecastin…)
• (01:20:46) AI Security Institute focuses on AI measurements and evaluations (digit.fyi/ai-security-institute-focuses-on-ai-…)
• (01:21:16) Nvidia AI Chips to Undergo Unusual U.S. Security Review Before Export to China (wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-ai-chips-to-undergo-unu…)
• (01:22:01) U.S. Authorities Shut Down Major China-Linked AI Tech Smuggling Network (justice.gov/opa/pr/us-authorities-shut-down-ma…)
• Synthetic Media & Art
• (01:24:01) RSL 1.0 has arrived, allowing publishers to ask AI companies pay to scrape content | The Verge (theverge.com/news/841222/rsl-licensing-ai-spec…)

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