#235 - Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon

Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 02/27/2026
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 andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai
Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at lastweekin.ai
In this episode:
• Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI’s Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic’s Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity’s multi-agent “Computer” coordinator.
• Compute and business moves include Meta’s reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior.
• Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China’s plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints.
• Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic’s report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI’s report on disrupting malicious use.

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Timestamps:
• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:52) News Preview
• Tools & Apps
• (00:03:20) Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/02/17/anthropic-releases-s…)
• (00:11:24) Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET (cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/google-ann…)
• (00:14:54) Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India (timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/social/…)
• (00:18:06) Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat (venturebeat.com/orchestration/anthropic-just-r…)
• (00:21:01) Perplexity announces "Computer," an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars Technica (arstechnica.com/ai/2026/02/perplexity-announce…)
• Applications & Business
• (00:23:40) Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases 'personal superintelligence' | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/02/24/meta-strikes-up-to-1…)
• (00:27:05) Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/02/24/nvidia-challenger-ai…)
• (00:31:00) World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com/2026/02/18/world-labs-lands-200…)
• (00:33:07) Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior (pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2026/simi…)
• (00:33:52) Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers (tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-inte…)
• (00:36:43) China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030 (tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/…)
• Research & Advancements
• (00:40:33) On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers (arxiv.org/abs/2602.15322v1)
• (00:48:03) Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens (arxiv.org/abs/2602.13517)
• (00:54:52) models have some pretty funny attractor states (lesswrong.com/posts/mgjtEHeLgkhZZ3cEx/models-h…)
• (01:01:41) When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task (arxiv.org/abs/2601.04480)
• (01:05:16) BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance (arxiv.org/abs/2602.07267)
• (01:12:00) NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist (arxiv.org/abs/2602.16756)
• (01:13:15) The least understood driver of AI progress (epoch.ai/gradient-updates/the-least-understood…)
• (01:21:45) The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans (alignment.anthropic.com/2026/psm)
• Policy & Safety
• (01:25:04) Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon's threats 'do not change our position' on AI (cnbc.com/2026/02/26/anthropic-pentagon-ai-amod…)
• (01:33:04) Musk's xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems (axios.com/2026/02/23/ai-defense-department-dea…)
• (01:34:17) Detecting and preventing distillation attacks (anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-di…)
• (01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLE (siliconangle.com/2025/10/07/openai-details-exp…)
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