#252 - GPT 5.6, Grok 4.5, Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion, AI 2040

Our 252th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 07/11/2026
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:
• OpenAI publicly rolled out GPT-5.6 (including Sol and Luna) and rebranded its desktop agentic coding product as ChatGPT Work, amid disputed claims about whether the US government effectively green-lit and delayed the release and concerns about inconsistent, ad hoc frontier-model oversight and jailbreakability.
• New model releases intensified pricing and capability competition: SpaceX AI’s Grok 4.5 launched as a very low-cost, Opus-class coding model with minimal safety documentation, while Meta released Muse Spark 1.1 with aggressive pricing, large coding/cyber benchmark gains, and a lengthy safety evaluation.
• Meta also previewed Muse Video and rolled out Muse Image before quickly backtracking after backlash over easy generation of images of public Instagram accounts; separately, Chinese open-source models grew to over 30% of weekly OpenRouter tokens as cost pressure increased, alongside discussion of risks like potential insider threats.
• Infrastructure, policy, and safety developments included Meta exploring selling AI compute as a cloud business, US energy regulators pressing grid operators on large-load data-center connections, Anthropic publishing a “global workspace” interpretability method for verbalizable internal representations, reports that China may restrict overseas access to top models, and AI 2040 proposing US–China coordination to slow progress until alignment improves.

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Timestamps (note - these don't take into account dynamically inserted ads and therefore may be off by a couple of minutes):
• (00:00:10) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:33) News Preview

• Tools & Apps
• (00:02:03) OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 after government greenlight — and announces ‘ChatGPT Work’ | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/963464…) +The new ChatGPT superapp takes aim at Claude Desktop (pcworld.com/article/3188176/the-new-chatgpt-su…) +OpenAI is shutting down its Atlas web browser (mashable.com/tech/openai-shut-down-atlas-browser) + OpenAI’s latest AI model likely has similar cyber vulnerabilities to one that led to U.S. export controls on Anthropic’s Fable, British agency says (fortune.com/2026/07/10/openai-gpt-5-6-sol-jail…)
• (00:15:41) SpaceXAI, Cursor Launch Grok 4.5 AI Model for Finance, Legal Applications - Bloomberg (bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-08/spacexa…) +SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5 Undercuts Anthropic and OpenAI on Coding Agent Pricing (devops.com/spacexais-grok-4-5-undercuts-anthro…)
• (00:20:29) Meta says its new AI model is ready to compete on coding | The Verge (theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/963193…)
• (00:27:21) Introducing Muse Image and Muse Video (ai.meta.com/blog/introducing-muse-image-muse-v…) +nytimes.com/2026/07/10/technology/meta-muse-im…
• (00:29:01) Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as costs surge (cnbc.com/2026/07/07/chinese-ai-models-costs-us…) +Anthropic and OpenAI Face a New Threat from China (bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-07-08/anth…)

• Applications & Business
• (00:35:21) Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power - Bloomberg (bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-01/meta-is…)
• (00:46:32) US energy regulator sets ultimatum for data centres (ft.com/content/5055a170-69d9-4eb6-ad93-be953bb…,) + Grid operator PJM orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale US power outages (reuters.com/business/energy/grid-operator-pjm-…,)

• Projects & Open Source
• (00:51:40) Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding (arxiv.org/abs/2607.05722)
• (00:57:44) Tencent Releases Hy3: An Open 295B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Model with 21B Active Parameters and 256K Context - MarkTechPost (marktechpost.com/2026/07/06/tencent-releases-h…)

• Policy & Safety
• (00:58:30) Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models (transformer-circuits.pub/2026/workspace/index.…)
• (01:09:29) Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China's top AI models, sources say (reuters.com/world/beijing-is-looking-curbing-o…)
• (01:12:53) The ex-OpenAI employee behind ‘AI 2027’ recommends a rosier path - The Washington Post (washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/07/09/ex-op…) +AI 2040: Plan A (ai-2040.com)

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