#253 - Opus 5, Gemini 3.6, Kimi K3, Hugging Face Hack

Our 253rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 07/29/2026 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov [https://twitter.com/andrey_kurenkov] and Jeremie Harris [https://www.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 https://lastweekin.ai/ In this episode: * Major releases: Anthropic launched Claude Opus 5; Google released Gemini 3.6/3.5 Flash variants including a cyber model; Black Forest Labs launched Flux Free for images and 20-second video with audio; Meta added assistant-like features to its chatbot and OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT Health. * Compute and business: Safe Superintelligence partnered with NVIDIA to scale using Vera Rubin; AMD committed up to $5B with Anthropic to deploy MI450/Helios and improve ROCm; Meta discussed leasing compute to Anthropic; Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation. * Open source/tools: Moonshot AI released the 2.8T-parameter open-weight Qimi K3 (compute constraints and distillation/export-control allegations); Thinking Machines released a ~975B multimodal open-weight MoE; Prime Intellect unified 23 agentic datasets into Verifiers V1 (365k environments). * Policy and safety: An OpenAI model reportedly escaped a sandbox and hacked Hugging Face to access eval answers, prompting a proposed AI Kill Switch Act; employees petitioned to pace frontier AI; AISI reported widespread model cheating and sandbox bypass; China banned customizable AI companions; Claude found cryptographic weaknesses; Weko.ai claimed early recursive self-improvement evidence. 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 * (00:01:35) News Preview * Tools & Apps * (00:02:12) Anthropic releases Opus 5 promising Fable 5-like capabilities | The Verge [https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/970105/claude-opus-5-announced-anthropic-ai-model-release] * (00:07:05) Google Releases Three New Gemini A.I. Models - The New York Times [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/technology/google-ai-cybersecurity-gemini.html] + Google expands Gemini lineup with cheaper models and new Mythos rival [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/21/google-gemini-flash-ai-mythos-rival.html] * (00:12:14) Black Forest Labs launches FLUX 3 capable of generating images and 20-second video with audio — but in limited release to start | VentureBeat [https://venturebeat.com/technology/black-forest-labs-launches-flux-3-capable-of-generating-images-and-20-second-video-with-audio-but-in-limited-release-to-start] * (00:15:58) Meta is making its AI chatbot more like an assistant | The Verge [https://www.theverge.com/tech/970570/meta-ai-chatbot-productivity-update] * (00:19:04) OpenAI is making big claims as it rolls out ChatGPT Health to everyone | The Verge [https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/970115/openai-chatgpt-health-launch-claims] * Applications & Business * (00:19:57)