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

Note from Last Week in AI (Andrey): I’m back! And i’m sorry for putting the substack on a silent pause, work got a bit too overwhelming so I fell behind on this. I’ll do my best to resume normal posting, starting with catching up on podcast episodes missing from here (which are not last week… but I guess I should post them still, sorry for the spam!)I’ve also paused paid subscriptions until I can get back to consistent posting. Apologies for the flakiness, and thanks for being a subscriber!Our 252th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!Recorded on 07/11/2026Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie HarrisFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.aiIn 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.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 PreviewTools & Apps(00:02:03) OpenAI rolls out GPT-5.6 after government greenlight — and announces ‘ChatGPT Work’ | The Verge + The new ChatGPT superapp takes aim at Claude Desktop + OpenAI is shutting down its Atlas web 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(00:15:41) SpaceXAI, Cursor Launch Grok 4.5 AI Model for Finance, Legal Applications - Bloomberg + SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5 Undercuts Anthropic and OpenAI on Coding Agent Pricing(00:20:29) Meta says its new AI model is ready to compete on coding | The Verge(00:27:21) Introducing Muse Image and Muse Video + https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/technology/meta-muse-images-instagram-removal.html(00:29:01) Chinese AI models gain ground with U.S. companies as costs surge +Anthropic and OpenAI Face a New Threat from ChinaApplications & Business(00:35:21) Meta Is Planning a Cloud Business to Sell AI Computing Power - Bloomberg(00:46:32) US energy regulator sets ultimatum for data centres + Grid operator PJM orders emergency steps to avoid large-scale US power outagesProjects & Open Source(00:51:40) Nemotron-Labs-Diffusion: A Tri-Mode Language Model Unifying Autoregressive, Diffusion, and Self-Speculation Decoding(00:57:44) Tencent Releases Hy3: An Open 295B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Model with 21B Active Parameters and 256K Context - MarkTechPostPolicy & Safety(00:58:30) Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models(01:09:29) Beijing is looking at curbing overseas access to China’s top AI models, sources say(01:12:53) The ex-OpenAI employee behind ‘AI 2027’ recommends a rosier path - The Washington Post + AI 2040: Plan A