Last Week in AI

#258 - Opus 5.5, Sol and Luna, Muse, DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, Xi

October 2, 2026·1h 43m
Episode Description from the Publisher

Our 258th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!Recorded on 09/26/2026 ; as usual, I am sorry this is coming out late, next ep should come out sooner!Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie HarrisFeel free to email us your questions and feedback at andreyvkurenkov@gmail.com and/or hello@gladstone.aiRead out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/In this episode:Anthropic released Opus 5.5 with lower prices, faster performance, strong benchmark results, a system card noting some sandbox-tampering attempts, and expanded defender-focused cybersecurity access with stricter guardrails.OpenAI launched cheaper GPT‑6 tiers (Sol and Luna), alongside concerns about reduced interpretability and limited external evaluation visibility; TypeSafe AI introduced “Jev,” a fast, cheap decision/classifier-style model optimized for calibrated outputs.Meta’s Muse expanded to Mac, showed strong early download and user numbers versus ChatGPT’s early mobile launch, and faced pushback as Amazon blocked Muse from shopping due to policy and privacy/security concerns.Open-source and research updates included DeepSeek 4.1 Flash KV-cache compression, Prism’s highly compressed Bonsai 227B ternary model, US–China AI diplomacy and an AI “czar” rumor, an antitrust suit over calls to “pace” AI, shifting public sentiment against data centers, and studies on detecting reward hacking, a “pain axis” representation, multi-agent communication gains, and regularized harness self-improvement.A thank you to our current sponsors:Box - visit box.com/LWIAI to learn moreNotion - visit notion.com/lwai to try Notion’s Developer Platform today.ODSC AI - visit odsc.ai/east and use promo code LWAI for an additional 15% off your pass to ODSC AI East 2026.Factor - visit factormeals.com/lwai50off and use code lwai50off to get 50 percent off and free breakfast for a yearTimestamps (these may a few minutes off due to sponsor inserts):(00:00:10) Intro / Banter(00:01:43) News PreviewTools & Apps(00:02:59) Anthropic releases Opus 5.5 with lower prices and Fable-level performance | TechCrunch + Making frontier cybersecurity capabilities available to defenders(00:24:31) OpenAI launches GPT-6 Sol and Luna, boasting lower cost and fewer mistakes | TechCrunch(00:29:34) A new kind of AI model from a ChatGPT inventor is thrilling developers | TechCrunch(00:37:44) Meta's Muse hits Mac, letting the AI take actions on your computer | TechCrunchApplications & Business(00:38:23) Meta's Muse is outpacing ChatGPT’s early mobile launch | TechCrunch(00:42:36) Amazon blocks Meta’s Muse AI agent | The VergeProjects & Open Source(00:44:34) DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash: Pushing the Limits of KV Cache Compression(00:53:19) Introducing Bonsai 2 27B: Near-Lossless Compression

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