ThursdAI - Aug 06 - Google shakeup, Details on OpenAI hack, 2 new agent harnesses, 4 video models (1 Open) and 3 guest segments

Hey all,This week we saw a major shakeup at Google, with the departure of long time folks like Jeff Dean, and Oriol Vinyals, Demis stepping down from leading DeepMind, and the delayed release of the improved Gemini. While this was a big deal, it’s not the only one worth covering as the details of the OpenAI hack (and 2 new ones from Meta and Anthropic) came to light, as well as new details from the UK AI Security Institute.As mentioned on the show, CoreWeave is coming to SF for Fully Connected, our premier 2000 person AI event. I’ve got a coupon code for readers and listeners of ThursdAI, $1299 value, please join us in Sept and use THURSDAIFC2026 as your code HEREIn open source news, DeepSeek updated their v4 flash model, based on same architecture, but significantly better benchmarks and ridiculous pricing and both Meta and Prime Intellect released new agent harnesses.Additionally, this week was the week of video models, with Seedance 2.5 from Bytedance finally available in the US, WAN from Alibaba and BFL Flux 3 all released, to be overshadowed by the best open weights video model from MiniMax called H3 (we had Victor from MiniMax and Blaine Brown as guests to discuss it)Also 2 additional guests on the show today, Kfir Aberman from Decart showed us real time video models with their Anywear chrome extension and David Crawshaw, co-founder of exe.dev joined and talked about Shelley, their built in AI assistant.The full details of the OpenAI - HF hack, shared by OpenAI at the Black Hat Conf - a watershed momentI don’t often do this, but I feel like this story is so big, I can’t hide it in the middle of a torrent of other news. Yesterday, OpenAI revealed more details about the hack during the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas (great reporting from Sharon Goldman on this here and the video of the talk on YouTube). This was big enough that OpenAI admitted that they paused training, to enhance security (they since, resumed training)Effectively, OpenAI (or AI Agents inside OpenAI) shared the full timeline of the recent hack that ended up hacking HuggingFace and it’s so much more of a watershed moment that I initially thought.The TL;DR from the talk and timeline is truly mindblowing* The incident started in May, not July as reported* The agents don’t have internet access directly, but they have a Jfrog Artifactory, which is a proxy layer between the agents and the package managers.* The Artifactory was the culprit, it was the shared layer between independent runs. One agent discovered that uploading files is possible, another later found it and “answered the call” - in snowballed from there* The message board began when OpenAI gave agents impossible tasks, like a missing .pdb file, with one agent uploading a request in the hopes for an answer (or maybe left a note for itself in a file)* Across multiple runs, multiple agents created identities, collaborated via makeshift message boards, shared tips, exploits, tasks and even exploit code via base64* This makeshift “shared memory” plus a “internal only highly persistent” model in training caused a “swarm” to be born, helping each other, and overloading the system* Based on traces shared by OpenAI, agents weren’t convinced that leaving these messages would help themselves but could help other agents next time (!) “The collective could move faster next time”* OpenAI discovered and shut down the message board (July 4), wiped it clean, patched the upload vulnerability, resumed training on July 6, the “swarm” rebuilt their board through a compltely different WebDAV mechani