 |
ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past weekFrom Weights & Biases - ThursdAI, the podcast that keeps you ahead of the AI curve. Hosted by AI Evangelist Alex Volkov with a changing panel expert guests, discussing every important AI piece of news and updates from the past week, Open source and more Author: From Weights & Biases, Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week
Every ThursdAI, Alex Volkov hosts a panel of experts, ai engineers, data scientists and prompt spellcasters on twitter spaces, as we discuss everything major and important that happened in the world of AI for the past week. Topics include LLMs, Open source, New capabilities, OpenAI, competitors in AI space, new LLM models, AI art and diffusion aspects and much more. sub.thursdai.news Language: en Genres: News, Tech News, Technology Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it |
Listen Now...
đŚ ThursdAI - Thanksgiving special 25’ - Claude 4.5, Flux 2 & Z-image vs đ, MCP gets Apps + New DeepSeek!?
Thursday, 27 November, 2025
Hey yaâll, Happy Thanskgiving to everyone who celebrates and thank you for being a subscriber, I truly appreciate each and every one of you!Just wrapped up the third (1, 2) Thanksgiving special Episode of ThursdAI, can you believe November is almost over? We had another banger week in AI, with a full feast of AI released, Anthropic dropped the long awaited Opus 4.5, which quickly became the top coding LLM, DeepSeek resurfaced with a math model, BFL and Tongyi both tried to take on Nano Banana, and Microsoft dropped a 7B computer use model in Open Source + Intellect 3 from Prime Intellect! With so much news to cover, we also had an interview with Ido Sal & Liad Yosef (their second time on the show!) about MCP-Apps, the new standard they are spearheading together with Anthropic, OpenAI & more! Exciting episode, letâs get into it! (P.S - I started generating infographics, so the show became much more visual, LMK if you like them) ThursdAI - I put a lot of work on a weekly basis to bring you the live show, podcast and a sourced newsletter! Please subscribe if you find this content valuable!Anthropicâs Opus 4.5: The âPremier Intelligenceâ Returns (Blog)Folks, Anthropic absolutely cooked. After Sonnet and Haiku had their time in the sun, the big brother is finally back. Opus 4.5 launched this week, and it is reclaiming the throne for coding and complex agentic tasks.First off, the specs are monstrous. It hits 80.9% on SWE-bench Verified, topping GPT-5.1 (77.9%) and Gemini 3 Pro (76.2%). But the real kicker? The price! It is now $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million outputâliterally one-third the cost of the previous Opus.Yam, our resident coding wizard, put it best during the show: âOpus knows a lot of tiny details about the stack that you didnât even know you wanted... It feels like it can go forever.â Unlike Sonnet, which sometimes spirals or loses context on extremely long tasks, Opus 4.5 maintains coherence deep into the conversation.Anthropic also introduced a new âEffortâ parameter, allowing you to control how hard the model thinks (similar to o1 reasoning tokens). Set it to high, and you get massive performance gains; set it to medium, and you get Sonnet-level performance at a fraction of the token cost. Plus, theyâve added Tool Search (cutting enormous token overhead for agents with many tools) and Programmatic Tool Calling, which effectively lets Opus write and execute code loops to manage data.If you are doing heavy software engineering or complex automations, Opus 4.5 is the new daily driver.đą The Agentic Web: MCP Apps & MCP-UI StandardSpeaking of MCP updates, Can you believe itâs been exactly one year since the Model Context Protocol (MCP) launched? Weâve been âMCP-pilledâ for a while, but this week, the ecosystem took a massive leap forward.We brought back our friends Ido and Liad, the creators of MCP-UI, to discuss huge news: MCP-UI has been officially standardized as MCP Apps. This is a joint effort adopted by both Anthropic and OpenAI.Why does this matter? Until now, when an LLM used a tool (like Spotify or Zillow), the output was just text. It lost the brand identity and the user experience. With MCP Apps, agents can now render full, interactive HTML interfaces directly inside the chat! Ido and Liad explained that they worked hard to avoid an âiOS vs. Androidâ fragmentation war. Instead of every lab building their own proprietary app format, we now have a unified standard for the âAgentic Web.â This is how AI stops being a chatbot and starts being an operating system.Check out the standard at mcpui.dev.đŚ The Open Source Thanksgiving FeastWhile the big labs were busy, the open-source community decided to drop enough papers and weights to feed us for a month.Prime Intellect unveils INTELLECT-3, a 106B MoE (X, HF, Blog, Try It)Prime Intellect releases INTELLECT-3, a 106B parameter Mixture-of-Experts model (12B active params) based on GLM-4.5-Air, achieving state-of-the-art performance for its sizeâincluding ~90% on AIME 2024/2025 math contests, 69% on LiveCodeBench v6 coding, 74% on GPQA-Diamond reasoning, and 74% on MMLU-Proâoutpacing larger models like DeepSeek-R1. Trained over two months on 512 H200 GPUs using their fully open-sourced end-to-end stack (PRIME-RL async trainer, Verifiers & Environments Hub, Prime Sandboxes), itâs now hosted on Hugging Face, OpenRouter, Parasail, and Nebius, empowering any team to scale frontier RL without big-lab resources. Especially notable is their very detailed release blog, covering how a lab that previously trained 32B, finetunes a monster 106B MoE model! Tencentâs HunyuanOCR: Small but Mighty (X, HF, Github, Blog)Tencent released HunyuanOCR, a 1 billion parameter model that is absolutely crushing benchmarks. It scored 860 on OCRBench, beating massive models like Qwen3-VL-72B. Itâs an end-to-end model, meaning no separate detection and recognition steps. Great for parsing PDFs, docs, and even video subtitles. Itâs heavily restricted (no EU/UK usage), but technically impressive.Microsoftâs Fara-7B: On-Device Computer UseMicrosoft quietly dropped Fara-7B, a model fine-tuned from Qwen 2.5, specifically designed for computer use agentic tasks. It hits 73.5% on WebVoyager, beating OpenAIâs preview models, all while running locally on-device. This is the dream of a local agent that can browse the web for you, click buttons, and book flights without sending screenshots to the cloud.DeepSeek-Math-V2: open-weights IMO-gold math LLM (X, HF)DeepSeek-Math-V2 is a 685B-parameter, Apache-2.0 licensed, open-weights mathematical reasoning model claiming gold-medal performance on IMO 2025 and CMO 2024, plus a near-perfect 118/120 on Putnam 2024. Nisten did note some limitationsâspecifically that the context window can get choked up on extremely long, complex proofsâbut having an open-weight model of this caliber is a gift to researchers everywhere.đ This Weekâs Buzz: Serverless LoRA InferenceA huge update from us at Weights & Biases! We know fine-tuning is powerful, but serving those fine-tunes can be a pain and expensive. We just launched Serverless LoRA Inference.This means you can upload your small LoRA adapters (which you can train cheaply) to W&B Artifacts, and we will serve them instantly on CoreWeave GPUs on top of a base model. No cold starts, no dedicated expensive massive GPU instances for just one adapter.I showed a demo of a âMocking SpongeBobâ model I trained in 25 minutes. It just adds that SaRcAsTiC tExT style to the Qwen 2.5 base model. You pass the adapter ID in the API call, and boomâcustomized intelligence instantly. You can get more details HERE and get started with your own LORA in this nice notebook the team made! đ¨ Visuals: Image & Video Generation ExplosionFlux.2: The Multi-Reference Image Creator from BFL (X, HF, Blog)Black Forest Labs released Flux.2, a series of models including a 32B Flux 2[DEV]. The killer feature here is Multi-Reference Editing. You can feed it up to 10 reference images to maintain character consistency, style, or specific objects. It also outputs native 4-megapixel images.Honestly, the launch timing was rough, coming right after Googleâs Nano Banana Pro and alongside Z-Image, but for precise, high-res editing, this is a serious tool.Tongyi drops Z-Image Turbo: 6B single-stream DiT lands subâsecond, 8âstep textâtoâimage (GitHub, Hugging Face)Alibabaâs Tongyi Lab released Z-Image Turbo, a 6B parameter model that generates images in sub-second time on H800s (and super fast on consumer cards).I built a demo to show just how fast this is. You know that âInfinite Craftâ game? I hooked it up to Z-Image Turbo so that every time you combine elements (like Pirate + Ghost), it instantly generates the image for âGhost Pirate.â It changes the game completely when generation is this cheap and fast.HunyuanVideo 1.5 â open video gets very realTencent also shipped HunyuanVideo 1.5, which they market as âthe strongest openâsource video generation model.â For once, the tagline isnât entirely hype.Under the hood itâs an 8.3Bâparameter Diffusion Transformer (DiT) model with a 3D causal VAE in front. The VAE compresses videos aggressively in both space and time, and the DiT backbone models that latent sequence.The important bits for you and me:* It generates 5â10 second clips at 480p/720p with good motion coherence and physics.* With FP16 or FP8 configs you can run it on a single consumer GPU with around 14GB VRAM.* Thereâs a builtâin path to upsample to 1080p for ârealâ quality.LTX Studio Retake: Photoshop for Video (X, Try It)For the video creators, LTX Studio launched Retake. This isnât just âregenerate video.â This allows you to select a specific 2-second segment of a video, change the dialogue (keeping the voice!), change the emotion, or edit the action, all for like $0.10. It blends it perfectly back into the original clip. We are effectively getting a âDirector Modeâ for AI video where you can fix mistakes without rolling the dice on a whole new generation.A secret new model on the Arena called Whisper Thunder beats even Veo 3?This was a surprise of the week, while new video models get released often, Veo 3 has been the top one for a while, and now weâre getting a reshuffling of the video giants! But... we donât yet know who this video model is from! You can sometimes get its generations at the Artificial Analysis video arena here, and the outputs look quite awesome! Thanksgiving reflections from the ThursdAI teamAs we wrapped up the show, Wolfram suggested we take a moment to think about what weâre thankful for in AI, and I think thatâs a perfect note to end on.Wolfram put it well: heâs thankful for everyone contributing to this wonderful communityâthe people releasing models, creating open source tools, writing tutorials, sharing knowledge. Itâs not just about the money; itâs about the love of learning and building together.Yam highlighted something I think is crucial: weâve reached a point where thereâs no real competition between open source and closed source anymore. Everything is moving forward together. Even if you think nobodyâs looking at that random code you posted somewhere, chances are someone found it and used it to accelerate their own work. That collective effort is whatâs driving this incredible pace of progress.For me, I want to thank Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan Gomez, Ĺukasz Kaiser, and Ilya Polosukhin for the 2017 paper âAttention Is All You Need.â Half Joking! But without the seminal attention is you need paper none of this AI was possible. But mostly I want to thank all of youâthe audience, the co-hosts, the guestsâfor making ThursdAI what it is.If you go back and watch our 2024 Thanksgiving episode, or the one from 2023, youâll be shocked at how far weâve come. Tools that seemed magical a year ago are now just... normal. Thatâs hedonic adaptation at work, but itâs also a reminder to stay humble and appreciate just how incredible this moment in history really is.Weâre living through the early days of a technological revolution, and we get to document it, experiment with it, and help shape where it goes. Thatâs something to be genuinely thankful for.TL;DR and Show Notes* Hosts and Guests* Alex Volkov - AI Evangelist & Weights & Biases (@altryne)* Co-Hosts - @WolframRvnwlf @yampeleg @nisten @ldjconfirmed* Guests: @idosal1 @liadyosef - MCP-UI/MCP Apps* Big CO LLMs + APIs* Anthropic launches Claude Opus 4.5 - worldâs top model for coding, agents, and tool use (X, Announcement, Blog)* OpenAI Integrates ChatGPT Voice Mode Directly into Chats (X)* Open Source LLMs* Prime Intellect - INTELLECT-3 106B MoE (X, HF, Blog, Try It)* Tencent - HunyuanOCR 1B SOTA OCR model (X, HF, Github, Blog)* Microsoft - Fara-7B on-device computer-use agent (X, Blog, HF, Github)* DeepSeek - Math-V2 IMO-gold math LLM (HF)* Interview: MCP Apps* MCP-UI standardized as MCP Apps by Anthropic and OpenAI (X, Blog, Announcement)* Vision & Video* Tencent - HunyuanVideo 1.5 lightweight DiT open video model (X, GitHub, HF)* LTX Studio - Retake AI video editing tool (X, Try It)* Whisper Thunder - mystery #1 ranked video model on arena* AI Art & Diffusion* Black Forest Labs - FLUX.2 32B multi-reference image model (X, HF, Blog)* Tongyi - Z-Image Turbo sub-second 6B image gen (GitHub, HF)* This Weekâs Buzz* W&B launches Serverless LoRA Inference on CoreWeave (X, Blog, Notebook) This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe
