Our 234th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 01/02/2026

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In this episode:

Major model launches include Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 with a 1M-token context window and “agent teams,” OpenAI’s GPT-5.3 Codex and faster Codex Spark via Cerebras, and Google’s Gemini 3 Deep Think posting big jumps on ARC-AGI-2 and other STEM benchmarks amid criticism about missing safety documentation.
Generative media advances feature ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 text-to-video with high realism and broad prompting inputs, new image models Seedream 5.0 and Alibaba’s Qwen Image 2.0, plus xAI’s Grok Imagine API for text/image-to-video.
Open and competitive releases expand with Zhipu’s GLM-5, DeepSeek’s 1M-token context model, Cursor Composer 1.5, and open-weight Qwen3 Coder Next using hybrid attention aimed at efficient local/agentic coding.
Business updates include ElevenLabs raising $500M at an $11B valuation, Runway raising $315M at a $5.3B valuation, humanoid robotics firm Apptronik raising $935M at a $5.3B valuation, Waymo announcing readiness for high-volume production of its 6th-gen hardware, plus industry drama around Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad and departures from xAI.

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Timestamps:

Apptronik's Humanoid Funding Surge

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