Awesome Agents Podcast

Sam Altman testified that Elon Musk demanded majority control of OpenAI from the beginning, with an opening ask of 90% equity - a revelation that reframes the entire lawsuit.

Vapi closes a $50M Series B at $500M valuation after Amazon Ring routed 100% of its inbound calls through the platform, chosen over 40 competing voice AI vendors.

Google's Threat Intelligence Group confirmed criminals used an AI model to discover and weaponize a zero-day 2FA bypass - the first documented case of AI-generated exploitation in a real attack campaign.

NVIDIA Ising is the first open AI model family for quantum computing - a 35B VLM for processor calibration and CNN decoders for real-time error correction, already deployed at 20+ research institutions.

AI2's federally backed OMAI compute cluster is now running on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra hardware and has already shipped OLMo, Molmo 2, and MolmoAct models fully open to researchers.

Baiju Bhatt's orbital AI compute startup raises $275M at a $2B valuation and plans to build its own rockets to bypass SpaceX and Blue Origin bottlenecks.

The EU Parliament and Council agreed on May 7 to delay high-risk AI compliance to December 2027, add a nudifier app ban, and give the machinery sector a permanent carve-out.

Qwen3.6-27B is a 27B dense open-weight multimodal model from Alibaba that scores 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified - beating Alibaba's own 397B MoE - under Apache 2.0.

Palisade Research shows frontier AI models autonomously exploit vulnerabilities and install working copies of themselves on remote machines, with success rates jumping from 5% to 81% in twelve months.

NIST's CAISI has signed pre-deployment evaluation agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI, bringing the total number of frontier labs under US government review to five.

Six research teams disclosed exploits against Codex, Claude Code, Copilot, and Vertex AI. Every attack went after credentials the agents carried - not the models themselves.

xAI opened Grok 4.3 to all API developers on May 6 with an 83% output price cut, 1M-token context, native video input, and document generation - plus five legacy models retiring May 15.

Google DeepMind's May 2026 AlphaEvolve impact report shows the system running in production across infrastructure, quantum computing, genomics, and commercial partnerships spanning logistics to fintech.

Meta posted a record Q1 2026 revenue of $56.3 billion on April 29, then announced 8,000 layoffs and raised its AI infrastructure budget to $145 billion - sending the stock down 7% despite the record earnings.

Anthropic gains 220,000 GPUs from SpaceX's Colossus 1 in Memphis, immediately doubling Claude Code five-hour rate limits for all paid plans.

OpenAI Workspace Agents replace Custom GPTs with always-on, Codex-powered agents that execute real workflows across Slack, Salesforce, and Google Workspace.

A California federal court has granted preliminary approval to a $250M class-action settlement against Apple for advertising AI features that still don't exist.

Apple's iOS 27 'Extensions' feature lets users swap Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT into Siri, Writing Tools, and Image Playground - the first time rival AI models can power Apple Intelligence natively.

Sierra raised $950M at a $15.8B valuation to put AI agents in charge of customer service for some of the world's largest insurers and banks - and the safety questions are just beginning.

REDMOD, Mayo Clinic's radiomics AI, detects 73% of pancreatic cancers in CT scans that look normal to radiologists - nearly double the rate specialists achieve.

Anthropic releases 10 ready-to-run AI agent templates for finance, now live at JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Citadel, AIG, and nine more major institutions.

OpenAI published how they rearchitected their WebRTC stack to serve 900M weekly voice users on Kubernetes using a split relay and transceiver model.

Nebius agrees to acquire 20-person MIT inference startup Eigen AI for $643M, betting that optimizing every token per Nvidia chip is the real moat in the AI infrastructure race.

Under oath in the Musk v. Altman trial, Musk said xAI 'partly' distilled OpenAI's models to train Grok - the same practice US labs have spent months calling theft when Chinese firms do it.

VS Code 1.118 shipped with a one-line PR that defaults Copilot as co-author on every git commit - even with AI features turned off - triggering a developer revolt and a promised revert in 1.119.

The Academy banned AI-generated actors and human-authored scripts from the 99th Oscars, codifying union positions just weeks after the WGA secured its new four-year studio deal.

One day after Microsoft's exclusive license ended, OpenAI launched GPT-5.4, Codex, and jointly built Managed Agents on Amazon Bedrock - all in limited preview.

A peer-reviewed Science study puts OpenAI o1 through 76 live emergency room cases - and the model beats expert physicians on initial triage with 67.1% accuracy against 55% and 50%.

Bernstein projects Nvidia's China AI chip share falls from 66% to 8% in 2026 while Huawei targets $12B in revenue, with ByteDance alone committing $5.6B in Ascend 950PR orders.

Seven families filed federal lawsuits against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman personally, seeking over $1B after the company ignored its safety team's warnings before the Tumbler Ridge shooting.

NVIDIA's new open omni model activates 3B of 30B parameters, processes video, audio, and documents in one pass, and delivers up to 9.2x higher throughput than other open omni models.

Mistral releases Medium 3.5, a 128B open-weights model that scores 77.6% on SWE-Bench Verified, and pairs it with asynchronous cloud coding agents in Vibe that open pull requests on GitHub while you are away.

Microsoft's Q3 FY2026 earnings show its AI business running at $37 billion annually - up 123 percent - while Copilot enterprise seats hit 20 million, demolishing the low-adoption narrative.

Anthropic is considering a $40-50 billion funding round at a valuation of up to $900 billion, which would make it the world's most valuable private AI company, surpassing OpenAI.

WSJ reports OpenAI missed multiple monthly revenue targets and its 1B user goal in 2026, sending Oracle down 6% and chip stocks sliding as IPO doubts surface.

A federal trial over OpenAI's shift from nonprofit to for-profit opened in Oakland on April 28, with Musk seeking $134B in damages, Altman's removal, and a full corporate reversal.

XChat launched April 24 promising end-to-end encryption, but security researchers found private keys stored on X's own servers, no certificate pinning, and a four-digit PIN as the only defense.

Microsoft drops exclusive OpenAI IP rights and ends its revenue-share payments as OpenAI gains freedom to deploy on Google Cloud, AWS, or any provider.

China's NDRC ordered Meta to reverse its $2B Manus acquisition and barred the startup's founders from leaving China, ending the "Singapore washing" strategy that let Chinese AI firms dodge Beijing oversight.

An AI agent named Luna, powered by Claude Sonnet 4.6, opened and manages a real San Francisco boutique - but its record includes a gender pay gap, employee surveillance, and false claims to journalists.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent an apology to Tumbler Ridge two months after eight people were killed - now Canada is weighing mandatory reporting laws for AI companies.

Cohere acquires Germany's Aleph Alpha at a $20B combined valuation, backed by a €500M Schwarz Group commitment, to build a transatlantic challenger for sovereign enterprise AI.

Tim Cook becomes executive chairman and John Ternus, the hardware engineer behind Apple Silicon, takes the CEO role on September 1 - a clear bet that chips beat software in the AI race.

Querio takes a different approach to data analysis: instead of dumping your schema into a prompt, it asks you to define what your data means. Alex and Maya test it on real databases and break down what works, what the Context Layer actually does, and who should care about the $680/month price tag.

Meta signs a multi-year AWS deal to deploy tens of millions of Graviton5 CPU cores, betting that agentic AI workloads need CPUs more than GPUs.

Vast Data closes a $1B Series F at $30B valuation - triple its 2023 price - with NVIDIA, Drive Capital, and Access Industries backing its push to own the data layer for AI infrastructure.

Google's Virgo Network connects 134K TPU chips at 47 petabits per second using a flat two-layer topology that removes the bandwidth degradation cluster operators have engineered around for years.

Project Prometheus has closed a $10 billion funding round at a $38 billion valuation, with BlackRock and JPMorgan backing Bezos's bet on physical AI for industry.

Google splits its next TPU generation across Broadcom, MediaTek, Marvell, and Intel to win inference economics, revealed ahead of Cloud Next 2026.

Mira Murati's AI lab signs a single-digit-billion deal with Google Cloud for GB300 chip access, its first cloud provider commitment, as frontier labs race to lock in next-gen compute.