LWiAI Podcast #232 - ChatGPT Ads, Thinking Machines Drama, STEM

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OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions, The Drama at Thinking Machines, STEM: Scaling Transformers with Embedding Modules Jan 28, 2026

Our 232st episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 01/23/2026

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.comand/or hello@gladstone.ai

In this episode:

OpenAI announces testing of ads in ChatGPT and introduces child age prediction to enhance safety features, amidst ongoing ethical debates and funding expansions in AI integration with educational tools and business models.

China’s AI landscape sees significant progress with AI firm Jpu training advanced models on domestic hardware, and strong competitive moves by data centers, highlighting the intense demand in AI manufacturing and infrastructure.

Silicon Valley tensions rise as startup Thinking Machines experiences high-profile departures back to OpenAI, reflecting broader industry struggles and rapid shifts in organizational dynamics.

AI legislation and safety measures advance with the US Senate’s Defiance Act addressing explicit content, and Anthropic updating Claude’s constitution to guide ethical AI interactions, while cultural pushbacks from artists signal ongoing debates in intellectual property and AI-generated content.

Timestamps:

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter

(00:02:08) News Preview

(00:02:26) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps

(00:11:55) OpenAI to test ads in ChatGPT as it burns through billions - Ars Technica

(00:18:05) OpenAI is launching age prediction for ChatGPT accounts

(00:23:37) Google now offers free SAT practice exams, powered by Gemini | TechCrunch

(00:24:57) Baidu’s AI Assistant Reaches Milestone of 200 Million Monthly Active Users - WSJ

Applications & Business

(00:26:53) The Drama at Thinking Machines, a New A.I. Start-Up, Is Riveting Silicon Valley - The New York Times

(00:31:44) Zhipu AI breaks US chip reliance with first major model trained on Huawei stack | South China Morning Post

(00:36:31) Elon Musk’s xAI launches world’s first Gigawatt AI supercluster to rival OpenAI and Anthropic

(00:41:25) Sequoia to invest in Anthropic, breaking VC taboo on backing rivals: FT

(00:45:18) Humans&, a ‘human-centric’ AI startup founded by Anthropic, xAI, Google alums, raised $480M seed round | TechCrunch

Projects & Open Source

(00:48:51) [Black Forest Labs Releases FLUX.2 [klein]: Compact Flow Models for Interactive Visual Intelligence - MarkTechPost](https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/01/16/black-forest-labs-releases-flux-2-klein-compact-flow-models-for-interactive-visual-intelligence/)

(00:50:35) [[2601.10611] Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Grounding](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10611)

(00:52:53) [[2601.10547] HeartMuLa: A Family of Open Sourced Music Foundation Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.10547)

(00:54:46) [[2601.11044] AgencyBench: Benchmarking the Frontiers of Autonomous Agents in 1M-Token Real-World Contexts](https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11044)