LWiAI Podcast #235: Sonnet 4.6, Deep-Thinking Tokens, and Anthropic vs Pentagon
The 235th episode of Last Week in AI covers Anthropic's Sonnet 4.6 with 1M context and strong ARC-AGI-2 results, Google's Gemini 3.1 Pro, xAI's Grok 4.2 beta, and various tool updates. Business news includes Meta's up-to-$100B AMD chip deal, MatX raising $500M, World Labs $1B, and Simile $100M. Research highlights deep-thinking tokens, masking updates, and LLM attractor states. Policy discussions focus on Anthropic's stance on Pentagon contracts and distillation attacks.
Our 235th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!
Recorded on 02/27/2026. Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris
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In this episode:
Model and tool updates highlight Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6 (1M context; strong ARC-AGI-2 results), Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro (major ARC-AGI-2 jump and multimodal demos), xAI’s Grok 4.2 beta (multi-agent debate), plus Anthropic’s Claude Code “Remote Control” and Perplexity’s multi-agent “Computer” coordinator.
Compute and business moves include Meta’s reported up-to-$100B AMD chip deal with warrant/equity incentives, MatX raising $500M to build specialized transformer chips shipping in 2027, World Labs raising $1B for world-model/3D environment tech, and a new startup raising $100M to simulate/predict human behavior.
Infrastructure and geopolitics cover Stargate data-center delays amid OpenAI/Oracle/SoftBank control disputes and cash concerns, and China’s plan to scale 7nm/5nm wafer output despite yield and tooling constraints.
Research and safety/policy discuss optimizer gains from masked updates, “deep thinking tokens” as a reasoning-effort signal, LLM attractor-state behaviors in bot-to-bot chats, mechanistic interpretability of counting/line-wrapping, methods to map task difficulty to human time horizons, plus Anthropic–Pentagon contract tensions, Anthropic’s report on distillation attacks (DeepSeek/Moonshot/Minimax), and OpenAI’s report on disrupting malicious use.
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Timestamps:
(00:00:10) Intro / Banter
(00:01:52) News Preview
Tools & Apps
(00:03:20) Anthropic releases Sonnet 4.6 | TechCrunch
(00:11:24) Google Rolls Out Latest AI Model, Gemini 3.1 Pro - CNET
(00:14:54) Elon Musk says Grok 4.20 public beta is now available: Capabilities of AI chatbot offered by xAI - The Times of India
(00:18:06) Anthropic just released a mobile version of Claude Code called Remote Control | VentureBeat
(00:21:01) Perplexity announces “Computer,” an AI agent that assigns work to other AI agents - Ars Technica
Applications & Business
(00:23:40) Meta strikes up to $100B AMD chip deal as it chases ‘personal superintelligence’ | TechCrunch
(00:27:05) Nvidia challenger AI chip startup MatX raised $500M | TechCrunch
(00:31:00) World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk, to bring world models into 3D workflows | TechCrunch
(00:33:07) Simile Raises $100 Million for AI Aiming to Predict Human Behavior
(00:33:52) Stargate AI data centers for OpenAI reportedly delayed by squabbles between partners — sources say OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank disagreed on who would have ultimate control of the planned data centers
(00:36:43) China to increase leading-edge chip output by 5x in two years, report claims — aims to lift 7nm and 5nm production to 100,000 wafers per month, targeting half a million monthly by 2030
Research & Advancements
(00:40:33) On Surprising Effectiveness of Masking Updates in Adaptive Optimizers
(00:48:03) Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens
(00:54:52) models have some pretty funny attractor states
(01:01:41) When Models Manipulate Manifolds: The Geometry of a Counting Task
(01:05:16) BRIDGE: Predicting Human Task Completion Time From Model Performance
(01:12:00) NESSiE: The Necessary Safety Benchmark -- Identifying Errors that should not Exist
(01:13:15) The least understood driver of AI progress
(01:21:45) The Persona Selection Model: Why AI Assistants might Behave like Humans
Policy & Safety
(01:25:04) Anthropic CEO Amodei says Pentagon’s threats ‘do not change our position’ on AI
(01:33:04) Musk’s xAI, Pentagon reach deal to use Grok in classified systems
(01:34:17) Detecting and preventing distillation attacks
(01:38:36) OpenAI details expanding efforts to disrupt malicious use of AI in new report - SiliconANGLE