LWiAI Podcast #238 - GPT 5.4 mini, OpenAI Pivot, Mamba 3, Attention Residuals

Note from Andrey: this ep came out a week ago on RSS, but I was delayed posting it to youtube and therefore also Substack. My bad!

Our 238th episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 03/18/2026

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

In this episode:

• OpenAI released GPT-5.4 mini and nano with 400k-token context windows, higher per-token prices but claimed token-efficiency gains in Codex; nano is API-only and pitched for high-volume classification/data extraction despite a major price increase.

• Mistral open-sourced the Small 4 model family (MoE, 119B total/6B active) combining reasoning, multimodal, and coding-agent capabilities, and announced Forge to help businesses train or post-train custom models.

• Agent “operating system” competition intensified with Meta’s acquired Manus launching a local Mac agent, Nvidia announcing NeMo/“Open Shell” sandboxed agent runtime, and Nvidia also unveiling DLSS 5 plus major hardware forecasts including Groq LPU integration.

• Business and safety updates included OpenAI shifting focus toward productivity/enterprise amid competition, Microsoft reorganizing Copilot and frontier-model efforts, Meta delaying its next model, China-linked ByteDance deploying large Nvidia clusters abroad, and new safety work on steganography, chain-of-thought faithfulness, fine-tuning defenses, cyber-attack evals, and constitution/spec compliance.

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Timestamps:

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter

(00:01:56) News Preview

Tools & Apps

(00:02:39) OpenAI ships GPT-5.4 mini and nano, faster and more capable but up to 4x pricier

(00:08:04) Mistral’s new Small 4 model punches above its weight with 128 expert modules

(00:14:03) Meta’s Manus launches ‘My Computer’ to turn your Mac into an AI agent - 9to5Mac

(00:17:57) NVIDIA Announces NemoClaw for the OpenClaw Community | NVIDIA Newsroom + Nvidia boosts knowledge work with Open Agent Development Platform

(00:24:09) DLSS 5 looks like a real-time generative AI filter for video games | The Verge

(00:26:36) OpenAI to Launch ChatGPT ‘Adult Mode’ Despite Warnings From Its Own Advisers - CNET

Applications & Business

(00:33:46) OpenAI Reportedly Pivoting to a Focus on Business and Productivity Only

(00:41:25) Nvidia GTC 2026: CEO Jensen Huang sees $1 trillion in orders for Blackwell and Vera Rubin through ’27

(00:45:44) Mistral launches Forge to help enterprises build their own AI models

(00:54:17) China’s ByteDance gets access to top Nvidia AI chips, WSJ reports

(00:57:57) Meta Delays Rollout of New A.I. Model After Performance Concerns

(01:02:50) Microsoft Shakes Up AI Division As Copilot Falls Behind Google and OpenAI

Policy & Safety

(01:07:26) A Decision-Theoretic Formalisation of Steganography With Applications to LLM Monitoring

(01:13:09) Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought

(01:18:29) In-Training Defenses against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models

(01:23:07) How do frontier AI agents perform in multi-step cyber-attack scenarios?

(01:25:20) Eval awareness in Claude Opus 4.6’s BrowseComp performance

(01:29:49) Introducing Bloom: an open source tool for automated behavioral evaluations

(01:32:26) How well do models follow their constitutions?

(01:37:11) Nvidia’s H200 License Stirs Security Concern Among Top Democrats

Research & Advancements

(01:40:050) [2603.15031] Attention Residuals

(01:47:11) Mamba-3: Improved Sequence Modeling using State Space Principles