LWiAI Podcast #243 - GPT 5.5, DeepSeek V4, AI safety sabotage

Our 243rd episode with a summary and discussion of last week’s big AI news!

Recorded on 04/29/2026

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-5.5 with strong coding-oriented improvements, a system card discussing chain-of-thought monitorability and misalignment testing, higher pricing than GPT-5.4, and notable quirks like a system-prompt warning about “goblins.”

xAI launched Grok Voice Think Fast 1.0, claiming large benchmark leads for real-time voice agents and reporting major Starlink customer-support automation and sales conversion impact.

DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek V4 (Pro and Flash) featuring MoE scaling and 1M-token context via hybrid/compressed attention changes, while Tencent released Hunyuan 3 preview with weaker benchmark performance; a new long-horizon agent benchmark (Clawmark) shows low task success rates.

Major business, legal, and policy updates include Google’s planned up-to-$40B investment and 5GW compute commitment to Anthropic, Meta’s AWS Gravitron deal and China blocking Meta’s Manus acquisition, a revamped OpenAI–Microsoft agreement, ongoing Musk–OpenAI trial developments, and new safety/security research on sabotage, document degradation under delegation, and bit-flip attacks.

Timestamps:

(00:00:10) Intro / Banter

(00:02:00) News Preview

(00:02:26) Response to listener comments

Tools & Apps

(00:02:55) OpenAI Unveils Its New, More Powerful GPT-5.5 Model - The New York Times

(00:20:33) xAI Launches grok-voice-think-fast-1.0: Topping τ-voice Bench at 67.3%, Outperforming Gemini, GPT Realtime, and More - MarkTechPost

(00:26:00) Claude can now plug directly into Photoshop, Blender, and Ableton | The Verge

Projects & Open Source

(00:26:38) China’s DeepSeek releases preview of long-awaited V4 model as AI race intensifies

(00:44:05) Tencent Unveils Hy3 preview; Model Enhances Agent Capabilities and Real-World Usability - Tencent 腾讯

(00:47:14) ClawMark: A Living-World Benchmark for Multi-Turn, Multi-Day, Multimodal Coworker Agents

Applications & Business

(00:50:03) Google Plans to Invest Up to $40 Billion in Anthropic

(00:53:26) Meta will use hundreds of thousands of AWS Graviton chips

(00:56:51) China blocks Meta’s $2 billion takeover of AI startup Manus

(00:58:45) OpenAI shakes up partnership with Microsoft, capping revenue share payments

(01:04:13) Elon Musk Testifies of AI Risk at Trial, Says OpenAI Tried to ‘Steal’ a Charity - WSJ

(01:08:50) Judge rejects DOJ bid to delay Anthropic appeal in Pentagon dispute

(01:11:42) Google’s Gemini can now run on a single air-gapped server — and vanish when you pull the plug

(01:16:07) DeepMind’s David Silver just raised $1.1B to build an AI that learns without human data | TechCrunch

Policy & Safety

(01:19:47) Evaluating whether AI models would sabotage AI safety research

(01:26:59) LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate

(01:29:50) Temporal Sparse Autoencoders: Leveraging the Sequential Nature of Language for Interpretability

(01:36:53) Memorandum on Adversarial Distillation of American AI Models

(01:38:41) Teen boys are dating their AI chatbots—and experts warn it could kill their careers | Fortune

(01:40:57) Announcing the Anthropic Economic Index Survey

(01:42:21) Scoop: CISA lacks access to Anthropic’s Mythos

Synthetic Media & Art

(01:45:03) Taylor Swift Files to Trademark Voice and Likeness to Protect Against AI Misuse

Research & Advancements

(01:46:15) Maximal Brain Damage Without Data or Optimization: Disrupting Neural Networks via Sign-Bit Flips