#222 - Sora 2, Sonnet 4.5, Vibes, Thinking Machines
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Key Quotes
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🎯 Summary
Podcast Summary: #222 - Sora 2, Sonnet 4.5, Vibes, Thinking Machines
This episode of “Last Week in AI” (hosted by Andrej Karpathy with guest co-host John Crone) provided a deep dive into several major recent announcements from OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside discussions on the emerging concept of “AI slop” and the trajectory toward more agentic AI systems.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus areas were Generative AI Model Releases and Capabilities, specifically:
- Video Generation: OpenAI’s Sora 2 advancements.
- Large Language Models (LLMs): Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Code 2.0 updates, focusing on agentic capabilities and long-context reasoning.
- Product Integration & Ecosystems: New consumer apps (Sora iOS app, Meta Vibes) and proactive assistant features (ChatGPT Pulse).
- Industry Trends: The growing importance of agentic workflows, the debate over “AI slop,” and the accelerating pace of model capability doubling times.
2. Key Technical Insights
- Sora 2 Improvements: The new model produces significantly better photorealistic video quality with improved adherence to real-world physics (e.g., consistent billiard ball behavior). It now also generates audio (speech and sound effects).
- Agentic Performance Leap: Claude Sonnet 4.5 is shown to be a major leap for long-running tasks (tasks taking hours for a human), surpassing the more expensive Opus 4.1 on many benchmarks, positioning it as best-in-class for coding and tool use.
- Accelerating Capability Curve: The discussion highlighted data suggesting that the length of human tasks an LLM can handle with 50% accuracy doubles every seven months, indicating an exponential increase in machine reasoning capability.
3. Business/Investment Angle
- Anthropic’s Enterprise Focus: Anthropic continues to strategically target the enterprise and professional market, emphasizing agentic tools, coding, and long-context reasoning over general consumer engagement.
- Developer Preference in Coding: The release of Claude Code 2.0 and the Claude Agents SDK is seen as a direct competitive move against OpenAI’s Codex, aiming to win back developer mindshare, as tools like Claude Code are already commanding high subscription fees ($200+/month).
- The “Slop” Dichotomy: There is a growing market distinction between low-effort, prompt-to-output AI content (“slop”), which is becoming devalued, and AI used as a sophisticated tool within a human-driven workflow (e.g., complex video editing, coding assistance), which retains high perceived value.
4. Notable Companies/People
- OpenAI: Released Sora 2 and the invite-only Sora iOS app featuring “Cameos.” Also launched ChatGPT Pulse, a personalized morning brief feature.
- Anthropic: Released Claude Sonnet 4.5 (outperforming Opus 4.1 on many metrics) and Claude Code 2.0, rebranding its development tools to the Claude Agents SDK.
- Meta: Launched Vibes, a feature in the Meta AI app for sharing AI-generated videos, which received a largely negative public reception compared to Sora.
- Andrej Karpathy & John Crone: Hosts/co-hosts discussing the news. John Crone noted the significant impact of agentic tools on his company’s workflow.
5. Future Implications
The industry is rapidly moving toward proactive, agentic AI that handles complex, multi-step tasks over long timeframes, rather than just reactive conversational chat. Video generation is approaching photorealism, blurring the lines of what is human-created. Furthermore, companies are increasingly willing to push technological boundaries (e.g., training data usage for Sora) before legal frameworks catch up, following historical Silicon Valley patterns (like Spotify or Uber).
6. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for AI/ML Professionals, Software Developers, Product Managers, and Technology Investors who need to track the competitive landscape between major foundation model providers (OpenAI vs. Anthropic) and understand the practical implications of new agentic tooling and generative media capabilities.
🏢 Companies Mentioned
Yann LeCun
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Google Pay
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Apple Pay
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Notion
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Perplexity
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GPT-5 thinking
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Microsoft
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Black Forest Labs
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Midjourney
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Sora app
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Microsoft Windows
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Microsoft Office
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In Word
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đź’¬ Key Insights
"SB 53, which we've covered a few times, is now law in California. This is the Transparency in Frontier AI Act, the successor to SB 1047, we've also called quite a bit, a very significant milestone in regulation, especially when it comes to frontier AI."
"if you want an AI employee to be human-like, you need long-term memory, short-term memory, all the stuff that we humans have, and it's still an unresolved problem on how you do that properly."
"The best model architectures have been ones that are hybrid, so they combine linear or an end, so our other recurrent models with sliding video at window attention."
"the complexity of the human task, the length of the human task that an AI model can handle doubling. This is a great example of it, a solid benchmark where 12 months ago this would have been unimaginable, and another 12 months from now, this might be rudimentary for a lot of AI models out there to be able to tackle."
"The models pass on the test, at least. It doesn't mean that they're able to do a job, right? This is like on-paper multiple-choice essays, whatever things that LLMs are good at. And we've seen in practice when you try to use them in the other job, things are more messy, and you can't do it so easily."
"They have a concept here called review ratio, defined as the fraction of review tokens within chain of thought. And actually find that shorter reasoning traces and lower review ratios are associated with higher accuracy."
đź“Š Topics
#artificialintelligence
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#generativeai
90
#aiinfrastructure
15
#startup
7
#investment
6