ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week cover art

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

By: From Weights & Biases Join AI Evangelist Alex Volkov and a panel of experts to cover everything important that happened in the world of AI from the past week
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Summary

 Every ThursdAI, Alex Volkov hosts a panel of experts, ai engineers, data scientists and prompt spellcasters on twitter spaces, as we discuss everything major and important that happened in the world of AI for the past week. Topics include LLMs, Open source, New capabilities, OpenAI, competitors in AI space, new LLM models, AI art and diffusion aspects and much more.

sub.thursdai.newsAlex Volkov Politics & Government
Episodes
  • ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over

    ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over
    May 15 2026
    Hey everyone, Alex here 👋I am back live on ThursdAI after a week off, and yes, I am now a married man! Thank you for all the congrats, and also thank you to Ryan and Yam for holding down the fort last week while I tried very hard to disconnect.This week was a relatively chill one in AI land (no, really, for once), which actually let us go deep on some really fascinating stuff. We’ve got Thinking Machines Lab finally shipping their first real research with these wild interaction models, Meta Muse Spark showing up in actual products (and it’s surprisingly good!), the Musk v. Altman trial dropping juicy disclosures, and probably the biggest narrative shift on the show today: all of us are quitting OpenClaw. Yeah, you read that right. We’ll get into why.Also! and this is breaking news from this morning, CoreWeave just launched Sandboxes for your agents. I’ll cover that in This Week’s Buzz, but if you’ve been waiting for production-grade sandbox infrastructure that powers 9 out of 10 major AI labs, today’s your day.Oh, and we had Vic Perez from Krea on to talk about Krea 2, their first foundation image model trained completely from scratch. Let’s dig in.ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Great OpenClaw Exodus towards Hermes 🫠I’m going to start with what was honestly the most emotional thread of the entire show, because three of us, me, Ryan, AND Wolfram; all independently switched away from OpenClaw this week. And we kicked off the show literally processing this together on air.The story is the same across all of us. OpenClaw was magical back in February when we first brought it to you. Things just worked. But after Anthropic’s pricing changes (we covered this — they made Max-tier subscription usage of Opus through OpenClaw significantly more expensive), and after months of the constant Lego-construction-style breakage on every update, the magic faded. Ryan said it best on the show; he was “constantly fixing OpenClaw” instead of using it.So Ryan went to Codex. Wolfram and I both went to Hermes from Nous Research. And folks, things just work again. That February feeling is back, and with GPT 5.5, it’s an incredible assistant!Why Hermes? A few things:* It’s now the #1 most-used CLI agent on OpenRouter globally, passing OpenClaw and even passing Claude Code on OpenRouter usage. That’s a massive milestone for Nous Research and shows we’re not alone in this migration.* It has /goal (more on this in a sec), steering, and background computer use via the TryCUA integration.* It’s open! which means if you’ve built a system like Wolfram’s “Amy” or my “Wooolfred” or Ryan’s “R2” (yes, we know each other’s assistants’ names better than each other’s kids’ names at this point 😅), you can port your memories, profile, and soul files seamlessly.The migration was so smooth that Wolfram literally had Codex talk to Hermes to plan and execute the migration of his home assistant agent. Two agents collaborating to migrate themselves. We are living in 2026 and it’s easier than ever to switch. If you haven’t tried Hermes, give it a go! Steering is maybe the most underrated addition to Hermes, it’s a Codex feature, but exists in Hermes, with GPT 5.5 you can send a follow-up message, and the agent will see it after the next tool call, not after the whole chain of thought was completed (like OpenClaw defaults to) - this changes the conversation to be much more natural! Agents buying wedding gifts using Stripe wallet! Real quick story: Two weeks ago we covered Stripe’s new wallet APIs that let your agents have actual budgets to spend money on the web. I told my agent (back when it was still OpenClaw) to “go buy us a wedding present, don’t tell me what it is.” It half-worked, half-broke. This week, a giant custom map of our travels that just arrived in the mail. I approved one Stripe push notification and the rest just happened. It’s been paying my traffic tickets via screenshots. I’ve also had Hermes pay traffic tickets for me (HOV lane ones, not like.. DUI, 80% of my drive is Tesla FSD)So so happy that my AI assistant got us a present of his own choosing! And it arrived in physical form. Not perfect (the date there is our proposal date ha, but it’s still cool!) Codex gets remote control! (X)While me and Wolfram moved to Hermes, Ryan Carson moved to Codex, and during the show, I wondered, how does he communicate with his R2? Well, just a few minutes after we concluded the live show, OpenAI dropped some breaking news! Codex is now on mobile, and it connects to any mac (for now), from any iOS/Android device, and you can control your Codex, your whole Mac with Computer Use, your browser with Chrome extension, and everything else Codex can do... on the go! This is a huge unlock for many folks, and for many, I assume ...
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    1 hr and 43 mins
  • 📅 ThursdAI - May 7 - Interviews with Sunil Pai, Sally Ann Omalley from AI Engineer Europe

    📅 ThursdAI - May 7 - Interviews with Sunil Pai, Sally Ann Omalley from AI Engineer Europe
    May 8 2026

    Hey yall, Alex here (with a scheduled post)

    I’m taking this week off to get married and celebrate life with family, and touch some grass, but wanted to share the awesome chats I had with some great folks at AI Engineer Europe last week.

    BTW - Yam and Ryan took over the live show today, if you didn’t happen to catch that, please check out the live on our youtube channel!

    Ok, now to the actual content. The best thing about the AI Engineer conferences for me is the people I meet. I often have a chance to bring them to the live show (in fact, the live show we recorded there had the most guests yet on an episode! 4 guests including Swyx, Omar Sanseviero, VB from OpenAI and Peter Gostev)

    But often times I also have an offline chat. I find these conversation to be less about the weeks news, and more about the state of AI Engineering, and the guests themselves. Not quite Lex Friedman pod level, but a different vibe from our live shows.

    Sunil Pai - Cloudflare (@threepointone)

    The first conversation in today’s pod is with Sunil Pai, Principle Engineer at Cloudflare. Long time followers of ThursdAI know that I love Cloudflare, they gave me my first big break when I was building Targum (which still runs on Workers), so I had a great time chatting with Sunil!

    This guy has had several lives. React.js core team at Meta (he self-deprecates — "I'm the one nobody talks about, there's a testing API I shipped that pisses people off"). Then did developer tooling and the CLI at Cloudflare the first time. Left to found PartyKit — open-source deployment platform for real-time multiplayer apps and AI agents, built on Cloudflare Durable Objects. Backed by Sequoia. Acquired by Cloudflare in 2024, and he came back as a Principal Systems Engineer (per his bio: "Worked at Cloudflare once, left and created PartyKit, came back wiser"). Also plays guitar (Les Pauls — it's all over his blog). Co-hosts a live show called Dry Run on Cloudflare TV with Craig Dennis.

    Our conversation was a very fun one, ranging from Cloudflare agentic offerings, to how engineers should think about writing/reading code in 2026.

    I had a great time chatting with Sunil and I hope you enjoy getting to know him!

    Sally Ann O'Malley - Redhat

    Then I had the pleasure of chatting with Sally, who’s a Principal Engineer at Redhat and contributor to OpenClaw.

    Sally has one of the more unusual paths in the speaker lineup. Started as a schoolteacher, did a stint at Trader Joe's, then moved to Westford, MA, discovered Red Hat's HQ across the street, and went back to school for a second bachelor's in software engineering at UMass Lowell. Joined Red Hat in 2015, has been there a decade. Worked across OpenShift teams, integrating Kubernetes and Podman into the platform. Recent projects span Image Based Operating Systems, Podman, OpenTelemetry, and Sigstore. Also an instructor at Boston University's Faculty of Computing and Data Sciences and an organizer for DevConf.US. Won the 2025 Paul Cormier Trailblazer Award at Red Hat. Currently a founding contributor on the llm-d project — distributed, scalable, high-performance AI inferencing built on K8s. Heavily involved in Red Hat's InstructLab collaboration with IBM (the small-model distillation system using IBM Granite + Llama).

    Sally and I had a great conversation, two high energy personalities met!

    We geeked out about our OpenClaw agents, securing your Clankers, how it is to maintain OpenClaw, and everything in between!

    She was so stressed about the recording, but dare I say, this was one of the more natural guests I had on the show!

    I hope you enjoyed this format, please let me know if the comments, and I’ll see you next week!

    — Alex



    This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sub.thursdai.news/subscribe
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    53 mins
  • 📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more

    📅 ThursdAI - Apr 30 - DeepSeek V4 (1.6T MoE), Cursor SDK Wins WolfBench, Mayo's REDMOD Saves Lives, Stripe Gives Agents a Wallet & more
    May 1 2026
    Hey everyone, Alex here 👋Tomorrow is May. May! I genuinely cannot believe we’re four months into 2026 already, and the AI news cycle is showing zero signs of slowing down. This week’s show was a wild one! We opened with what is genuinely one of the most important AI stories I’ve ever covered (Mayo Clinic AI detecting pancreatic cancer THREE YEARS before human radiologists), we covered the return of the Chinese whale with DeepSeek V4, OpenAI got caught in their own system prompt begging GPT-5.5 to please stop talking about goblins, and I literally gave my coding agent a credit card and asked it to buy my fiancée a wedding gift with the new Strip Link skill and CLI! Oh yeah, I’m getting married next Tuesday! 💍 So next week’s show will be a little different. I’ll be back the week after to catch you up on whatever drops in my absence (almost certainly something major, knowing this industry).Lots to get through, so let’s dive in. (also, in the end I have a full month recap of every major launch, don’t miss) ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Mayo Clinic’s REDMOD: AI Detects Pancreatic Cancer 3 Years Early 🔥 (X, Blog, Announcement)I know we usually cover Models, Parameter sizes, MoEs and big copmanies. But this is important. This is the use case that justifies the entire AI revolution, the GPU burns, the buildouts. I want humans to WIN, and Cancer to be fixed!Mayo Clinic just published a study in Gut (BMJ) validating an AI model called REDMOD that detects pancreatic cancer on routine CT scans up to three years before clinical diagnosis. The numbers are jaw-dropping: They show 73% sensitivity for catching prediagnostic cancers, compared to 39% for experienced human radiologists (while looking at the same exact CT scans).And maybe the most important bit, at scans taken more than 2 years before diagnosis, the AI catches nearly 3x as many cases as specialistsFor context: pancreatic cancer has less than 15% five-year survival specifically because 85% of patients are diagnosed after the disease has already spread. This is the cancer that took Steve Jobs. Imagine if Jobs had access to this AI three years before his diagnosis. That’s the impact we’re talking about.As Dr. Ajit Goenka from Mayo Clinic put it, the greatest barrier to saving lives from pancreatic cancer has been the inability to see the disease when it’s still curable. This AI can now identify the signature of cancer from a normal-appearing pancreas.Even better: it runs on CT scans people are already getting for other reasons. No extra screening protocol, no new imaging required. Just smarter analysis of existing data. The model also showed remarkably stable performance across institutions, imaging systems, and protocols, with 90-92% test-retest concordance over serial scans.Mayo Clinic is now moving this into prospective clinical testing through a study called AI-PACED (Artificial Intelligence for Pancreatic Cancer Early Detection).When we say “lets f*****g go” that’s what we mean. Yeah getting more intelligence is cool, but I want a world without decease! Let’s F*****g go mayo clinic! Agentic Commerce - Giving OpenClaw my credit card - safely! Stripe Link Wallet and Infrastructure CLI (X, Announcement, Blog, Announcement)Ok, give an LLM your credit card, what can go wrong.. right? Well, it’s clear that this, increasingly, is the future of commerce. Agents will be shopping for us, and we need solutions here. Well, this week at Stripe Sessions (Stripe’s annual product lineup conference) just delivered. Link Wallet, is a new ... API? CLI? Skill? Definitely a skill, for your agents, to connect with your Stripe Link (the thing that stores your credit cards safely) and then giving your agent a budget, it can go and make purchases in your behalf. Now the trick here, is, every purchase, you get a notification to approve, and the agent never sees your actual credit card number! This I think is the biggest win here. To test it out , first, I showed Wolfred the install instructions, which are literally this: Read link.com/skill.md and get me set up with LinkAnd then I asked Wolfred my OpenClaw assistant to buy me a present of its choice for my upcoming wedding, and that I don’t want to know what the present is, but I can approve the spend! OpenClaw installed this, sent me a link to connect to my Link.com account, I also downloaded the Link app to receive notifications (and had to enable them by hand, it was a bit annoying to discover, but they said they will fix the onboarding) and .. voila, my agent can now go spend my money, and I get these approval notifications: The kicker? The present Wolfred sent us is due to arrive like 2 months after the wedding 😂 But hey, it’s still something! My agent went, chose a wedding gift in budget, asked for my approval to puchase, and filled out ...
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    1 hr and 37 mins
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