Last Week in AI Last Week in AI

#235 - Sonnet 4.6, Deep-thinking tokens, Anthropic vs Pentagon

Mar 3, 2026

Summary

This episode covers major model releases, including Anthropic’s Sonnet 4.6, Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro, and xAI’s Grok 4.2, highlighting significant jumps in ARC-AGI benchmark performance. The hosts discuss Meta’s $100 billion chip deal with AMD, funding for AI hardware startup Metax, and delays in OpenAI’s Stargate data center project. Additional topics include China’s chip production goals, new research on adaptive optimizers, and product updates from Perplexity and Anthropic.

Topics discussed

Sponsors: Box, OutShift, and Mirror Facial Bar Intro: Apologies for the missed week and hiring update Anthropic Sonnet 4.6 and RKGI benchmarking Google Gemini 3.1 Pro release and pricing xAI Grok 4.2, agents, and OpenClaw updates Perplexity Computer and agent capabilities Meta and AMD partnership for AI chips Metax raises $500M for NVIDIA challenger chips Robotics, OpenAI Stargate, and Chinese chip production Research: Masking updates and deep thinking tokens LLM attractor states and model personalities Anthropic's internal geometry and scaling laws Synthetic data, efficiency gains, and persona models Policy: DoD AI usage, Anthropic, and security reports
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