📆 ThursdAI - highest signal weekly AI news show - recorded LIVE

Quick Overview

The "ThursdAI" episode for September 4th highlighted significant advancements in AI, including the release of News Research's Hermes 4 models and Husky Holdem benchmark, Tencent's Hunan MT translation model, and the Upperus multilingual LLM from Switzerland, alongside major corporate news like Anthropic's $13 billion funding and OpenAI's reported $10 billion share sale.

Key Points: News Research released Hermes 4, featuring 4.5B and 7B models fine-tuned on Llama 3.1 and a 14B model fine-tuned on Qwen 3, aiming for neutral alignment and showing strong performance on EQBench and their new Husky Holdem poker bot evaluation benchmark. The Upperus 8B and 70B models from Switzerland were open-sourced, trained on 15 trillion tokens across 1,800 languages with an Apache 2.0 license, representing a significant European contribution to open-source multilingual AI. Tencent open-sourced Hunan MT, a 7B machine translation model that won WMT 2025 awards, showcasing competitive performance against larger models and highlighting its utility for data work and specific translation tasks. Major AI companies saw significant financial activity: Anthropic raised $13 billion in Series F funding at a $183 billion post-money valuation, while OpenAI reportedly secured a $10 billion funding round through a sale of employee shares, valuing the company at $500 billion. OpenAI also released GPT real-time with new API features including remote MCP tool support and image input, and acquired the companies Statsig and Alex (an AI coding agent for Xcode), bolstering its developer tools and AI capabilities. Apple released Fast VLM 7B, a vision-language model emphasizing speed with 85x faster time to first token compared to peers, generating significant buzz on Hugging Face. The episode featured discussions on the rapid development of coding agents, with Grok Fast Code (formerly Sonic) becoming a top performer on OpenRouter, and Codex seeing a 10x increase in usage following recent improvements.