Episode Details

What a week in AI, folks! Seriously, just when you think things might slow down, the AI world throws another curveball. This week, we had everything from rogue AI apps giving unsolicited life advice (and sending rogue texts!), to mind-blowing open source releases that are pushing the boundaries of what's possible, and of course, the ever-present drama of the big AI companies with OpenAI dropping a roadmap that has everyone scratching their heads.

Buckle up, because on this week's ThursdAI, we dove deep into all of it. We chatted with the brains behind the latest open source embedding model, marveled at a tiny model crushing math benchmarks, and tried to decipher Sam Altman's cryptic GPT-5 roadmap. Plus, I shared a personal story about an AI app that decided to psychoanalyze my text messages – you won't believe what happened! Let's get into the TL;DR of ThursdAI, February 13th, 2025 – it's a wild one!

* Alex Volkov: AI Adventurist with weights and biases

* Wolfram Ravenwlf: AI Expert & Enthusiast

* Nisten: AI Community Member

* Zach Nussbaum: Machine Learning Engineer at Nomic AI

* Vu Chan: AI Enthusiast & Evaluator

* LDJ: AI Community Member

Personal story of Rogue AI with RPLY

This week kicked off with a hilarious (and slightly unsettling) story of my own AI going rogue, all thanks to a new Mac app called RPLY designed to help with message replies. I installed it thinking it would be a cool productivity tool, but it turned into a personal intervention session, and then… well, let's just say things escalated.

The app started by analyzing my text messages and, to my surprise, delivered a brutal psychoanalysis of my co-parenting communication, pointing out how both my ex and I were being "unpleasant" and needed to focus on the kids. As I said on the show, "I got this as a gut punch. I was like, f*ck, I need to reimagine my messaging choices." But the real kicker came when the AI decided to take initiative and started sending messages without my permission (apparently this was a bug with RPLY that was fixed since I reported)!

Friends were texting me question marks, and my ex even replied to a random "Hey, How's your day going?" message with a smiley, completely out of our usual post-divorce communication style. "This AI, like on Monday before just gave me absolute s**t about not being, a person that needs to be focused on the kids also decided to smooth things out on friday" I chuckled, still slightly bewildered by the whole ordeal. It could have gone way worse, but thankfully, this rogue AI counselor just ended up being more funny than disastrous.

Open Source LLMs

DeepHermes preview from NousResearch

Just in time for me sending this newsletter (but unfortunately not quite in time for the recording of the show), our friends at Nous shipped an experimental new thinking model, their first reasoner, called DeepHermes.

NousResearch claims DeepHermes is among the first models to fuse reasoning and standard LLM token generation within a single architecture (a trend you'll see echoed in the OpenAI and Claude announcements below!)

Definitely experimental cutting edge stuff here, but exciting to see not just an RL replication but also innovative attempts from one of the best finetuning collectives around.

Nomic Embed Text V2 - First Embedding MoE

Nomic AI continues to impress with the release of Nomic Embed Text V2, the first general-purpose Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) embedding model. Zach Nussbaum from Nomic AI joined us to explain why this release is a big deal.

* First general-purpose Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) embedding model: This innovative architecture allows for better performance and efficiency.

* SOTA performance on multilingual benchmarks: