Episode Details

Hey folks, Alex here.

Can you believe it’s already the middle of October? This week’s show was a special one, not just because of the mind-blowing news, but because we set a new ThursdAI record with four incredible interviews back-to-back!

We had Jessica Gallegos from Google DeepMind walking us through the cinematic new features in VEO 3.1. Then we dove deep into the world of Reinforcement Learning with my new colleague Kyle Corbitt from OpenPipe. We got the scoop on Amp’s wild new ad-supported free tier from CEO Quinn Slack. And just as we were wrapping up, Swyx ( from Latent.Space , now with Cognition!) jumped on to break the news about their blazingly fast SWE-grep models.

But the biggest story? An AI model from Google and Yale made a novel scientific discovery about cancer cells that was then validated in a lab. This is it, folks. This is the “let’s f*****g go” moment we’ve been waiting for. So buckle up, because this week was an absolute monster. Let’s dive in!

ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Open Source: An AI Model Just Made a Real-World Cancer Discovery

We always start with open source, but this week felt different. This week, open source AI stepped out of the benchmarks and into the biology lab.

Our friends at Qwen kicked things off with new 3B and 8B parameter versions of their Qwen3-VL vision model. It’s always great to see powerful models shrink down to sizes that can run on-device. What’s wild is that these small models are outperforming last generation’s giants, like the 72B Qwen2.5-VL, on a whole suite of benchmarks. The 8B model scores a 33.9 on OS World, which is incredible for an on-device agent that can actually see and click things on your screen. For comparison, that’s getting close to what we saw from Sonnet 3.7 just a few months ago. The pace is just relentless.

But then, Google dropped a bombshell. A 27-billion parameter Gemma-based model they developed with Yale, called C2S-Scale, generated a completely novel hypothesis about how cancer cells behave. This wasn’t a summary of existing research; it was a new idea, something no human scientist had documented before. And here’s the kicker: researchers then took that hypothesis into a wet lab, tested it on living cells, and proved it was true.

This is a monumental deal. For years, AI skeptics like Gary Marcus have said that LLMs are just stochastic parrots, that they can’t create genuinely new knowledge. This feels like the first, powerful counter-argument. Friend of the pod, Dr. Derya Unutmaz, has been on the show before saying AI is going to solve cancer, and this is the first real sign that he might be right. The researchers noted this was an “emergent capability of scale,” proving once again that as these models get bigger and are trained on more complex data—in this case, turning single-cell RNA sequences into “sentences” for the model to learn from—they unlock completely new abilities. This is AI as a true scientific collaborator. Absolutely incredible.

Big Companies & APIs

The big companies weren’t sleeping this week, either. The agentic AI race is heating up, and we’re seeing huge updates across the board.

Claude Haiku 4.5: Fast, Cheap Model Rivals Sonnet 4 Accuracy (X, Official blog, X)

First up, Anthropic released Claude Haiku 4.5, and it is a beast. It’s a