Episode Details

Hey, it’s Alex! Happy Halloween friends!

I’m excited to bring you this weeks (spooky) AI updates! We started the show today with MiniMax M2, the currently top Open Source LLM, with an interview with their head of eng, Skyler Miao, continued to dive into OpenAIs completed restructuring into a non-profit and a PBC, including a deep dive into a live stream Sam Altman had, with a ton of spicy details, and finally chatted with Arjun Desai from Cartesia, following a release of Sonic 3, a sub 49ms voice model!

So, 2 interviews + tons of news, let’s dive in! (as always, show notes in the end)

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Open Source AI

MiniMax M2: open-source agentic model at 8% of Claude’s price, 2× speed (X, Hugging Face )

We kicked off our open-source segment with a banger of an announcement and a special guest. The new king of open-source LLMs is here, and it’s called MiniMax M2. We were lucky enough to have Skyler Miao, Head of Engineering at Minimax, join us live to break it all down.

M2 is an agentic model built for code and complex workflows, and its performance is just staggering. It’s already ranked in the top 5 globally on the Artificial Analysis benchmark, right behind giants like OpenAI and Anthropic. But here’s the crazy part: it delivers nearly twice the speed of Claude 3.5 Sonnet at just 8% of the price. This is basically Sonnet-level performance, at home, in open source.

Skylar explained that their team saw an “impossible triangle” in the market between performance, cost, and speed—you could only ever get two. Their goal with M2 was to build a model that could solve this, and they absolutely nailed it. It’s a 200B parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model, but with only 10B active parameters per inference, making it incredibly efficient.

One key insight Skylar shared was about getting the best performance. M2 supports multiple APIs, but to really unlock its reasoning power, you need to use an API that passes the model’s “thinking” tokens back to it on the next turn, like the Anthropic API. Many open-source tools don’t support this yet, so it’s something to watch out for.

Huge congrats to the MiniMax team on this Open Weights (MIT licensed) release, you can find the model on HF!

MiniMax had quite a week, with 3 additional releases, MiniMax speech 2.6, an update to their video model Hailuo 2.3 and just after the show, they released a music 2.0 model as well! Congrats on the shipping folks!

OpenAI drops gpt-oss-safeguard - first open-weight safety reasoning models for classification ( X, HF )

OpenAI is back on the open weights bandwagon, with a finetune release of their previously open weighted gpt-oss models, with gpt-oss-safeguard.

These models were trained exclusively to help companies build safeguarding policies to make sure their apps remains safe! With gpt-oss-safeguards 20B and 120B, OpenAI is achieving near parity with their internal safety models, and as Nisten said on the show, if anyone knows about censorship and safety, it’s OpenAI!

The highlight of this release is, unlike traditional pre-trained classifiers, these models allow for updates to policy via natural language!

These models will be great for businesses that want to safeguard their