Continuous Thought Machines, Absolute Zero, BLIP3-o, Gemini Diffusion & more | EP. 41

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton explore the latest AI breakthroughs, including Sakana AI’s biologically-inspired “Continuous Thought Machines,” the self-taught coding model Absolute Zero, and Salesforce’s unified vision-language system BLIP3-o. They discuss the growing importance of reinforcement learning in a data-constrained world, Google’s diffusion-based language and video models, and Anthropic’s industry-leading interpretability efforts. The team also covers Apple’s AI missteps and a new study revealing why single, well-structured prompts outperform long chat sessions. Throughout, they reflect on alignment risks, emergent reasoning, and the changing shape of model development and training strategy.

Listen on Spotify
Listen on Apple Podcasts