📆 ThursdAI - May 29 - DeepSeek R1 Resurfaces, VEO3 viral moments, Opus 4 a week after, Flux Kontext image editing & more AI news

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋

Welcome back to another absolutely wild week in AI! I'm coming to you live from the Fontainebleau Hotel in Vegas at the Imagine AI conference, and wow, what a perfect setting to discuss how AI is literally reimagining our world. After last week's absolute explosion of releases (Claude Opus 4, Google I/O madness, OpenAI Codex and Jony colab), this week gave us a chance to breathe... sort of. Because even in a "quiet" week, we still got a new DeepSeek model that's pushing boundaries, and the entire internet discovered that we might all just be prompts. Yeah, it's been that kind of week!

Before we dive in, quick shoutout to everyone who joined us live - we had some technical hiccups with the Twitter Spaces audio (sorry about that!), but the YouTube stream was fire. And speaking of fire, we had two incredible guests join us: Charlie Holtz from Chorus (the multi-model chat app that's changing how we interact with AI) and Linus Eckenstam, who's been traveling the AI conference circuit and bringing us insights from the frontlines of the generative AI revolution.

Open Source AI & LLMs: DeepSeek Whales & Mind-Bending Papers

DeepSeek dropped R1-0528 out of nowhere, an update to their reasoning beast with some serious jumps in performance. We’re talking AIME at 91 (beating previous scores by a mile), LiveCodeBench at 73, and SWE verified at 57.6. It’s edging closer to heavyweights like o3, and folks on X are already calling it “clearer thinking.” There was hype it might’ve been R2, but the impact didn’t quite crash the stock exchange like past releases. Still, it’s likely among the best open-weight models out there.

So what's new? Early reports and some of my own poking around suggest this model "thinks clearer now." Nisten mentioned that while previous DeepSeek models sometimes liked to "vibe around" and explore the latent space before settling on an answer, this one feels a bit more direct.

And here’s the kicker—they also released an 8B distilled version based on Qwen3, runnable on your laptop. Yam called it potentially the best 8B model to date, and you can try it on Ollama right now. No need for a monster rig!

The Mind-Bending "Learning to Reason Without External Rewards" Paper

Okay, this paper result broke my brain, and apparently everyone else's too. This paper shows that models can improve through reinforcement learning with its own intuition of whether or not it's correct. 😮

It's like the placebo effect for AI! The researchers trained models without telling them what was good or bad, but rather, utilized a new framework called Intuitor, where the reward was based on how the "self certainty".

The thing that took my whole timeline by storm is, it works! GRPO (Group Policy Optimization) - the framework that DeepSeek gave to the world with R1 is based on external rewards (human optimize) and Intuitor seems to be mathcing or even exceeding some of GRPO results when Qwen2.5 3B was used to finetune. Incredible incredible stuff

Big Companies LLMs & APIs

Claude Opus 4: A Week Later – The Dev Darling?

Claude Opus 4, whose launch we celebrated live on the show, has had a week to make its mark. Charlie Holtz, who's building Chorus (more on that amazing app in a bit!), shared that while it's sometimes "astrology" to judge the vibes of a new model, Opus 4 feels like a step change, especially in coding. He mentioned that Claude Code, powered by Opus 4 (and Sonnet 4 for implementation), is now tackling GitHub issues that were too complex just weeks ago. He even had a coworker who "vibe coded three websites in a weekend" with it – that's a tangible productivity boost!

Linus Eckenstam highlighted how Lovable.dev saw their syntax error rates plummet by nearly 50% after integrating Claude 4. That’s quantifiable proof of improvement! It's clear Anthropic is leaning heavily into the developer/coding space. Claude Opus is now #1 on the LMArena WebDev arena, further cementing its reputation.

I had my own magical moment with Opus 4 this week. I was working on an MCP observability talk for the AI Engineer conference and trying to integrate Weave (our observability and evals framework at Weights & Biases) into a project. Using Windsurf's Cascade agent (which now lets you bring your own Opus 4 key, by the way – good move, Windsurf!), Opus 4 not only tried to implement Weave into my agent but, when it got stuck, it figured out it had access to the Weights & Biases support bot via our MCP tool. It then formulated a question to the support bot (which is also AI-powered!), got an answer, and used that to fix the implementation. It then went back and checked if the Weave trace appeared in the dashboard! Agents talking to agents to solve a problem, all while I just watched – my jaw was on the floor. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Quick Hits: Voice Updates from OpenAI & Anthropic

OpenAI’s Advanced Voice Mode finally sings—yes, I’ve been waiting for this! It can belt out tunes like Mariah Carey, which is just fun. Anthropic also rolled out voice mode on mobile, keeping up in the conversational race. Both are cool steps, but I’m more hyped for what’s next in voice AI—stay tuned below (OpenAI X, Anthropic X).

🐝 This Week's Buzz: Weights & Biases Updates!

Alright, time for a quick update from the world of Weights & Biases!

* Fully Connected is Coming! Our flagship 2-day conference, Fully Connected, is happening on June 18th and 19th in San Francisco. It's going to be packed with amazing speakers and insights into the world of AI development. You can still grab tickets, and as a ThursdAI listener, use the promo code WBTHURSAI for a 100% off ticket! I hustled to get yall this discount! (Register here)

* AI Engineer World's Fair Next Week! I'm super excited for the AI Engineer conference in San Francisco next week. Yam Peleg and I will be there, and we're planning another live ThursdAI show from the event! If you want to join the livestream or snag a last-minute ticket, use the coupon code THANKSTHURSDAI for 30% off (Get it HERE)

Vision & Video: Reality is Optional Now

VEO3 and the Prompt Theory Phenomenon

Google's VEO3 has completely taken over TikTok with the "Prompt Theory" videos. If you haven't seen these yet, stop reading and watch ☝️. The concept is brilliant - AI-generated characters discussing whether they're "made of prompts," creating this meta-commentary on consciousness and reality.

The technical achievement here is staggering. We're not just talking about good visuals - VEO3 nails temporal consistency, character emotions, situational awareness (characters look at whoever's speaking), perfect lip sync, and contextually appropriate sound effects.

Linus made a profound point - if not for the audio, VEO3 might not have been as explosive. The combination of visuals AND audio together is what's making people question reality. We're seeing people post actual human videos claiming they're AI-generated because the uncanny valley has been crossed so thoroughly.

Odyssey's Interactive Worlds: The Holodeck Prototype

Odyssey dropped their interactive video demo, and folks... we're literally walking through AI-generated worlds in real-time. This isn't a game engine rendering 3D models - this is a world model generating each frame as you move through it with WASD controls.

Yes, it's blurry. Yes, I got stuck in a doorway. But remember Will Smith eating spaghetti from two years ago? The pace of progress is absolutely insane. As Linus pointed out, we're at the "GAN era" of world models. Combine VEO3's quality with Odyssey's interactivity, and we're looking at completely personalized, infinite entertainment experiences.

The implications that Yam laid out still have me shook - imagine Netflix shows completely customized to you, with your context and preferences, generated on the fly. Not just choosing from a catalog, but creating entirely new content just for you. We're not ready for this, but it's coming fast.

Hunyuan's Open Source Avatar Revolution

While the big companies are keeping their video models clo…