About this episode
Hey folks, Alex here, welcome back to ThursdAI! And folks, after the last week was the calm before the storm, "The storm came, y'all" – that's an understatement. This wasn't just a storm; it was an AI hurricane, a category 5 of announcements that left us all reeling (in the best way possible!). From being on the ground at Google I/O to live-watching Anthropic drop Claude 4 during our show, it's been an absolute whirlwind.This week was so packed, it felt like AI Christmas, with tech giants and open-source heroes alike showering us with gifts. We saw OpenAI play their classic pre-and-post-Google I/O chess game, Microsoft make some serious open-source moves, Google unleash an avalanche of updates, and Anthropic crash the party with Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet live stream in the middle of ThursdAI!So buckle up, because we're about to try and unpack this glorious chaos. As always, we're here to help you collectively know, learn, and stay up to date, so you don't have to. Let's dive in! (TL;DR and links in the end) Open Source LLMs Kicking Things OffEven with the titans battling, the open-source community dropped some serious heat this week. It wasn't the main headline grabber, but the releases were significant!Gemma 3n: Tiny But Mighty MatryoshkaFirst up, Google's Gemma 3n. This isn't just another small model; it's a "Nano-plus" preview, a 4-billion parameter MatFormer (Matryoshka Transformer – how cool is that name?) model designed for mobile-first multimodal applications. The really slick part? It has a nested 2-billion parameter sub-model that can run entirely on phones or Chromebooks.Yam was particularly excited about this one, pointing out the innovative "model inside another model" design. The idea is you can use half the model, not depth-wise, but throughout the layers, for a smaller footprint without sacrificing too much. It accepts interleaved text, image, audio, and video, supports ASR and speech translation, and even ships with RAG and function-calling libraries for edge apps. With a 128K token window and responsible AI features baked in, Gemma 3n is looking like a powerful tool for on-device AI. Google claims it beats prior 4B mobile models on MMLU-Lite and MMMU-Mini. It's an early preview in Google AI Studio, but it definitely flies on mobile devices.Mistral & AllHands Unleash Devstral 24BThen we got a collaboration from Mistral and AllHands: Devstral, a 24-billion parameter, state-of-the-art open model focused on code. We've been waiting for Mistral to drop some open-source goodness, and this one didn't disappoint.Nisten was super hyped, noting it beats o3-Mini on SWE-bench verified – a tough benchmark! He called it "the first proper vibe coder that you can run on a 3090," which is a big deal for coders who want local power and privacy. This is a fantastic development for the open-source coding community.The Pre-I/O Tremors: OpenAI & Microsoft Set the Stage
