AI Leadership Weekly

Top Stories

Accusations of cheating sour Llama 4 reveal
Meta released the latest version of their open source LLM, Llama 4, which topped many benchmarks and even competes with the likes of GPT-4.5.

The model comes in two size versions, Scout and Maverick, with Llama 4 Behemoth currently in preview. Each model is a mix of experts with 17B active parameters each, where Scout has 109B total parameters, and Maverick has 400B total parameters.

Controversy has struck, though, with claims that Meta put their thumbs on the scale of the benchmarks. Essentially, Meta used a special "conversational" version of Llama 4 Maverick for the benchmarks, but this version won't be available by developers, calling the impressive benchmark results into questions.

Major publishers call on US govt. to stop ‘AI Theft’
Major publishers, including The New York Times and Washington Post, are calling on the US government to intervene and stop what they call AI theft.

This is another lawsuit that aims to address the issue of AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google taking copywrited material and using it to train AI models, from which they then turn a profit.

The large group of publishers have launched an ad campaign asking to 'make Big Tech pay for the content it takes.' Each ad had a QR code leading to the Support Responsible AI page, where visitors are prompted to contact their local representatives and express their concerns.

OpenAI in talks to buy Jony Ive startup
OpenAI is reportedly in talks to buy "io Products", which is the startup of ex-Apple industrial designer John Ive.

The secretive company is reportedly developing AI devices and wearables, including a phone without a screen. Although, it's likely that most of the products (if they even exist) are meant solely for concept exploration, and not for eventual release.

The company is already backed by Sam Altman, and the move would value io Products at $500 million. This is another example of OpenAI (amongst other big AI companies) seeking to expand into the hardware realm, especially as the AI space becomes more and more crowded.

In Brief

• Anthropic announces 100 roles in Europe, new EMEA head

• Amazon’s video model now generates minutes-long clips

• Devin 2.0 drops to just $20 p/m

Market Trends

AI-powered Quake II is impressive but buggy
Microsoft has released a demo of the classic Quake II, powered by Copilot AI. The impressive demo was trained on a level of Quake II, and lets players explore the level in a browser window, as well as jump and interact with objects.

Under the hood, the technology is essentially creating each new frame of the game in the same way it does AI-generated video. Other versions of this tech have been proposed as a way for game designers to experiment with and explore new mechanics for their games, such as new weapons or spells or abilities.

Microsoft has acknowledged limitations with the current tech, though, such as the model struggling with object permanence, with health counters and the like being inaccurate, and with some objects (such as enemies) being fuzzy.

Chinese models catching up to the West
A recent Stanford report has shown that Chinese AI models have swiftly closed the gap in terms of quality with those from the West.

DeepSeek R1 made a huge splash only a few months ago, and various Chinese corporations have made huge investments in technology and infrastructure over the past year. The report notes that Chinese models now lead in two key benchmarks, and that they now lead the US in terms of AI publications and patents.

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