In this episode, Gordon Mullan and Govind Shukla explore the wildest edges of AI and robotics in 2025. We cover Google’s quirky “nano-banana” release, xAI’s spicy new Grok tools (and Musk’s surprise launch of Macrohard), and why OpenAI’s IQ-beating GPT-5 is rewriting the rules. From Unitree’s domination at the Humanoid Robot Olympics to Meta’s next-gen vision model, Anthropic’s coding tutor, and Perplexity’s secret web-scraping scandal, we unpack what’s hype, what’s real, and what’s just a little unhinged. We also dive into China’s latest world-building AI engines, Nvidia’s 53× speed breakthrough, and how to keep AI from spiraling into psychosis. Tune in for the freshest updates on Big Tech, robots that sprint faster than you, and the strange future of AI nations. And don’t forget — you can find previous episodes of The Road to Abundance on the ENGX SPACE YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@engxspace Download MP3: https://engx-space.simplecast.com/episodes/trta8
👉 EngX Space: https://engx.space/
👉Prompt Engineering Advanced ($30): Go beyond basics to unlock advanced AI skills — 6h, 13 lessons, 17 practice tasks for devs & test engineers
https://engx.space/global/en/courses/prompt-engineering-advanced
In this episode, Gordon Mullan and Govind Shukla explore the wildest edges of AI and robotics in 2025.
We cover Google’s quirky “nano-banana” release, xAI’s spicy new Grok tools (and Musk’s surprise launch of Macrohard), and why OpenAI’s IQ-beating GPT-5 is rewriting the rules.
From Unitree’s domination at the Humanoid Robot Olympics to Meta’s next-gen vision model, Anthropic’s coding tutor, and Perplexity’s secret web-scraping scandal, we unpack what’s hype, what’s real, and what’s just a little unhinged.
We also dive into China’s latest world-building AI engines, Nvidia’s 53× speed breakthrough, and how to keep AI from spiraling into psychosis.
Tune in for the freshest updates on Big Tech, robots that sprint faster than you, and the strange future of AI nations.
And don’t forget — you can find previous episodes of The Road to Abundance on the ENGX SPACE YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@engxspace
Download MP3: https://engx-space.simplecast.com/episodes/trta8
NAVIGATION
00:00 – Introduction
00:55 – OpenAI: GPT-5 IQ, IOI gold medal & long-term models
09:07 – Google: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, DeepThink & Jules Agent
17:04 – Anthropic: 1M Context, Claude Code Security & Memory
23:16 – Meta: DINOv3 Vision Foundation Model
27:04 – Nvidia: Jet-Nemotron & 53× LLM Speedup
29:45 – Perplexity: Crawling Scandal & Chrome Acquisition Bid
36:14 – xAI: Babuschkin Ventures, Grok Imagine & Macrohard
41:58 – Mistral & Cursor Updates
44:13 – China: Qwen Image, Tencent Hunyuan Models & AAA Game Engine Yan
46:13 – Z.ai GLM-4.5V & DeepSeek Huawei Chips
52:00 – ElevenLabs, Pika Labs Lip-sync, HeyGen Digital Twin & Ollama Turbo
59:30 – Law & Order: Iceland-9 AI-run State (possibly fake news)
01:01:45 – Science & Tech: Google g-AMIE & AI Gravitational Wave Detector
01:08:48 – Robotics: Unitree, Ground Control Robotics, Figure AI & Robot Games
01:28:55 – Final Words
SERVICES AND LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
🔹 GPT-5: https://openai.com/gpt-5
Tracking AI — IQ test: https://www.trackingai.org/home
🔹 GPT OOS (open models): https://openai.com/open-models
🔹 OpenAI Harmony: https://cookbook.openai.com/articles/openai-harmony
🔹 OpenAI podcast on long-term models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBzStBK6Z8
🔹 DeepMind Genie 3: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier-for-world-models
🔹 Genie 3 self-simulation — X post: https://x.com/holynski_/status/1953155509793767928
🔹 Jules: https://jules.google/
🔹 Anthropic — 1M context: https://www.anthropic.com/news/1m-context
🔹 Claude Code security review: https://www.anthropic.com/news/automate-security-reviews-with-claude-code
🔹 MetaAI DINOv3: https://ai.meta.com/blog/dinov3-self-supervised-vision-model/
🔹 Cloudflare on Perplexity: https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-undeclared-crawlers-to-evade-website-no-crawl-directives
🔹 The Information on Perplexity: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/wild-chrome-bid-perplexity-hunting-browsers?rc=ukjmk2
🔹 Grok Imagine: https://www.theverge.com/news/718795/xai-grok-imagine-video-generator-spicy-mode
🔹 Mistral changelog: https://docs.mistral.ai/getting-started/changelog/
🔹 Cursor CLI: https://cursor.com/cli
🔹 Cursor pricing: https://cursor.com/en/blog/aug-2025-pricing
🔹 Qwen-Image 20B: https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen-image
🔹 HuggingFace Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507: https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507
🔹 Tencent models: https://huggingface.co/tencent
🔹 Hunyuan-Large-Vision: https://vision.hunyuan.tencent.com
🔹 GLM-4.5V: http://github.com/zai-org/GLM-V
🔹 Chat Z.ai: http://chat.z.ai
🔹 DeepSeek and Huawei: https://www.ft.com/content/eb984646-6320-4bfe-a78d-a1da2274b092
🔹 Yan arXiv report: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08601
🔹 ElevenLabs Music blog: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/eleven-music-is-here
🔹 ElevenLabs Music app: https://elevenlabs.io/app/music
🔹 Pika Labs lipsync: https://x.com/pika_labs/status/1954935844936024476
🔹 Browser Company Dia subscription: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/06/the-browser-company-launches-a-20-monthly-subscription-for-its-ai-powered-browser/
🔹 Ollama Turbo: https://ollama.com/turbo
🔹 AI-run island: https://zamin.uz/en/technology/156369-on-the-new-island-order-is-governed-solely-by-ai.html
🔹 Google g-AMIE: https://research.google/blog/enabling-physician-centered-oversight-for-amie/
🔹 Unitree A2: https://www.unitree.com/A2/
🔹 Robot ad video: https://youtu.be/6MUrF_G7KlM
🔹 Loki Robotics: https://www.startupticker.ch/en/news/1-6-million-for-a-restroom-cleaning-robot
🔹 Figure AI Helix laundry: https://www.figure.ai/news/helix-learns-to-fold-laundry
🔹 World Humanoid Robot Games: https://www.youtube.com/live/1MMgDKXtdWU
🔹 Running robot video: https://t.me/denissexy/10630
#theroadtoabundance #gpt #genie