LWiAI Podcast #242 - ChatGPT Images 2.0, Qwen 3.6 Max, Kimi-K2.6

Last Week in AI released episode 242 of its podcast, recorded on April 22, 2026 and hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris. The episode summarizes and discusses the week's AI news.

On the tools and apps side, OpenAI released a new ChatGPT image model that the episode says excels at accurate text and screenshot-like generations. Alibaba's Qwen 3.6 Max Preview moved to an API-only offering. Google expanded Deep Research with a "Max" option built on Gemini 3.1 Pro and MCP support for accessing proprietary data, and Mozilla reported using Anthropic's Claude to find and fix 271 Firefox bugs.

Chinese model activity accelerated, with open releases from Moonshot AI (Kimi K2.6, described as a 1T-parameter MoE with attention optimizations) and Minimax (MiniMax M 2.7), both showing strong benchmark results.

Business and policy updates covered in the episode include a reported SpaceX-Cursor deal with a $60B buy option, Cerebras filing for an IPO, Amazon adding $5B to Anthropic alongside a $100B AWS spending pledge, and platform responses to synthetic media such as AI music spam and YouTube deepfake takedown requests.

Additional items listed include research on Infusion (shaping model behavior by editing training data via influence functions), Parcae (scaling laws for stable looped language models), and OccuBench (evaluating AI agents on real-world professional tasks via language environment simulation).

The episode also cites reports that the NSA is using Anthropic's Mythos despite a blacklist, and that an unauthorized group gained access to Anthropic's exclusive cyber tool Mythos. Deezer said 44% of songs uploaded to its platform daily are AI-generated, and celebrities will be able to find and request removal of AI deepfakes on YouTube.

Other listed items include Kevin Weil and Bill Peebles exiting OpenAI, Meta hiring five Thinking Machines Lab founders, Meta cutting 198 Bay Area jobs, and a Canadian quantum company Xanadu reaching a $16 billion valuation after an Nvidia release.