In this episode of Hidden Layers, we dive into the most important AI developments of the month. We cover OpenAI’s highly anticipated and controversial GPT-5 release, debate where we really are on the AGI timeline, explore groundbreaking new world models like Google’s Genie 3 and Tencent’s Huanyuan Gamecraft, and unpack Meta’s DINO V3 image encoder breakthrough.

In this episode of Hidden Layers, host Ron talks with Dr. Hannah Lu, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and core faculty at the Odin Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences. Dr. Lu is pioneering the use of AI-powered surrogate models to make complex scientific simulations—like CO₂ absorption in geological formations—faster, more accurate, and more useful for real-world decision-making.

They discuss:

• How surrogate models work and why they’re so powerful
• The challenges of applying AI to physics-based systems
• How digital twins and uncertainty quantification are shaping the future of environmental modeling
• The intersection of generative AI, physics constraints, and climate science

In this episode of Hidden Layers: Decoded, Ron Green, Dr. ZZ Si, and Michael Wharton unpack July’s biggest AI developments—from flawed reasoning tests to surprising training breakthroughs.

Apple’s “Illusion of Thinking” paper draws sharp critiques—from both humans and language models. Meta revives a forgotten 2019 attention mechanism to reshape scaling laws. Video generation tools from BlackForest Labs and others hit new levels of realism and interactivity. Federal courts weigh in on Anthropic and Meta’s use of copyrighted training data. A one-line tweak in training recurrent models dramatically boosts performance on long sequences. Cloudflare announces it will block AI scrapers by default—though it might be too late.

From Transformer alternatives to copyright battles, this episode dives into the fast-moving intersection of AI research, engineering, and regulation.