Apple AI Collapse, Diffusion Video Boom, Copyright Wars & More | EP. 42

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.