In this milestone 100th episode of the Latent Space Podcast, the hosts reflect on the journey over the past two years, paralleling the explosive growth in the AI engineering sector. They delve into significant trends from the NeurIPS conference, such as the shift towards inference-time computing, the increasing influence of smaller models emerging from large labs, and the rising significance of synthetic data. Despite OpenAI's leading market position, competitors like Gemini are stepping up, sparking a pricing battle in the budget-friendly segment. The discussion wraps up with a forward-looking perspective on 2025, which is anticipated to be the year of practical agents. The podcast also highlights the remarkable performance of ReCraft V3, which has outpaced Flux 1.1 in image generation benchmarks, showcasing the ongoing advancements in AI capabilities.