Last Week in AI

#202 - Qwen-32B, Anthropic's $3.5 billion, LLM Cognitive Behaviors

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Our 202nd episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!

Recorded on 03/07/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.

Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at [email protected] and/or [email protected]

Read out our text newsletter and comment on the podcast at https://lastweekin.ai/.

Join our Discord here! https://discord.gg/nTyezGSKwP

In this episode:

  • Alibaba released Qwen-32B, their latest reasoning model, on par with leading models like DeepMind’s R1.
  • Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in a funding round, valuing the company at $61.5 billion, solidifying its position as a key competitor to OpenAI.
  • DeepMind introduced BigBench Extra Hard, a more challenging benchmark to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of large language models.
  • Reinforcement Learning pioneers Andrew Bartow and Rich Sutton were awarded the prestigious Turing Award for their contributions to the field.

    • Timestamps + Links:

    cle picks:

    • (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
    • (00:01:41) Episode Preview
    • (00:02:50) GPT-4.5 Discussion
      • (00:14:13) Alibaba’s New QwQ 32B Model is as Good as DeepSeek-R1 ; Outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini
      • (00:21:29) With Alexa Plus, Amazon finally reinvents its best product
      • (00:26:08) Another DeepSeek moment? General AI agent Manus shows ability to handle complex tasks
      • (00:29:14) Microsoft’s new Dragon Copilot is an AI assistant for healthcare
      • (00:32:24) Mistral’s new OCR API turns any PDF document into an AI-ready Markdown file
        • (00:33:19) A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Closes Deal That Values It at $61.5 Billion
        • (00:35:49) Nvidia-Backed CoreWeave Files for IPO, Shows Growing Revenue
        • (00:38:05) Waymo and Uber's Austin robotaxi expansion begins today
        • (00:38:54) UK competition watchdog drops Microsoft-OpenAI probe
        • (00:41:17) Scale AI announces multimillion-dollar defense deal, a major step in U.S. military automation
          • (00:44:43) DeepSeek Open Source Week: A Complete Summary
          • (00:45:25) DeepSeek AI Releases DualPipe: A Bidirectional Pipeline Parallelism Algorithm for Computation-Communication Overlap in V3/R1 Training
          • (00:53:00) Physical Intelligence open-sources Pi0 robotics foundation model
          • (00:54:23) BIG-Bench Extra Hard
            • (00:56:10) Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners
            • (01:01:49) The MASK Benchmark: Disentangling Honesty From Accuracy in AI Systems
            • (01:05:32) Pioneers of Reinforcement Learning Win the Turing Award
            • (01:06:56) OpenAI launches $50M grant program to help fund academic research
              • (01:07:25) The Nuclear-Level Risk of Superintelligent AI
              • (01:13:34) METR’s GPT-4.5 pre-deployment evaluations
              • (01:17:16) Chinese buyers are getting Nvidia Blackwell chips despite US export controls
                • ...more
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