Last Week in AI

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

Listen Later

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

                • See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

                ...more
                View all episodesView all episodes
                Download on the App Store
                Last Week in AIBy Skynet Today
                • 4.6
                • 4.6
                • 4.6
                • 4.6
                • 4.6

                4.6

                306 ratings

                More shows like Last Week in AI

                View all
                The a16z Show by Andreessen Horowitz

                The a16z Show

                1,095 Listeners

                Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn by Jon Krohn

                Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn

                299 Listeners

                NVIDIA AI Podcast by NVIDIA

                NVIDIA AI Podcast

                349 Listeners

                Practical AI by Practical AI LLC

                Practical AI

                209 Listeners

                Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

                Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

                99 Listeners

                Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

                Dwarkesh Podcast

                548 Listeners

                Big Technology Podcast by Alex Kantrowitz

                Big Technology Podcast

                513 Listeners

                The Artificial Intelligence Show by Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput

                The Artificial Intelligence Show

                207 Listeners

                No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

                No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

                140 Listeners

                Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by Latent.Space

                Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

                98 Listeners

                This Day in AI Podcast by Michael Sharkey, Chris Sharkey

                This Day in AI Podcast

                229 Listeners

                The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis by Nathaniel Whittemore

                The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

                659 Listeners

                Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast by Everyday AI

                Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast

                108 Listeners

                A Beginner's Guide to AI by Dietmar Fischer

                A Beginner's Guide to AI

                58 Listeners

                The Next Wave - AI and The Future of Technology by Mindstream (Hubspot Media)

                The Next Wave - AI and The Future of Technology

                58 Listeners