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

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 contact@lastweekinai.com and/or hello@gladstone.ai

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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