#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.
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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