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

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

Author: Skynet Today March 9, 2025 Duration: 1:19:52
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 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.

Keeping up with artificial intelligence can feel like drinking from a firehose. Every week brings a new breakthrough, a surprising application, or an urgent ethical debate. Last Week in AI, from the team at Skynet Today, is here to turn that torrent into a clear, digestible stream. Instead of getting lost in the noise, you'll get a thoughtful rundown of the developments that actually have impact, explained without unnecessary jargon. Each episode feels like a conversation with well-informed friends who have done the homework for you, sifting through research papers, product launches, and industry announcements to highlight what's substantive. You'll hear nuanced discussions that go beyond the headlines, considering the real-world implications of new models, policy shifts, and corporate moves in the tech landscape. This podcast doesn't just tell you what happened; it provides context on why it matters for developers, businesses, and society at large. It’s an efficient way to stay informed and critically engaged with a field that is reshaping our world at a breathtaking pace. Tune in for a consistently insightful analysis that makes the complex world of AI feel accessible and relevant, week after week.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Last Week in AI
Podcast Episodes
#231 - Claude Cowork, Anthropic $10B, Deep Delta Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:43:17
Our 231st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 01/16/2026 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.co…
#230 - 2025 Retrospective, Nvidia buys Groq, GLM 4.7, METR [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:38:08
Our 230th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 01/02/2026 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.co…
#229 - Gemini 3 Flash, ChatGPT Apps, Nemotron 3 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:27:07
Our 229th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 12/19/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.co…
#228 - GPT 5.2, Scaling Agents, Weird Generalization [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:26:42
Our 228th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 12/12/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.co…
#227 - Jeremie is back! DeepSeek 3.2, TPUs, Nested Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:34:40
Our 227th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 12/05/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastweekinai.co…
#226 - Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, Nano Banana Pro, LeJEPA [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:11
Our 226th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 11/24/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and co-hosted by Michelle Lee Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@last…
#225 - GPT 5.1, Kimi K2 Thinking, Remote Labor Index [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:18:14
Our 225th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 11/16/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and co-hosted by Michelle Lee Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@last…
#224 - OpenAI is for-profit! Cursor 2, Minimax M2, Udio copyright [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:31:43
Our 224th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 10/31/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and co-hosted by Gavin Purcell (check out AI For Humans and AndThen!) Feel free to email us you…
#223 - Haiku 4.5, OpenAI DevDay, Claude Skills, Scaling RL, SB 243 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:11:45
We discuss a range of news from updates on AI models and tools by Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, to new business partnerships involving OpenAI and Broadcom, along with regulatory actions from California and market mov…
#222 - Sora 2, Sonnet 4.5, Vibes, Thinking Machines [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:37:16
Our 222st episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news! Recorded on 10/03/2025 Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and co-hosted by Jon Krohn Feel free to email us your questions and feedback at contact@lastwee…