#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 de