Mar 09 2025 79 mins 123
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
