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:
(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
(00:53:00) 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
(01:13:34) METR’s GPT-4.5 pre-deployment evaluations
(01:17:16) Chinese buyers are getting Nvidia Blackwell chips despite US export controls
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