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:

(00:33:19) 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

01/17/2025 | World News Roundup Late Edition