Episode Details

What is UP folks! Alex here from Weights & Biases (yeah, still, but check this weeks buzz section below for some news!)

I really really enjoyed today's episode, I feel like I can post it unedited it was so so good. We started the show with our good friend Junyang Lin from Alibaba Qwen, where he told us about their new 32B reasoner QwQ. Then we interviewed Google's VP of the search product, Robby Stein, who came and told us about their upcoming AI mode in Google! I got access and played with it, and it made me switch back from PPXL as my main.

And lastly, I recently became fully MCP-pilled, since we covered it when it came out over thanksgiving, I saw this acronym everywhere on my timeline but only recently "got it" and so I wanted to have an MCP deep dive, and boy... did I get what I wished for! You absolutely should tune in to the show as there's no way for me to cover everything we covered about MCP with Dina and Jason! ok without, further adieu.. let's dive in (and the TL;DR, links and show notes in the end as always!)

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🤯 Alibaba's QwQ-32B: Small But Shocking Everyone!

The open-source LLM segment started strong, chatting with friend of the show Junyang Justin Lin from Alibaba’s esteemed Qwen team. They've cooked up something quite special: QwQ-32B, a reasoning-focused, reinforcement-learning-boosted beast that punches remarkably above its weight. We're talking about a mere 32B parameters model holding its ground on tough evaluations against DeepSeek R1, a 671B behemoth!

Here’s how wild this is: You can literally run QwQ on your Mac! Junyang shared that they applied two solid rounds of RL to amp its reasoning, coding, and math capabilities, integrating agents into the model to fully unlock its abilities. When I called out how insane it was that we’ve gone from "LLMs can't do math" to basically acing competitive math benchmarks like AIME24, Junyang calmly hinted that they're already aiming for unified thinking/non-thinking models. Sounds wild, doesn’t it?

Check out the full QwQ release here, or dive into their blog post.

🚀 Google Launches AI Mode: Search Goes Next-Level (X, Blog, My Live Reaction).

For the past two years, on this very show, we've been asking, "Where's Google?" in the Gen AI race. Well, folks, they're back. And they're back in a big way.

Next, we were thrilled to have Google’s own Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, drop by ThursdAI after their massive launch of AI Mode and expanded AI Overviews leveraging Gemini 2.0. Robby walked us through this massive shift, which essentially brings advanced conversational AI capabilities straight into Google. Seriously — Gemini 2.0 is now out here doing complex reasoning while performing fan-out queries behind the scenes in Google's infrastructure.

Google search is literally Googling itself. No joke. "We actually have the model generating fan-out queries — Google searches within searches — to collect accurate, fresh, and verified data," explained Robby during our chat. And I gotta admit, after playing with AI Mode, Google is definitely back in the game—real-time restaurant closures, stock analyses, product comparisons, and it’s conversational to boot. You can check my