Claude enters the reasoning era

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Reasoning models are the brand new battleground in AI—and Anthropic has officially entered the race with Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the world’s first-ever hybrid reasoning model.

After months of quiet, Anthropic is making a giant splash on the AI leaderboards. But with DeepSeek’s aggressive open-source push and a unified GPT-5 on the horizon, how long will this dominance last?

In today’s AI rundown:

• Claude 3.7 Sonnet with ‘hybrid reasoning’

• Qwen’s latest open-source pondering model

• Learn how to seek advice from your apps with Concierge AI

• AI agents get their very own communication protocol

• 4 latest AI tools & 4 job opportunities

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANTHROPIC

🧠 Claude 3.7 Sonnet with ‘hybrid reasoning’

The Rundown: Anthropic just released Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the world’s first ‘hybrid reasoning’ AI that may mix quick responses with controllable prolonged pondering capabilities — alongside a brand new agentic coding tool called Claude Code.

The main points:

• Claude 3.7 Sonnet enables users to toggle between a typical and “prolonged pondering” mode, with the latter showing the AI’s reasoning via a scratchpad.

• API users can precisely control how long Claude thinks (as much as 128K tokens), allowing them to balance speed, cost, and quality based on task complexity.

• The AI achieves SOTA performance on real-world coding benchmarks and agentic tool use, surpassing competitors like o1, o3-mini, and DeepSeek R1.

• Anthropic also introduced Claude Code, a command-line coding agent that may edit files, read code, and write and run tests, in a limited research preview.

Why it matters: Anthropic has finally brought Claude into the reasoning era — with vastly improved coding benchmarks, precise pondering control, and a brand new agentic feature that points to a serious push on the dev side. With OpenAI also planning a hybrid reasoner, 3.7 would be the start of the subsequent leg up for a brand new generation of models.

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ALIBABA

🤔 Qwen’s latest open-source pondering model

The Rundown: Alibaba’s Qwen team just released QwQ-Max-Preview, a brand new reasoning-focused AI that introduces pondering capabilities to their chat platform — while promising a full open-source release soon.

The main points:

• QwQ-Max-Preview is built on Qwen2.5-Max but significantly enhanced for deep reasoning, excelling in mathematics, coding, and agentic tasks.

• The model introduces a “Considering (QwQ)” feature to Qwen Chat that enables users to see the AI’s reasoning process as it really works through complex problems.

• Qwen announced plans to open-source QwQ-Max and Qwen2.5-Max under an Apache 2.0 license soon, making the models freely available for developers.

• The team may even release smaller variants like QwQ-32B for local deployment on devices with limited compute resources.

Why it matters: Reasoning has turn out to be the brand new competitive frontier in AI, and Qwen’s move to open-source their flagship reasoner could push the industry toward having these capabilities as a typical moderately than a gated, premium feature. Open source is staying right on the heels of industry leaders — with Chinese labs leading the way in which.

AI TRAINING

⚡ Learn how to seek advice from your apps with Concierge AI

The Rundown: Concierge is the primary connected AI Assistant that may read and write to your favorite software tools, by finding and updating information across all of your apps in real-time.

Step-by-step:

1. Create a Concierge account here to start totally free.

2. Click “Connect” and select the tools you employ — Gmail, Slack, Jira, Notion, HubSpot, or something else.

3. Type requests like “summarize my unread emails”, “create a Jira ticket based on feedback in Slack” or “research these prospects from Salesforce.”

4. Watch as your AI assistant immediately finds information and takes motion across your connected apps.

Pro tip: Start with one or two apps you employ most ceaselessly, then step by step add more as you get comfortable with the workflow.

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AI & COMMUNICATION

📞 AI agents get their very own communication protocol

The Rundown: Two developers just introduced Gibber Link, a sound-based communication protocol that enables AI agents to detect one another on calls and switch from human speech to direct data transmission — reducing time and compute costs.

The main points:

• Created by Anton Pidkuiko and Boris Starkov at ElevenLabs’ recent Hackathon, the project uses an open-source data-over-sound library called “ggwave.”

• Within the demo, an agent detects one other AI on the phone and switches to dial-up-style ggwave audio signals with transcriptions, as an alternative of normal voice.

• Using the sound-level protocol as an alternative of generating speech reduces compute costs by as much as 90% and shortens communication time by as much as 80%.

• The design also ensures clearer communication in noisy environments in comparison with traditional speech recognition-based systems.

Why it matters: AI voice agents are about to be in every single place, meaning the amount of AI-to-AI calls will grow exponentially (especially for businesses). This hackathon-winning project is an ideal have a look at how finding more efficient and cost-effective methods for these interactions might take AI communication down completely latest paths.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🤖 Zapier Agents – Equip agents with internal data to work across 7,000+ apps

• 👀 SmolVLM2 – Small AI models to research videos on phones and laptops

• 🗣️ ElevenLabs Studio – Structure, edit, and generate long-form audio

• 🧬 Evo 2 – Biomolecular AI model for insights into DNA, RNA, and proteins

💼 AI Job Opportunities

• 💊 Tempus – Key Account Director, Pharma East

• 🔧 DeepL – Customer Technical Solutions Manager

• 🏛️ Scale AI – Communications Manager, Public Sector

• 📢 Cresta – Senior Customer Marketing Manager

📰 The whole lot else in AI today

Luma Labs released a brand new Video to Audio feature in Dream Machine, enabling users to simply generate synced audio for video outputs.

Perplexity posted a teaser for a brand new agentic search browser called Comet, with a waitlist available to enroll in early access.

Salesforce and Google expanded their partnership to (amongst other things) integrate Gemini into Agentforce, allowing AI agents to process images, audio, and videos.

Alibaba revealed plans to take a position $52B in cloud computing and AI infrastructure over the subsequent three years, surpassing total spending in these sectors over the past decade.

Nothing unveiled its upcoming AI-powered Nothing Phone (3a), featuring an unboxing video by 1X’s recently debuted NEO Gamma humanoid robot.

Meta AI launched in Arabic across 10 Middle Eastern and North African countries, taking text generation, image creation, and animation to tens of millions of latest users.

COMMUNITY

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Join our next workshop on Thursday, February 27, at 1 PM EST and learn transform your creative concepts into skilled videos with LTX Studio’s Tom Factor, Director of Creative Strategy and AI, and Alon Yaar, VP of Product.

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See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Alvaro, and Jason—The Rundown’s editorial team