QwQ-32B claims to match DeepSeek R1-671B

**Alibaba Qwen** released their **QwQ-32B** model, a **32 billion parameter** reasoning model using a novel two-stage reinforcement learning approach: first scaling RL for math and coding tasks with accuracy verifiers and code execution servers, then applying RL for general capabilities like instruction following and alignment. Meanwhile, **OpenAI** rolled out **GPT-4.5** to Plus users, with mixed feedback on coding performance and noted inference cost improvements. The QwQ model aims to compete with larger MoE models like **DeepSeek-R1**. *"GPT-4.5 is unusable for coding"* was a notable user critique, while others praised its reasoning improvements due to scaling pretraining.