FT: “Lack of internal deliberation abilities — thinking, in other words — has long been considered one of the main weaknesses of artificial intelligence. The scale of a recent advance in this by ChatGPT creator OpenAI is a point of debate within the scientific community. But it leads many of my expert colleagues and me to believe that there is a chance that we are on the brink of bridging the gap to human-level reasoning…Better reasoning would address two major weaknesses of current AI: poor coherence of answers and the ability to plan and achieve long-term goals. The former is important in scientific uses and the latter is essential to create autonomous agents. Both could enable important applications.”
Narayan Ramachandran: “India’s hope of becoming an upper middle-income country cannot be realized in this environment of statism, because it will fail the cause of deepening prosperity throughout the population. Intricate rule-based regulation must give way to framework regulation…The state has a very important role to play as a standards setter and enabler of fair competition. If the state were to function as an enlightened referee, rather than as umpire, player and promotion board, then individual actors would innovate and contribute much more to an economy that could underpin an inclusive and prosperous country.”
VentureBeat: “At the heart of Microsoft’s strategy is what Lamanna calls the “agent mesh” – an interconnected system where AI agents collaborate to solve complex problems. Rather than operating in isolation, agents can pass tasks, messages, and knowledge seamlessly across the enterprise. Copilot Studio has been associated so far with agents that are triggered via chat, but now Microsoft is emphasizing any kind of actions. Imagine an enterprise where agents collaborate seamlessly: A sales agent triggers an inventory agent to check stock availability, which then notifies a customer service agent to update the client. This architecture includes: autonomous agents that detect events and trigger actions without human oversight, an orchestration layer that coordinates multiple specialized agents, and real-time monitoring tools that provide transparency into agent workflows.”
Nate Silver: “Why did polling still feel so unsatisfying? In a world where the parties are remarkably efficient at corralling voters and competing to a 50-50 split each time, polls aren’t going to provide the certainty we crave. We’d better get used to it: This is now the fourth election in a row in which the popular vote margin was within five points, something that has happened only once before in the country’s history, for six [US] elections between 1876 through 1896. The problems with polls are the same problems that plague politics. Polling has become a mirror that reflects the frustrating, even infuriating, nature of politics in America in 2024. Our politics are messy, and that is not something polls can fix. We’d better get used to that, too.”
Economist: 10 trends to watch in 2025. Among them: “Crunch time for AI: It’s the biggest gamble in business history: more than $1trn is being spent on data centres for artificial intelligence (AI), even though companies are still not sure how to use it and adoption rates are low (though many workers may simply be using it in secret). Will investors lose their nerve, or will AI prove its worth, as “agentic” systems become more capable and AI-developed drugs emerge?”
