Technology Review: “Last year, China saw a boom in foundation models, the do-everything large language models that underpin the AI revolution. This year, the focus has shifted to AI agents—systems that are less about responding to users’ queries and more about autonomously accomplishing things for them. There are now a host of Chinese startups building these general-purpose digital tools, which can answer emails, browse the internet to plan vacations, and even design an interactive website…These emerging AI agents aren’t large language models themselves. Instead, they’re built on top of them, using a workflow-based structure designed to get things done. A lot of these systems also introduce a different way of interacting with AI. Rather than just chatting back and forth with users, they are optimized for managing and executing multistep tasks—booking flights, managing schedules, conducting research—by using external tools and remembering instructions.”
Mark Robichaux: “Our culture is obsessed with urgency, but winning doesn’t always mean being fastest to first. The deeper reward comes from staying in the race long enough to become who you were meant to be.”
FT: “For the first time in almost a generation, governments are starting to face regular resistance from investors when they try to sell long-term debt…“It’s a classic supply-and-demand mismatch problem, but on a global scale,” says Amanda Stitt, a fixed-income specialist at $1.6tn asset manager T Rowe Price. “The era of cheap, long-term funding is over, and now governments are jostling in a crowded room of sellers.” The reticence among some investors has taken 30-year government borrowing costs in countries such as the UK, Japan and the US to or near their highest in decades and moved the question of debt sustainability up the political agenda. In many countries, the mounting cost of servicing debt interest threatens to squeeze government spending in other areas.”
WSJ reviews “Proof”: “Adam Kucharski, a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, takes the reader on a fascinating tour of the history of what has counted as proof. Today, for example, we have computerized proofs by exhaustion, in which machines chew through examples so numerous that they could never be checked by humans. The author sketches the development of ever-more-rarefied mathematics, from calculus to the mind-bending work on different kinds of infinity by the Russian-German sage Georg Cantor, who proved that natural integers (1,2,3 . . . ) are somehow not more numerous than even numbers (2,4,6 . . .), even though the former set includes all the elements of the latter set, in addition to the one that contains all odd numbers. My favorite example is the Banach-Tarski paradox, which proves that you can disassemble a single sphere and reconstitute it into two spheres of identical size. Climbing the ladder of proof, we can enter a wild realm where intuitions break down completely.”
