Tim Cook: “When something becomes so much a part of you, it needs to reflect your style…We’re saying this product is so personal that it needs to reflect you. And you are the best person to decide what that means.”
Economist: “SLMs may become still more attractive as businesses deploy more AI agents. A little-noticed paper published in June by Nvidia Research, the chipmaker’s investigations arm, states boldly that “small, rather than large, language models are the future of agentic AI.” It notes that currently most agents are powered by LLMs, hosted by cloud service providers. The investment pouring into AI-related cloud infrastructure suggests that the market assumes that LLMs will remain the engines of agentic AI. The paper challenges that assumption, arguing that SLMs are sufficiently powerful to handle agentic tasks, and more economical (for instance, a 7bn-parameter model can be ten to 30 times cheaper to run than a model up to 25 times bigger). It says that SLMs may lead to a “Lego-like” approach to building agents, with firms using small, specialised experts, rather than one monolithic LLM intelligence.”
NYTimes: “In the near future (not tomorrow), the smartphone hardware may even be succeeded — though not replaced — by a new all-important personal computing device. A pair of A.I.-powered glasses or a bracelet, for example, will be aware of your surroundings, and your assistant will essentially coexist with you to offer help throughout the day, some tech executives predict. Every major tech company is thinking about this million-dollar question: What comes after the smartphone?” Options: Smart Glasses, The Ambient Computer, The Ambient Computer, The Recorder.”
WSJ: “Pokémon cards, which pay no dividends and aren’t subject to financial regulation, have seen a roughly 3,821% monthly cumulative return since 2004, according to an index by analytics firm Card Ladder tracking trading-card values through August. That trounces the S&P 500’s 483% jump over the same period. Meta Platforms, one of the Magnificent Seven, has climbed around 1,844% since the company went public in 2012.”
Steve Newman: “Back in April 2024, I claimed that agentic AI would require “fundamental advances” in four areas: memory, exploration, robust reasoning, and creative insight. For memory, there has been no fundamental advance, but context windows have increased substantially, from 128,000 tokens in GPT-4 Turbo to 400,000 for GPT-5 and 1,000,000 for Google’s Gemini. For exploration and robust reasoning, some would argue that “reasoning models” starting with OpenAI’s o1 constitute a fundamental advance. That leaves creative insight, which is hard to evaluate, but does not seem like the issue that is tripping up current experimental agents – it wasn’t a lack of creative insight that led Claude to claim that it could don a blue blazer and meet a customer in person. It’s hard to say exactly why, even with all this progress, current AI models are still so hopeless at dealing with open-ended real-world situations…In April 2024, it seemed like agentic AI was going to be the next big thing. The ensuing 16 months have brought enormous progress on many fronts, but very little progress on real-world agency.”
