Good evening!
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This is overdue to go out by a couple of months. So some of this is less cutting edge than it was, and there are some developments that have exciting. I shared some of the discoveries around meta materials, like time crystals, that care being integrated into physical materials. The line between the quantum and the observable tangible world is getting blurry, and that is wildly exciting. The state is on fire and I need to think about other things for a minute, so here you go.
- Time and energy are money. This has never been more true than in today's world of Ai and quantum computing. The faster we can process data with less energy, the better.
- venturebeat.com
Toyota is hoping to launch a solid state battery car with a 748 miile range in 2028. Meanwhile, Chery (the top selling Chinese brand overseas) unveiled a prototype pack with 1,300km (808 miles) range, production set for next year with full rollout in 2027. This pack has an energy density of 600Wh/kg. This is roughly 2x traditional battery. It uses an "in-situ polymerized solid electrolyte system with a lithium rich manganese cathode.", this chemistry means the risk of thermal runaway is avoided, it is immune to puncture, and can be submerged.
- A major breakthrough in quantum computing took place in Vienna where researchers successfully demonstrated the ability to rewind quantum time (no human based time travel still isn't possible, unless you count the process of remembering). This is valuable because it allows for the resetting of a qubit and it happens in real time. The stabilization of qubits may be close to 100% error free sooner than expected. One step closer to room temperature useful quantum computing.
- opg.optica.org/fulltext.cfm
- If you want to read more about quantum time states
- quantum-journal.org/q-2020-12-15-374
Amazon sued Perplexity! – Why? Because perplexity has an agentic shopping tool that was doing the work of shopping on Amazon on behalf of it's human users. Amazon claims the consumer is missing their "tailored shopping experience" (LOL!) Agentic bots aren't going to be susceptible to the same marketing tactics that humans are. The use of color to catch your eye? Useless. The big discount on an inflated price for a perceived "deal"? Doesn't work. Agentic Ai threatens Amazon's profits as Perplexity makes us savvy shoppers! (I fell prey to Amazon's tactics buying a ski boot bag yesterday, despite knowing I was getting played!)
- Long running large scale tasks are challenging. Meta and Harvard released the CCA (Confucius code agent). It is interesting in how it treats the engagement or experience of the User, the Developer AND the Agent!! Think about it this way. The Agent determines the best method for performing the task, and is now able to make that decision. The user, needs to understand and guide what is going on. The Developer needs to make sure it is correct and fix it when needed. In other words, this tool makes other tools work better.
- marktechpost.com
- I really like the Daily Dose. It's a good way to check in and not get overwhelmed. This one looks at Tokens, which are sort of how an LLM understands the text or speech you provide it to produce an artifact. There is a lot of work being done in this area to improve the speed (energy consumption) of the LLM by changing the Token. Subword Tokenization is one of those changes that allowed the LLM's to make big leaps forward.
- dailydoseofds.com/llmops-crash-course-part-2
- MCP – By now everyone has heard of Model Context Protocol. The interface that Open Ai adopted last May prompting the entire Ai world to also agree to adopt it. This was huge news, but what does it mean and how can it be leveraged. This one is way in the weeds, but don't worry, it is more digestible than Swedish flatbread.
- pbidax.wordpress.com
- The HIRI summit invited yours truly to share thoughts on Ai and technology. This is a 20 min video (that I think makes just as good audio only). Similar to what was delivered at FAST 2025, but with some additional thoughts and some more refined language. (The talk starts about min 1:11 with background an context)
- youtu.be/y6o0vTAGp8E
LAST THING!
Manus. It isn't new, but it made the news recently when Meta announced they were buying it for mucho dinero. Why? Because Manus is one of the few Agentic tools that can complete complex tasks fully, let you edit the results, add to the project, and maintain stability throughout the process. Meta hadn't figured it out, so they bought the company that did. Manus is an agentic tool that uses other AI tools (Claude, Nanobanana, etc.) to get things done. I'll send you examples and explanations in the next one of these!
- Enjoy!
- Michael
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