👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

👋 I’ll be Speaking at AI in Action in Montréal!

I’m heading back to Montréal on May 5th for the AI in Action conference.

I am super excited for this conference as the AI conversation has moved from what’s possible to what’s actually working. In my talk, I’ll cover the latest trends in LLMs and SLMs, orchestration, and multi-agent systems. We’ll also explore how to prepare for the next major moment in the AI landscape.

I’m especially interested in comparing notes with founders, executives, and builders on what it takes to move from impressive demos to scaled products: distribution, evaluation, cost, UX, and the operational work that turns AI experiments into real workflows and businesses.

If you’ll be at AI in Action in Montréal on May 5th, or nearby that week, reply to this newsletter or on LinkedIn. I’d be glad to connect. If you’d like a discounted ticket, please reach out to me.

🤖 AI Reads

DeepSeek V4 — Almost on the Frontier, a Fraction of the Price

Notes: More on DeepSeek V4 which we covered last week. Huawei Ascend was supposedly used to train the model indicating that NVIDIA’s GPU stranglehold is weakening.

Mike - The Open Source Alternative to Harvey and Legora

Notes: I assume the naming is inspired from Suits. Great traction on GitHub for 3 day old release.

Agentic Harness Engineering: Observability-Driven Automatic Evolution of Coding-Agent Harnesses

Notes: Autoresearch for the coding agent harness itself.

Recursive Multi-Agent Systems

Notes: A very interesting paper, but not particularly relevant for system builders, more for AI architecture research.

browser-use / browser-harness: Self-Healing Harness That Enables LLMs to Complete Any Task

Notes: Another tool for chrome browser support for agents.

h4ckf0r0day / obscura: Headless Browser for AI Agents and Web Scraping

Notes: Yet another new tool for browser support. This one takes a different approach to make a completely headless experience.

dirac-run / dirac: Coding Agent Singularly Focused Efficiency and Context Curation

Notes: Neat Uses ASTs and Hash Anchored Edits. I would expect other popular coding agents to support these pretty soon.

shanraisshan / claude-code-best-practice

Notes: Neat repository (not mine) collecting much of the Claude Code plugins and workflows I shared in this newsletter over the past few months.

💼 Business Reads

Two NJ Malls Separated by Just Four Miles — and Very Different Fates

Notes: The high-end mall in Bellevue is also doing very well.

Most Prediction Market Traders Are Losing Money While Bots Rack Up Gains

Notes: I’m not surprised at all.

Mahjong Is the Third Place of the Moment for a Burned-Out Generation

Notes: I love the proliferation of new kinds of third places, loving that it’s Mahjong.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

👋 I’ll be Speaking at AI in Action in Montréal!

I’m heading back to Montréal on May 5th for the AI in Action conference.

I am super excited for this conference as the AI conversation has moved from what’s possible to what’s actually working. In my talk, I’ll cover the latest trends in LLMs and SLMs, orchestration, and multi-agent systems. We’ll also explore how to prepare for the next major moment in the AI landscape.

I’m especially interested in comparing notes with founders, executives, and builders on what it takes to move from impressive demos to scaled products: distribution, evaluation, cost, UX, and the operational work that turns AI experiments into real workflows and businesses.

If you’ll be at AI in Action in Montréal on May 5th, or nearby that week, reply to this newsletter or on LinkedIn. I’d be glad to connect. If you’d like a discounted ticket, please reach out to me.

🤖 AI Reads

OpenAI Introduces GPT‑5.5

Notes: OpenAI is putting the heat on Anthropic in the agentic coding market.

DeepSeek V4 Preview Release

Notes: DeepSeek is back with a release, but so far seems to be mostly on-par with other open weight models. The more interesting choices they made seem to be enabling their price war strategy. See read below.

DeepSeek Slashes Fees for New AI Model in Chinese Price War

Notes: I covered the DeepSeek price war previously in #64. They’re back at it again!

AgenticQwen: Training Small Agentic Language Models with Dual Data Flywheels for Industrial-Scale Tool Use

Notes: The Qwen team has an interesting paper out.

earthtojake / text-to-cad: An Open-Source Harness for Generating CAD Models

Notes: The demo looks great, but I am not sure how useful this really is for engineering firms. Anyone care to comment?

vercel-labs / agent-browser: Browser Automation CLI for AI Agents

Notes: Giving this a try tomorrow to see if it performs better than chrome-devtools-mcp.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🤖 AI Reads

Introducing Claude Opus 4.7

Notes: So much more expensive token wise, but quality is improved.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B: Agentic Coding Power, Now Open to All

Notes: It’s already replaced Qwen3.5 27B for my coding agent work locally. Reddit Thread, Unsloth Quantized Model on HuggingFace.

Thunderbolt — AI You Control

Notes: Important because it is being built by Mozilla. Blog Post.

rowboatlabs / rowboat: AI Coworker Turns Work into a Knowledge Graph

Notes: This project looks a lot like how I use Claude Code + WorkIQ at work.

forrestchang / andrej-karpathy-skills

Notes: Andrej Karpathy’s observations on LLM coding pitfalls fixed by a single Claude.md.

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now

Notes: Interesting article given all the Mythos discussions.

PurpleAILAB / Decepticon: Autonomous Red Team Testing

Notes: Open source projects equivalent to Mythos.

zubair-trabzada / geo-seo-claude

Notes: Interesting project for Generative AI SEO.

Cocoon-AI / architecture-diagram-generator

Notes: System architecture diagrams as a Claude Code skill.

thedotmack / claude-mem: Persistent Memory Compression System

Notes: I shared Claude-Mem previously, but worth a reshare.

tirth8205 / code-review-graph: Local Knowledge Graph for Claude Code

Notes: Uses ASTs of your project. Not sure how much of a lift this would give if you have LSP correctly configured.

nadimtuhin / claude-token-optimizer

Notes: A project documentation system for Claude that reduces token usage.

drona23 / claude-token-efficient: Keeps Claude Responses Terse

Notes: Implemented as a single CLAUDE.md file.

JuliusBrussee / caveman: Why Use Many Tokens When Few Do Trick

Notes: Similar to the above, but funnier and with a more complex implementation (skills and MCP server).

💼 Business Reads

Stanford’s 2026 AI Index Report

Notes: A very important report to read every year. Great insights!

AI adoption is spreading at historic speed, and consumers are deriving substantial value from tools they often access for free.

Your Startup Is Probably Dead On Arrival

Notes: From the famous Steve Blank.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🤖 AI Reads

Project Glasswing a.k.a. Claude Mythos

Notes: Rightfully caused a panic in the markets with respect to cybersecurity. Ignore the hype and criticism on all sides. Given the quality level of coding agent automation driven by frontier LLMs since November 2025, it’s a no-brainer that we’re entering a new cybersecurity era. Also read Wired.

multica-ai / multica: Open-Source Managed Agents Platform

Notes: Competing open source project to Claude Managed Agents.

getcompanion-ai / feynman: Four Bundled Research Agents, Dispatched Automatically

Notes: Kind of similar to Model Council.

Meta-Harness: End-to-End Optimization of Model Harnesses

Notes: Autoresearch for your autoresearch.

garrytan / gbrain: Garry's Opinionated OpenClaw / Hermes Agent Brain

Notes: Garry Tan’s opinionated OpenClaw setup.

The Art of Building Verifiers for Computer Use Agents

Notes: This is a really interesting paper for Microsoft Research (not my department).

LFM2.5-VL-450M: Structured Visual Intelligence, Edge to Cloud

Notes: New model from MIT’s Liquid AI.

Mistral Launches Voxtral 4B TTS 2603

Notes: Outperforms ElevenLabs’s closed source model.

💼 Business Reads

Wall Street Banks Try Out Anthropic’s Mythos & Bank of Canada, Major Lenders Met on Anthropic AI Cyber Risk

Notes: I hope there will be a renewed pushed for improved cybersecurity everywhere, not just banks.

Japan Bets $16 Billion to Propel Rapidus in Global AI Chip Race

Notes: More competition for Nvidia is good.

Hermès Sticks With Plan to Raise Output

Notes: This is honestly a surprise to me, but I guess demand is so high that bad vibes wouldn’t lower demand for several years. P.S. Hermès’ flagship store in Japan is something else.

🔀 Other Reads

rtk-ai / rtk: CLI Proxy That Reduces LLM Token Consumption by 60–90% on Common Dev Commands

Notes: Hooks into coding agents like Claude, OpenCode, Codex, etc. to remove unnecessary tokens from common commands like ls, cat, grep, etc. One of my favorite things about the coding agent revolution is the revival of interest in terminal-based development and the explosive growth of CLI tools, (e.g. ripgrep, bat, exa, etc. all new-to-me).

coast-guard / coasts: Localhost Service Isolation and Orchestration for Git Worktrees

Notes: Another approach for coding agent isolation.

Freestyle: Sandboxes for Coding Agents

Notes: YC startup focused on coding agent isolation and sandboxing for enterprise.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

Apologies for missing last week, the whole family caught a new variant of Covid which escaped our existing immunity. Felt surreal to lose my sense of taste again.

🤖 AI Reads

Biggest News of the Past Two Weeks: Claude Code Leaked

Notes: Original leak was through their npm registry, read this HN thread. The title link is to ccleaks which breaks down all the unreleased features. Read this analysis too along with the HN comments. Claude Code was rewritten in Rust using Codex in this open source project so as to be free from DMCA takedowns. Also, read this Reddit thread.

✨ Google Releases Gemma 4: Maximize Intelligence-Per-Parameter

Notes: 4 new models: E2B, E4B, 26B-A4B, 31B. I’m already running 26B-A4B and 31B locally. They are excellent! Gemma 4 31B might replace the Qwen 3.5 family of models in my local deployment (Qwen 3.5 is also new, see #142).

Liquid AI's LFM2.5-350M: No Size Left Behind

Notes: MIT’s Liquid AI is pushing impressive models at very small sizes.

thedotmack / claude-mem: Better Memory for Claude Code

Notes: Overkill for most projects unless it is >100K LOC and even then…

Nimbalyst: The Visual Workspace for Building with Codex and Claude Code

Notes: Neat project, but it’s hard to beat the customization you can build with any old-school terminal.

TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate

Notes: This paper supposedly lead to memory manufacturing stocks to decline. Yes, it’s a great development, but the stock market reaction was overblown.

Agents of Chaos

Notes: Paper covering extensive red-teaming of deployed agents.

PivotRL: High Accuracy Agentic Post-Training at Low Compute Cost

Notes: Interesting paper for subscribers fine-tuning for agentic scenarios.

OpenClaw Arena

Notes: StepFun 3.5 Flash is number one! Congratulations to ex-STCA friends!

NVIDIA OpenShell

Notes: My local setup looks a lot like this new open source project from Nvidia, except without the K8s overkill, but with the same network activity filtering to locked down VMs. GitHub.

Lemonade: Refreshingly Fast LLMs on GPUs and NPUs

Notes: Supported by AMD. Another inference tool for running LLMs locally on AMD hardware.

Simon Willison is a subscriber favorite. Great interview with Lenny:

🔀 Other Reads

Supply Chain Attack on Axios Pulls Malicious Dependency from npm & LiteLLM Hack: Were You One of the 47,000?

Notes: The number of supply chain attacks is getting unwieldy…

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🤖 AI Reads

Thoughts on OpenAI Acquiring Astral and uv/Ruff/Ty

Notes: I’m a little worried about uv. It truly solved so many problems with the Python packaging ecosystem that I would hate to go back. The acquisition seems to be in the same spirit as Anthropic’s acquisition of Bun. Is this the beginning of a new era of developer tooling funding and acquisition? Which VC-backed devtools startup would you bet on next?

Markdown as a Protocol for Agentic UI

Notes: For those building chat applications, this is an interesting approach to Generative UI.

pablodelucca / pixel-agents: Pixel Office

Notes: Is everything just a game now?

ComposioHQ / agent-orchestrator: Orchestrator for Parallel Coding Agents

Notes: Yet another coding agent orchestration framework.

hardikpandya / stop-slop: A Skill File for Removing AI Tells From Prose

Notes: A skills version of Signs of AI Writing from Wikipedia?

Mistral Forge: Build Your Own Frontier Models

Notes: Similar to Thinking Machines Lab and other startups.

💼 Business Reads

The AI Shift: Is This the ‘Take Off’ Moment for AI Agents?

Notes: Distribution is ever more important. I recorded a podcast with Framework.vc that touched on this topic.

Welcome to Paris, the City That Said No to Cars

Notes: I had the chance to experience many of these improvements in Paris last year. It definitely felt significantly more human-scale than my previous visit over a decade ago.

🔀 Other Reads

‘Project Hail Mary’ Review: Ryan Gosling Is Lost and Found in Space

Notes: A fantastic movie, I loved it! It was adapted from a novel written by Andy Weir, so it was similar in spirit to The Martian.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

👋 I’ll be a Mentor at Startupfest Montréal!

I am excited to be returning to Montréal (my hometown) this summer as a mentor at Startupfest.

Startupfest is one of the premier events in the Montréal startup ecosystem. It’s been around for longer than my career in tech. It’s also an excellent excuse to fly up to the city and experience our glorious patio summers!

Looking forward to connecting with founders and entrepreneurs building the next generation of AI startups, sharing lessons from scaling products from zero to global scale, and contributing back to the startup and tech community that launched my career.

If you’ll be attending Startupfest or will be in Montreal around the July 8 - 10 and would like to connect, feel free to reply to this newsletter. I also have a 15% discount code available for tickets.

🤖 AI Reads

bytedance / deer-flow: An Open-Source SuperAgent Harness That Researches, Codes, and Creates

Notes: Interesting project from ByteDance. Similar to OpenClaw, Autoresearch, and other clones.

LLM Architecture Gallery

Notes: Very cool poster from Sebastian Raschka.

I spent way too much time Claude Coding this past week… Just a short interjection, none of the spec frameworks, skills, plugins, etc. that I am sharing solve the problem of “taste”. In other words, what should be built when anything can be built.

Fission-AI / OpenSpec: Spec-Driven Development (SDD) for AI Coding Assistants

Notes: I shared in a previous newsletter, but worth re-sharing. Lighter than Spec Kit.

github / spec-kit: Toolkit to Help You Get Started With Spec-Driven Development

Notes: Supports almost all the coding agents (GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, etc).

bmad-code-org / BMAD-METHOD: Breakthrough Method for Agile Ai Driven Development

Notes: More opinionated.

obra / superpowers: An Agentic Skills Framework & Software Development Methodology That Works

Notes: Neat collection of skills.

obra / double-shot-latte: Claude Code Plugin That Automatically Evaluates Whether Claude Should Continue Working

Notes: Claude for Claude.

garrytan / gstack : Garry Tan’s Exact Claude Code Setup

Notes: Garry Tan runs YC.

777genius / claude-notifications-go

Notes: Customize Claude Code notifications.

💼 Business Reads

Services: The New Software

Notes: From Sequoia Capital, an excellent read for all founders. If you were to only pick one read this week, pick this one.

AI Startup Moonshot Snags Funds at $18 Billion Valuation

Notes: Kimi K2.5 is pretty good.

Asia Tech Review

China is obsessed with OpenClaw

China is obsessed with OpenClaw, the platform for creating AI agents that can carry out tasks…

Read more

2 months ago · 1 like · Jon Russell

🔀 Other Reads

Hammerspoon

Notes: Much much more flexible than AppleScript.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🎙️ Podcast with Framework Venture Partners

I recently sat down with Mikhail Karmali from Framework Venture Partners for a wide-ranging conversation recorded at my kitchen table. 🙂 We discussed how the LLM era is compressing traditional SaaS models faster than many appreciate. The cost and complexity of building software has fallen dramatically, yet the enterprise buy-vs-build bar has never been higher. Listen to it on Spotify!

I would love to hear your thoughts, reply directly to the newsletter.

✅ Innovation Governance Program Level 1

I'm pleased to share that I've completed Level 1 of the Innovation Governance Program (iGP) from the Council of Canadian Innovators | Conseil canadien des innovateurs (CCI).

The program focuses on the realities of governing innovation-driven companies, for example; how boards support founders, oversee risk in fast-moving technology environments, and provide strategic guidance while maintaining effective oversight. It was valuable to learn alongside a strong cohort of operators and leaders from across Canada's innovation ecosystem.

Governance is an increasing area of focus for me and I'm particularly interested in the role boards can play in shaping the responsible development and deployment of AI technologies, ensuring innovation is paired with strong oversight, safety, and long-term strategic thinking.

I'm open to board or advisory board opportunities, particularly with companies building in AI, software, and emerging technologies. If you're building a board or governance structure and think my background could be helpful, I'd welcome the conversation.

🤖 AI Reads

Alibaba’s Qwen3.5-Medium Models Offer Sonnet 4.5 Performance

Notes: I was testing qwen3.5-35b-a3b this weekend. Full GPU offload with a decent context size is possible on a RTX 4090. It’s shockingly good. It may become my default coding model. The 35B-A3B model seems to be close enough to Claude Opus 4.6 per this study. Simon Willison shared news of potential personnel changes at Qwen. Unsloth posted an article on How to Run Qwen3.5 Locally. Find the models on HuggingFace. Read this X Post from Alibaba.

karpathy / autoresearch: AI Agents Running Research on Single-GPU NanoChat Training Automatically

Notes: Just goodness from Andrej Karpathy.

Introduction to LLM Post-Training Techniques

Notes: From Maxime Labonne at Liquid AI. Great ML scientist to follow.

Olmo WebGPU: Run Olmo Hybrid Directly in Your Browser

Notes: Always nice to see Edge AI projects being released by big research labs like AI2.

ruvnet / ruvector: RuVector is a Self-Learning, Vector Graph Neural Network, and Database

Notes: Interesting open source project.

builderz-labs / mission-control: Open-Source Dashboard for AI Agent Orchestration

Notes: I haven’t tried it yet because I already built my own control plane for my AI agents.

🔀 Other Reads

A Wave of Unexplained Bot Traffic Is Sweeping the Web

Notes: Hey look Ma, I made it! The vast majority of the traffic to my website and Substack over the last 90 days is from Lanzhou.

the peculiar case of japanese web design

Notes: An old article (2022), but a super fun read.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🎙️ Podcast with Framework Venture Partners

I recently sat down with Mikhail Karmali from Framework Venture Partners for a wide-ranging conversation recorded at my kitchen table. 🙂 We discussed how the LLM era is compressing traditional SaaS models faster than many appreciate. The cost and complexity of building software has fallen dramatically, yet the enterprise buy-vs-build bar has never been higher. Listen to it on Spotify!

I would love to hear your thoughts, reply directly to the newsletter.

🤖 AI Reads

The 2-Minute Claude Code Upgrade You’re Probably Missing: LSP

Notes: It’s unsurprising that a decade’s worth of investment in the Language Server Protocol would enable code search to outperform basic grep and find operations.

microgpt

Notes: Another fantastic article from Andrej Karpathy.

Introducing Mercury 2: Fastest Reasoning LLM, Powered by Diffusion

Notes: Mercury 2 is the current SOTA diffusion model.

LFM2-24B-A2B: Scaling Up the LFM2 Architecture

Notes: New model release from Liquid AI (MIT).

gsd-build / get-shit-done: Meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven development system for Claude Code

Notes: Neat project for Claude Code.

💼 Business Reads

Claude Code and the Great Productivity Panic of 2026

Notes: In tech, no one’s sleeping anymore.

AI Is Proving a 100-Year-Old Prediction True

Notes: An interesting thought experiment on leisure time.

SatPost by Trung Phan

How Hermès Sells "Time"

Thanks for subscribing to SatPost…

Read more

2 years ago · 135 likes · 19 comments · Trungphan2

🔀 Other Reads

Let’s Discuss Sandbox Isolation

Notes: Highly relevant article detailing the differences between each sandbox isolation method. Personally, I use full virtual machines for each of my coding agents with an isolated non-root user account within that VM. Each VM can’t connect to anything in my local network (enforced at multiple layers), and only has access to specific IPs pulled from DNS records that are refreshed every day. I took inspiration from Claude Code’s .devcontainer, but went further than Docker containers. Docker has a microVM feature in “experimentation” mode, but they aren’t easily customizable, so full VMs it is!

The Latest Destination for Bagels Isn’t New York. It’s Singapore

Notes: Another reason to visit Singapore!

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🎙️ Podcast with Framework Venture Partners

I recently sat down with Mikhail Karmali from Framework Venture Partners for a wide-ranging conversation recorded at my kitchen table. 🙂 We discussed how the LLM era is compressing traditional SaaS models faster than many appreciate. The cost and complexity of building software has fallen dramatically, yet the enterprise buy-vs-build bar has never been higher. Listen to it on Spotify!

I would love to hear your thoughts, reply directly to the newsletter.

🤖 AI Reads

2026 Agentic Coding Trends Report

Notes: Anthropic released a coding agent trend report.

Amp: Coding Agents Engineered For The Frontier

Notes: Did anyone give AMP a try?

standardagents / dmux: A dev agent multiplexer for git worktrees and claude code (or other agents)

Notes: A terminal version of Conductor.

Half the AI Agent Market Is One Category. The Rest Is Wide Open

Notes: So much opportunity.

Think Deep, Not Just Long: Measuring LLM Reasoning Effort via Deep-Thinking Tokens

Notes: Good paper from Google.

The ratio of deep-thinking tokens correlates more reliably with accuracy than token count or confidence metrics across mathematical and scientific benchmarks (AIME 24/25, HMMT 25, GPQA-diamond), tested on DeepSeek-R1, Qwen3, and GPT-OSS.

Hello Entire World

Notes: A massive seed round to solve agent - developer collaboration by the former CEO of GitHub.

GGML and llama.cpp Join HuggingFace

Notes: Huge news for the open source, local AI movement.

💼 Business Reads

Cyber Stocks Slide as Anthropic Unveils Claude Security Tool

Notes: More software stock selling…

Autonomous Market Intelligence: Agentic AI Nowcasting Predicts Stock Returns

Notes: Another excellent paper using Agents to generate alpha.

We find that AI possesses genuine stock selection ability, but only for identifying top winners. Longing the 20 highest-ranked stocks generates a daily Fama-French five-factor plus momentum alpha of 18.5 basis points and an annualised Sharpe ratio of 2.43.

An Investor’s Guide to Gen Alpha

Notes: Fun read from Bloomberg.

Millennials Melted Their Brains With Screens. Their Kids Want None of It

Notes: Gen Alpha is right. There is a great market for the Light Phone.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🤖 AI Reads

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me & Follow Up & More

Notes: The most important story of the week. Seriously.

Moltbook Was Peak AI Theater

Notes: Sigh.

The reality is much more mundane.

Agyn: A Multi-Agent System for Team-Based Autonomous Software Engineering

Notes: From a team at MILA (Montréal).

LLaDA2.1: Speeding Up Text Diffusion via Token Editing

Notes: From the Ant Group. Impressive work!

Beyond RAG for Agent Memory: Retrieval by Decoupling and Aggregation

Notes: Interesting paper from King College London.

alibaba / zvec: A Lightweight In-Process Vector Database

Notes: Benchmarks.

My AI Adoption Journey

Notes: From the famous Mitchell Hashimoto.

💼 Business Reads

Why the Hotel Bakery Is Becoming as Popular as the Hotel Bar

Notes: I am 100% all-in on this trend. Food has been a primary motivator for our choice of travel destinations. Glad we’re not the only ones.

Wealth Manager Stocks Sink as Traders Flee Next AI Casualty

Notes: Tech PE is dead.

🔀 Other Reads

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

Please excuse the briefness of the newsletter today, it was the Super Bowl and our Seattle Seahawks won! #12

🤖 AI Reads

RentAHuman.ai

Notes: So we are here now… Not surprising to be honest.

Introducing Claude Opus 4.6 & Introducing GPT-5.3-Codex

Notes: Fierce competition this week between Anthropic and OpenAI. Meanwhile, I’m very happy with my local LLM setup.

Qwen3-Coder-Next: Pushing Small Hybrid Models on Agentic Coding

Notes: Qwen3-Coder-Next does well on the benchmarks for its size but I haven’t tried it yet.

Learning to Reason in 13 Parameters

Notes: From Meta’s FAIR.

💼 Business Reads

How Digital Business Models Are Evolving in the Age of Agentic AI

Notes: From MIT Sloan.

The Best Tech Movies Predicted Three Features Of The Digital Age

Notes: Minority Report is one of my all-time favorite movies.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

🤖 AI Reads

OpenClaw - Personal AI Assistant & Moltbook

Notes: OpenClaw (previously Clawdbot & Moltbot) is both exciting and terrifying. Honestly, the main innovation is how the project built-in relay between all the messaging platforms and a local LLM running 24/7. The uptake has been pretty impressive because of how easy it is to setup and have it control an entire computer, but that is terrifying for your security (prompt injection vulnerabilities, credential leaking, etc.) This comment on HackerNews nails it (Read more of HackerNews).

We are back in the glorious era of eval($user_supplied_script).

Related to OpenClaw is Moltbook. Moltbook went viral, but it opens such a giant attack vector to your data and machine that it’s already been compromised. had a memorable quip:

Don’t catch a CTD — chatbot transmitted disease.

If you’re going to run OpenClaw, please please please do so in a virtual machine or a separate machine segregated from your main network without access to any of your real accounts & data.

Mistral Launches Vibe 2.0

Notes: It’s pretty good now. See the official blog post.

DeepSeek-OCR 2: Visual Causal Flow

Notes: Also see HuggingFace and GitHub.

MiniMax M2.1: Significantly Enhanced Multi-Language Programming, Built for Real-World Complex Tasks

Notes: Released in 2025 while I was OOO.

GLM-4.7: Advancing the Coding Capability

Notes: Also released in 2025 while I was OOO.

Introducing SAM Audio: Unified Multimodal Model for Audio Separation

Notes: From Meta, an impressive audio model.

resemble-ai / chatterbox: SOTA Open-Source TTS

Notes: Claims to perform better than Cartesia, ElevenLabs, VibeVoice. Unsure how it performs compared to Qwen3-TTS.

VoxCPM: Tokenizer-Free TTS for Context-Aware Speech Gen

Notes: Models speech in a continuous space.

glittercowboy / get-shit-done

Notes: Open source, lightweight, meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven development system for Claude Code and OpenCode.

The Dragon Hatchling: The Missing Link between the Transformer and Models of the Brain

Notes: Interesting paper from Montréal-connected scientists.

💼 Business Reads

How London Became the Rest of the World’s Startup Capital

Notes: LA's ecosystem consistently surprises me. I need to explore LA more. Peter Walker from Carta put this chart together.

(Apple) Margin Call

Notes: Apple’s gross margins continue to grow despite Apple’s size.

🔀 Other Reads

UK House Price Heatmap

Notes: Neat website in you’re in the UK.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

Happy New Year! We're back to our regular publishing schedule. Catch up on yesterday's newsletter where I shared my plans for 2026, it’s worth a quick read!

🤖 AI Reads

Ollama Launches Claude Code, Open Code, Codex & Droid Support

Notes: Ollama & LM Studio are my go-to tools for running local large language models easily. Ollama just made it easy to configure Claude Code to work against a variety of local coding models (GPT-OSS 20B, Qwen3-Coder, etc.)

Qwen3-TTS Family Open Sourced: Voice Design, Clone, and Generation

Notes: Really really really good TTS model from Alibaba.

Sopro TTS

Notes: Lighter weight TTS model with voice cloning than Qwen3-TTS (169M parameters)

Soprano: Instant, Ultra‑Realistic Text‑to‑Speech

Notes: Even lighter weight English-only TTS model, but extremely small (80M parameters).

Ministral 3 Paper

Notes: Mistral AI’s papers are always worth a read.

TranslateGemma Technical Report

Notes: Translation model from Google. Download from HuggingFace.

Demystifying Evals For AI Agents

Notes: Great introduction on evals from Anthropic. Read this first and then look at Evalry.

Evalry: Compare 300+ LLM Models on Your Use Case

Notes: Often repeated in this newsletter, benchmark models against your own use cases. Here’s a tool to help you do it.

💼 Business Reads

What Stanley Kubrick Got Right About Artificial Intelligence

Notes: Fun read!

Addy Osmani On The Next Two Years of Software Engineering

Notes: Spot on. I particularly like the recommendations for junior engineers.

Singapore Pours $786 Million Into Race to Become AI Powerhouse

Notes: Good announcement! More details here.

🔀 Other Reads

YC Startup Genealogy

Notes: Neat website!

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

Happy New Year! This edition is being sent on Saturday, outside of the usual Sunday publishing schedule. This isn’t a numbered edition; a regular Rami’s Readings will be sent tomorrow. Today, I am sharing a preview of what I have planned for 2026 for this community and beyond. I’m super excited about the year ahead, so let’s dive in!

Apéro & Intellect

Reflecting on the past two of years of Apéro & Intellect, the small group format (6-8 people) was the most enjoyable. My plan is to maintain this format, with more frequent scheduling in the Greater Seattle area, and occasional scheduling in other US and Canadian cities. The event will continue to be by application or invitation only, with priority given to super-fans of newsletter. What’s new:

• Due to travel limitations in 2026, I’ll be introducing a virtual option with special priority for subscribers outside of Seattle.

• I’m planning a limited number of “premium” events that will either have paid tickets or sponsors. These will be infrequent in 2026 and mostly held in Seattle. If you’re interested in sponsoring an AI brunch or dinner, please reply directly to this email or message me on LinkedIn.

• I am planning on launching a dedicated website for Apéro & Intellect, but for now, expect all announcements to continue to be shared via Rami’s Readings.

Conferences & Meetups

My travel schedule will be lighter in 2026 due to family commitments, but I’m planning on speaking at a few conferences. Two conferences are confirmed, and I am open to adding one to two more. If you have any suggestions or if you’d like me to speak at a private event, please reply directly to this email or message me on LinkedIn. Confirmed conferences:

• The AI in Action Series: Montreal on May 5th, 2026.

• The AI in Actions Series: Boston on October 6th, 2026.

Startup Investing with Framework.vc

As many of you have seen on LinkedIn, I joined the fabulous Framework Venture Partners as a Venture Partner, in addition to my existing role at Microsoft AI. Framework is one of Canada’s leading venture firms, and I’m looking forward to working alongside their exceptional team and supporting their portfolio companies.

I’m particularly excited for the opportunity to bridge Canadian 🍁 Venture Capital and West Coast Tech. If you are based in Seattle, developing an AI or FinTech startup, and looking to work with me and the amazing team at Framework.vc, send me an email at rami@framework.vc.

📈 My Favorite Editions in 2025

A few of my favorite editions from 2025:

If you enjoyed the newsletter, please share it with a friend. Referrals are well rewarded, see the leaderboard.

Refer a friend

📈 Top Three Editions in 2025 According to Substack

Share Rami’s Readings

Wishing you a happy and successful 2026! Happy New Year! Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack

Vacation Notice: Starting tomorrow until the middle of January, I’ll be on a holiday break. You might receive a few surprise newsletters during this time. Wishing you a splendid end to the year!

🤖 AI Reads

Introducing Devstral 2 & Mistral Vibe CLI

Notes: Excellent release from Mistral! Devstral Small 2 has already replaced GPT-OSS-20B for my fun projects. Per SWE-Bench Verified, Devstral Small 2 (24B) outperforms the much larger GPT-OSS-120B. It runs fast on my RTX 4090. Ollama model link.

Introducing GPT-5.2

Notes: Three things caught my eye in the latest GPT-5.2 release from OpenAI.

1. “New knowledge cutoff of August 2025”. The previous 5.x models knowledge cutoffs were September 2024.

2. Pricing is 🚀

3. The ARC-AGI improvement is wild!

ARC-AGI-1 (Verified), a benchmark designed to measure general reasoning ability, GPT‑5.2 Pro is the first model to cross the 90% threshold, improving from 87%⁠ by o3‑preview last year while reducing the cost of achieving that performance by roughly 390×.

Introducing Rerank 4: Cohere’s Most Powerful Reranker Yet

Notes: Outperforms the Qwen3-Reranker model family.

Towards a Science of Scaling Agent Systems

Notes: Some problems are best solved by teams, while others are not so much.

Centralized coordination improves performance by 80.9% on parallelizable tasks like financial reasoning, while decentralized coordination excels on dynamic web navigation (+9.2% vs. +0.2%). Yet for sequential reasoning tasks, all multi-agent variants degraded performance by 39-70%.

llama-farm / llamafarm: Deploy Any AI Model, Agent, Database, RAG, and Pipeline Locally or Remotely in Minutes

Notes: Fairly opinionated, the project uses Ollama & Chroma as default.

CocoIndex: Data Transformation for AI

Notes: Written in Rust. Example usage: Building a Knowledge Graph from meeting notes that automatically updates.

How We Made 100M Vector Indexing in 20 Minutes Possible on PostgreSQL

Notes: Engineering fundamentals win again. VectorChord is another PostgreSQL extension for vector search.

Strategic Decision Framework for Enterprise LLM Adoption

Notes: Interesting framework. It’s a fast read.

Interconnects

2025 Open Models Year in Review

Welcome to the first Artifacts Recap, where we highlight the most notable and impactful open model releases of this year. And what a year it has been! Starting into the year, the open model landscape was seen as lagging behind severely, with open models being mostly a choice for those who needed privacy or wanted to fine-tune models for their use cases…

Read more

5 months ago · 14 likes · 7 comments · Florian Brand and Nathan Lambert

💼 Business Reads

Oracle Debt Trades Like Junk as Bond, CDS Spreads Flare

Notes: Yikes.

How the Dollar Store Industry Overcharges Cash Strapped Customers While Promising Low Prices

Notes: In my experience, it is not just dollar stores. We have developed a habit of taking pictures of prices and checking what appears on the register, even at fancy grocery stores. It is rare that there isn’t at least one pricing mistake.

The 82 Books That Top Business Leaders Couldn’t Put Down

Notes: I’m looking forward to the holiday break to read 1929.

AI Leaders Eye New Breakthrough to Build More Powerful Models

Notes: I previously shared research in this space in the newsletter. Check out MIT’s SEAL.

🔀 Other Reads

Disk Prices

Notes: Neat website that tracks disk prices across most form factors and technologies.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack

The most important AI conference, NeurIPS 2025, ends today. Sadly, I was not able to attend due to family commitments, but I would love to hear from my subscribers who went. Just reply to this email!

🤖 AI Reads

Titans: Learning to Memorize at Test Time & It’s All Connected: A Journey Through Test-Time Memorization, Attentional Bias, Retention, and Online Optimization

Notes: From Google. #NeurIPS2025

Pass@K Policy Optimization: Solving Harder Reinforcement Learning Problems

Notes: Another great technical paper. #NeurIPS2025

Nobody Is Talking About a Bubble at the World’s Biggest AI Research Conference

Notes: For my 🇨🇦 Canadian subscribers, The Logic has a great article with an interview roundup from Canadian AI leaders. #NeurIPS2025

DeepSeek-V3.2 Release

Notes: New model update from DeepSeek. Follows on the heels of DeepSeekMath-V2.

Introducing Mistral 3

Notes: Another very good model from the French company Mistral. Also, not to be missed the Ministral models designed to run on the edge. From Bloomberg, France’s Mistral Debuts New Models to Keep Pace in AI Race.

STARFlow-V: End-to-End Video Generative Modeling with Normalizing Flows

Notes: An open weights vision understanding model from Apple.

💼 Business Reads

Microsoft Is the House That Excel Built

Notes: In the back of my mind, I always wonder whether a startup’s SaaS offering is simply a replacement for Excel. Reminder, I work for Microsoft.

Netflix to Buy Warner Bros. in Historic $72 Billion Deal

Notes: Writing of spreadsheets… I would love to see the synergy spreadsheet for this M&A deal. I wonder if my friend Cape will make one? 😉

AI’s Future May Be Written in Railroads’ Past

Notes: So much ink has been spilled writing discussing whether we are in an AI bubble. Many business historians are comparing it with the Railroad booms and busts. This read will catch you up. Another interview making the rounds on the Internet: IBM CEO says there is ‘no way’ spending trillions on AI data centers will pay off at today’s infrastructure costs.

AI Cash Ignites a Boom for Multimillion-Dollar San Francisco Homes

Notes: Not surprising.

Andy Konwinski Went From Jehovah’s Witness Outcast to AI Evangelist

Notes: This article is really about Andy Konwinski and the Laude Institute.

What a Country Gives Up When IKEA Finally Arrives

Notes: IKEA is entering New Zealand. I do find it surprising that the Billy bookcase can be used to compare purchasing power, like the McDonald’s Big Mac.

Take the Billy bookcase. IKEA estimates one sells every five seconds worldwide. It’s so ubiquitous that Bloomberg used it in 2015 to compare purchasing power around the world.

I loved Auckland, New Zealand.

🔀 Other Reads

Bun Is Joining Anthropic

Notes: Bun is alternative Node.js runtime that is significantly faster than mainline Node.js.

A Luxury Watch Gift Guide for Every Specific Person in Your Life

Notes: For my friends in NYC.

As Beef Prices Soar, So Does New York’s Burger Scene

Notes: The best burger I have ever had was in a random bar in NYC.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack

🤖 AI Reads

DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning

Notes: Excellent and thought-provoking paper from DeepSeek. It echoes much of Yann Lecun’s points. Subscribers, please read everything DeepSeek publishes!

INTELLECT-3: A 100B+ MoE Trained with Large-Scale RL

Notes: Frontier results on a number of benchmarks, but they open sourced much of their training infrastructure. Paper.

MMaDA-Parallel: Multimodal Large Diffusion Language Models for Thinking-Aware Editing and Generation

Notes: More diffusion model papers.

Image Diffusion Models Exhibit Emergent Temporal Propagation in Videos

Notes: Pretty cool paper from South Korea.

AI Agents in Action: Foundations for Evaluation and Governance

Notes: From the World Economic Forum.

Fara-7B: An Efficient Agentic Model for Computer Use

Notes: Not from my group (see disclosure).

💼 Business Reads

Worldwide Markets Roiled by Data-Center Snafu in Chicago Suburb

Notes: I often discuss datacenter energy demands, but innovation in datacenter cooling is also desperately needed.

US Options Market Grapples With ‘Concentration Risk’ in Clearing

Notes: How many of you are trading 0DTE?

Every listed US options trade goes through The Options Clearing Corp., a central counterparty that handles more than 70 million contracts a day during busy periods. The trades are submitted to the OCC by its members — who help trades get to the clearing house and act as guarantors in case their clients go bust.

Jakarta Has Overtaken Tokyo to Become the World’s Largest City

Notes: Any travel recommendations? I haven’t visited.

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack

This week was fun! There were so many new models and projects to explore. ☺️

🤖 AI Reads

Gemini 3: A New Era of Intelligence

Notes: An incredible model release from Google. It’s wildly impressive! Read on Gemini 3.

Nano Banana Pro: Gemini 3 Pro Image Model

Notes: Another fantastic release from Google! I really like the generated images from this model.

SAM 3: Segment Anything with Concepts

Notes: State-of-the-art image segmentation with text prompts on images and videos. Paper.

Olmo 3: Charting a Path Through the Model Flow to Lead Open-Source AI

Notes: Seattle-based Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) released Olmo 3. Just a reminder, everything about the Olmo model family is open-source.

From at Ai2:

Interconnects

Latest open artifacts (#16): Who's building models in the U.S., China's model release playbook, and a resurgence of truly open models

This holiday season, remember you can give the gift of Interconnects (or reimburse your subscription with your company’s learning budget…

Read more

6 months ago · 7 likes · Nathan Lambert and Florian Brand

TiDAR: Think in Diffusion, Talk in Autoregression

Notes: Text diffusion is all the rage right now. This paper and model architecture from Nvidia combines diffusion and autoregression.

karpathy / llm-council

Notes: Karphathy was having fun vibe coding yesterday! It’s a cool idea, but I can already smell the GPUs burning if used in production at scale.

StarlightSearch / EmbedAnything

Notes: No PyTorch! Completely built in Rust. Cool open source project supporting multiple model file formats.

Early Science Acceleration Experiments with GPT-5

Notes: Sebastian Bubek’s paper on science acceleration with GPT-5 (ex-MSFT, now OpenAI).

💼 Business Reads

Samsung’s 60% DRAM Price Hike Signals a New Phase of Global Memory Tightening

Notes: This is for the same DRAM sticks too… I am certain at this point that if I calculate how much my RTX4090 hardware build from 2023 costs today, it would be about the same or even 20% more, even after accounting for inflation.

The Godmother of AI Didn’t Expect It to Be This Massive

Notes: Great interview with Fei-Fei Li!

Banned Bond Tactic That Turns 8% Yields Into 16% Is Roaring Back

Notes: Yikes… Bond markets everywhere are important.

🔀 Other Reads

Preserving Code That Shaped Generations: Zork I, II, and III Go Open Source

Notes: I love coding history preservation projects! (From my employer).

An Untapped Trove of ’80s Vintage Luxury Draws Fashionistas to Japan

Notes: Vintage watches too!

Signing off from Redmond, WA.

👋🏼 Welcome New Subscribers

Hello! A hearty thank you for subscribing to Rami's Readings! There are quite a few new subscribers this week, thanks to recommendations from The AI Ethics Brief, Product Byte, and The VC Corner. I am thrilled to have you on board! In this newsletter, I curate the best papers, tweets, and articles I have read during the week focusing on LLMs, AI, economics, business, and technology news. You can learn more about me on my website.

📈 Top Recent Editions According to Substack

Friends! Rami’s Readings crossed 1000 subscribers and 130 editions, continuing to grow almost entirely through word of mouth. What started as a tiny Sunday side-project covering AI and tech news has turned into a community. To all of you who read, reply, share, debate, and send me links at random hours, I’ve learned so much from you! 🙏

🤖 AI Reads

Omnilingual ASR: Advancing Automatic Speech Recognition for 1,600+ Languages

Notes: Meta’s FAIR (same group that Yann LeCun used to lead) released an open source speech recognition model for 1600+ languages. GitHub repo.

ElevenLabs: Introducing Scribe v2 Realtime

Notes: Not to be outdone by Meta, ElevenLabs is claiming to have the most accurate low-latency Speech to Text model.

ason-format / ason: Aliased Serialization Object Notation

Notes: TOON was all the rage last week, and not without some pointed criticism that “it seems AI people rediscovered CSV”. Most of the criticism I’ve seen circulating misses an important nuance: the serialization frameworks that work for LLMs may not be the same as those built for general software development. And yes… reducing input tokens is a valid goal.

I’ve witnessed people blindly throwing JSON objects into prompts and expecting LLMs to do all JSON parsing. This is terrible. The alternative is to do proper context engineering, but that’s also hard. So improving the serialization format is a quicker win than many realize.

Anyways, here’s another project that aims for the same goals as TOON.

Anthropic’s Viral Report

Notes: Anthropic released a report on how they disrupted an APT that went viral, but there’s a few issues… Read this article next.

nathan-barry / tiny-diffusion

Notes: Built on nanochat-gpt. I love sharing simple, single file implementations of ML models.

yichuan-w / LEANN

Notes: Has anyone tried this open source project?

💼 Business Reads

Yann LeCun’s Been Right About AI for 40 Years. Now He Thinks Everyone Is Wrong.

Notes: I am still shocked, but not surprised by Yann’s departure considering how at odds he has been with Meta’s leadership. For those that missed it, Joel Pineau left Meta to join Cohere in Canada.

Longitudinal Expert AI Panel: Insights from Waves 1, 2, and 3

Notes: Excellent report. Must read concrete predictions of AI progress.

« C’est une hécatombe » : à l’origine de la crise du management, les formations hors-sol des futurs cadres

Notes: I know it’s a French article. Still, it is a worthy read if you’re interested in investing in French businesses or startups.

Asia Tech Review

India’s IPO window blows open as investors make billions from Groww, Pine Labs and Lenskart

Welcome back. We just published an original story looking at why Western AI firms are now targeting India and other emerging markets—but first up this issue we’re looking at India’s growing appetite for startup listings…

Read more

6 months ago · 2 likes · Jon Russell

Signing off from Redmond, WA.