Rami's Readings #105 - ✨ Stanford's 2025 AI Index Report
The latest on AI, LLMs, Deep Cogito, Agent2Agent, Stanford HAI's AI Index Report, the Instant Coffee Boom, the World's Most Complicated Watch, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #105 - a weekly digest of interesting articles, papers, videos, and X threads from my various sources across the Internet. Expect a list of reads covering AI, technology, business, culture, fashion, travel, and more. Learn about what I do at ramisayar.com/about.
👋🏼 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 a recommendation from The AI Ethics Brief. 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
I encourage you to follow me on LinkedIn to stay up to date on my projects.
Cogito v1 Preview: Introducing IDA as a Path to General Superintelligence
Notes: The 70B model surpasses the newly released LLaMA 4 109B model released last week.
SmolDocling: An Ultra-Compact Vision-Language Model for End-to-End Multi-Modal Document Conversion
Notes: From IBM Research and HuggingFace.
Advances and Challenges in Foundation Agents: From Brain-Inspired Intelligence to Evolutionary, Collaborative, and Safe Systems
Notes: A huge collaboration between a multitude of companies and institutions.
LocalScore - Local AI Benchmark
Notes: Another confirmation there is no reason to upgrade from the RTX 4090 to the 5090.
Google Announced the Agent2Agent Protocol
Notes: Meh. Kinda like MCP. Success will depend on wide community adoption.
💼 Business Reads
✨ Stanford HAI Released the 2025 AI Index Report ✨
Notes: Stanford’s AI Index report is always an incredibly insightful read. If you had to pick one read from #105, read this report. For long time readers, many of the trends highlighted in the report will be familiar to you: AI investment is still growing, Edge & Local AI is increasingly capable, and AI optimism & regulation continues to vary by global regions.
The Instant Coffee Boom Is Changing Farmers’ Fortunes
Notes: I can barely function without coffee. I’ll admit, I’ve been leaning on instant more often lately—especially since Partners and Verve dropped their own. A friend of mine and I trade them like baseball cards (or hockey cards 🇨🇦) at MIT. This is a great read about the impact of booming coffee demand on Vietnamese farmers. If you’ve been reading closely, you might’ve noticed I often sign off with the name of the coffee shop where I wrote most of the newsletter. Today’s is 203° F in Kirkland, WA.
🔀 Other Reads
Better Typography With Text-Wrap Pretty
Notes: Short last lines were always a bit of a headache when we were working on Visual Stories on Bing. Glad to see a browser-native solution to typographic rivers and short last lines, despite page performance concerns.
Tiny Hierarchical Navigable Small Worlds
Notes: Tiny nearest neighbor search for vector embeddings in C++ and under 500 lines of code. Small implementations of important algorithms are important for learning. This library reminds me of llama2.c.
Vacheron Constantin Breaks The World Record for Most Complicated Wristwatch
Notes: Shockingly wearable given the number of complications.
Signing off from 203° Fahrenheit Coffee Co.
