Rami's Readings #134 - NeurIPS 2025
The latest on AI, LLMs, NeurIPS 2025, Mistral 3, DeepSeek-V3.2, Excel, AI & Railroads, AI & Real Estate, and more.
Welcome to Rami’s Readings #134 - 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 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.