Welcome to Rami’s Readings #150 - 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.
🚀 Resetting and Relaunching Rami’s Readings
Rami’s Readings was quiet for a few months. There wasn’t one dramatic reason, just a lot of life piling up at once.
My family was knocked out for a whole month and a half with a variety of nasty illnesses from the petri dish that is “daycare.” Shortly after, a mix of travel and vacations took up most of the summer, and with work becoming unusually intense, it was incredibly hard for me to get back to the newsletter. The weekly cadence slipped for a few months, but this pause also gave me an opportunity to think about the newsletter and prepare a few things in celebration of #150.
So rather than simply picking up where I left off, I’m using #150 as a reset and a relaunch.
The biggest change is that Apéro & Intellect is getting a proper home with its own website and events hosted on Luma, fulfilling the plan I shared earlier this year. I’ll be hosting Apéro & Intellect #14 in Greater Seattle on Thursday, September 3rd.
The newsletter will continue its focus on AI, business, and other reads, but with a more concerted effort to share product-related news: specifically, new AI products or features that catch my eye.
Lastly, expect a few guest writers and interviews to appear in the newsletter on occasion. I’m excited about this part, and I’ll share more details a bit later in the year.
Consider the last few months an intermission. Now, on to the next iteration.
👋🏼 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, The VC Corner and from the AI in Action Conference in Montréal. 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.
If any of you would like to get a copy of the slides, feel free to respond directly to this newsletter.
🤖 AI Reads
Broadly speaking, the past few months saw smaller models steadily eroding the Big AI labs’ advantage across many benchmarks.
Qwen3.8-27B
Notes: I used Qwen3.5 all the way through to the latest Qwen3.8 version for coding locally. The Qwen family of models have continued to show that you don’t need the biggest model for every workload.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next
Notes: This model is interesting because it’s showing a new avenue for improving quality while reducing memory requirements. It uses N-gram embedding which is offloadable from GPU RAM to system RAM or even SSD. Many Reddit and HuggingFace threads showing varying levels of success running this model locally on more and more constrained RAM.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731
Notes: DeepSeek continues to lead on the economics of running LLMs at scale. Their strategy appears to be positioning themselves to be the cost leader while remaining within reach of the top of the benchmarks.
GLM-5.3 Flash
Notes: A SOTA open-weights model that you can run quantized on the new Mac Ultra 256GB (or better on the yet to-be-priced 512GB version. By the way if anyone wants to buy me a Christmas gift 😉). The model was floating around on various benchmarks as Ox Alpha before it was revealed to be Z.ai’s GLM model.
Muse Glimmer
Notes: While Muse Glimmer was overshadowed by Qwen and GLM, it stands out as Meta’s first notable model release since Llama 3. It’s also the first major release since Alexandr Wang took on AI at Meta.
LFM2.5-2.6B
Notes: Liquid AI also released an agentic model that can run on a phone and yields some impressive results against competitors models of the same size. Liquid AI is an MIT startup that I track in this newsletter.
In terms of the business of AI, there’s been a handful of important acquisitions and upcoming IPOs. The following are the most important:
Stripe Agrees to Acquire OpenRouter to Help Businesses Optimize Token Routing and Usage
Notes: This acquisition is interesting because OpenRouter is effectively a marketplace for exchanging dollars for tokens across many model & inference providers. If we expect the market to continue to explode, then it makes sense for Stripe to expand into that payment infrastructure and payment processing market.
Nvidia Agrees to Buy Open Source AI Platform Hugging Face For $12.9 Billion
Notes: This acquisition is interesting and important, but not at all surprising. If we want to use a gold-rush analogy then it makes sense for shovel-maker to buy the shovel showcase space… I guess. 😂 My only concern is that the relative neutrality of HuggingFace will erode over time as regulatory and market pressures increase. There isn’t quite an alternative to HuggingFace except GitHub and possibly Docker or Ollama.
Anthropic Confidentially Submits Draft S-1 to the SEC & OpenAI Confidential Submission of Draft S-1 to the SEC
Notes: So much venture capital and other private capital is tied up in the companies that no matter how you feel about the IPOs themselves, one clear benefit is that some of that capital will be unlocked and available for the next generation of startups. If you time it right and are raising your Series A in 6-12 months from now, there could be a lot of dry powder ready to be deployed. 😉
A few subscribers always ask about what hardware I’m running. Recently, I acquired a M5 Max and a AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 to complement my RTX 4090. They are both interesting machines. Day zero support for both MLX & ROCm is becoming more common, so I’ll be watching for the differences in quality and performance between the different platforms.
New open source projects and papers continue to emerge, exploring a serious wide variety of concepts. I’ll share more in future newsletters, but here are a few worth highlighting:
mathomhaus / guild: Shared Context, Memory, and Task Coordination Across AI Coding Agents
HumanSignal / Adala: Autonomous DAta (Labeling) Agent Framework
CopilotKit / CopilotKit: The Frontend Stack for Agents & Generative UI
drumih / turbo-fieldfare: Gemma 4 26B-A4B inference in ~2 GB of RAM on any M-series MacBook
AutoSaddler: Automatic Harness Optimization with Durable Updates from Agent Execution Traces
Atlassian Rovo Exfiltrates Data, Bypassing Controls
💼 Business Reads
It’s been a strange few months for businesses across North America. I won’t try to recap everything, but here’s a few things happening elsewhere:
China’s AI Boom Has a Favorite Bar
Notes: Shared by one of my favorite subscribers, Marielena. I would say it’s not unexpected for spaces for discussion to emerge. In Seattle, there is the AI House near the waterfront.
The Unlikely Place at the Center of China’s AI Boom
Notes: Not quite where I expected, but interesting to read.
Asia’s 20 Richest Families of 2026
Notes: Required reading in preparation for the Crazy Rich Asian sequel.
The List Tracking Canada’s Tech Exodus
Notes: Yep, but there’s still great Canadian startups and talent!
People Without Kids Are Hacking the College Savings Account
Notes: I can’t agree more with this article. Open a 529 plan as soon as you can.
Signing off from Montréal, QC.