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The following is the feed for Saturday, July 18, 2026

1) New Lin Qiao’s Fireworks AI Bets on Specialized Models Over General A.I. Hype

observer.com | Saturday, July 18, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Fireworks AI is a platform for developers to build products faster and at lower cost than with proprietary models, using open-source models...Lin Qiao believes companies that turn their data into specialized intelligence will outcompete those relying on general models...But Lin believes that, amid the abundance of public data and general intelligence models, the most valuable uses of A."

*Source: https://observer.com/2026/07/lin-qiaos-fireworks-ai-bets-on-specialized-models-over-general-a-i-hype/


2) New How Artists Are Using A.I. and Where They Are Drawing the Line

observer.com | Saturday, July 18, 2026

Selected Quotes: "“The development of a new tool creates new technologies, and technologies create new ways to express ourselves, think and create...” Most recently, artificial intelligence has become a creative accelerator, helping him transform existing projects and push imagery beyond the limits of physical perception...“Instead, now I dedicate most of my time to painting, physical work, and artist residencies, where I can meet new people and experience different environments."

*Source: https://observer.com/2026/07/feature-arts-culture-artists-ai-creativity-gabriel-rico-celine-shen-theo-triantafyllidis/


3) New Where is Gemini 3.5 Pro? The case of the missing AI model.

mashable.com | Saturday, July 18, 2026

Selected Quotes: "The AI company said the model had such advanced cybersecurity capabilities that it would only be shared with trusted partners...Without a new frontier model of its own, Google has taken a tumble down AI leaderboard rankings, despite its massive advantages in the AI arms race...5 Pro may be launching soon, but while Google readies the model for release, the competition is racing ahead."

*Source: https://mashable.com/tech/google-gemini-3-5-pro-delay


4) Using Classical ML to Empower AI Agents | Towards Data Science

by Stephanie Kirmer | towardsdatascience.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "You can pre-calculate the inferences by running your classical ML model as a scheduled job, and store these inferences in whatever data storage solution your agent has access to...Take it a step further than just calling rudimentary tooling, and give your AI agent models to use! For example, consider an agent designed for real estate analysis...Another option is to make the model not a direct tool of the agent, but a provider of context data."

*Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/using-classical-ml-to-empower-ai-agents/


5) Analog AI Is Back, But Can It Survive Its Own Noise? | Towards Data Science

by Ferran Alia | towardsdatascience.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Recent work cataloguing these effects lists programming noise, read noise, temporal conductance drift, limited bit precision, and analog-to-digital conversion loss as the standing open problems in the field...This is the real shape of “analog AI has a noise problem”, not a gentle accuracy tax, but a threshold the network was never prepared to cross...Test accuracy of a conventionally-trained network, evaluated through a simulated analog layer at increasing noise levels."

*Source: https://towardsdatascience.com/analog-ai-is-back-can-it-survive-its-own-noise/


6) Thinking Machines amps up its bet against one-size-fits-all AI with its first open model, Inkling | TechCrunch

by Connie Loizos | techcrunch.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "It’s Tinker, not the model itself, where the company’s revenue has to come from, via training, fine-tuning, and, now, a cut of the hosting ecosystem built around it...It was trained on 45 trillion tokens of text, image, audio, and video, and reasons natively across all four, according to the company’s own release materials...Researchers from both companies took an existing open source model and trained it further on Bridgewater’s own financial expertise."

*Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/15/thinking-machines-amps-up-its-bet-against-one-size-fits-all-ai-with-its-first-open-model-inkling/


7) The risk of weather data sabotage is rising

www.technologyreview.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "More recently, weather predictions have become relevant for an emerging industry: prediction markets, where people bet money on all kinds of real-world events, including the weather...Observational data passes through many hands: the operators who run the stations, the national weather services that steward the records, and the forecasting centers that turn them into predictions...Data homogenization methods that clean up weather records also need to get faster, with the goal of catching problems in real time."

*Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/17/1140622/weather-data-sabotage/


8) 3 reasons China's new AI model has Silicon Valley and Washington quaking

www.businessinsider.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Companies can save substantial computing costs by choosing a cheaper model that delivers similar performance, making pricing almost as important as benchmark scores for startups deploying AI at scale...8 trillion parameters — the internal values that help an AI model learn and generate responses — making it the largest open-weight AI model announced to date...But its combination of frontier-level coding performance, competitive pricing, and an open-weight release suggests China's AI labs are continuing to close the gap on the US's leading AI labs."

*Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/kimi-k3-ai-model-moonshot-china-open-weights-benchmarks-pricing-2026-7


9) Meta’s Oversight Board Finds Top AI Models Are Hesitant to Criticize Repressive Governments

by Bruce Gil | gizmodo.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "It also urged them to identify and address any “unintentional learning and replication” of restrictive speech laws and consider human rights at every stage of model development...“Our findings suggest that LLM users may be experiencing free speech infringements by proxy, with limited transparency,” the Board wrote in its report...The board also found that some models claimed to be following general policies against criticizing world leaders."

*Source: https://gizmodo.com/metas-oversight-board-finds-top-ai-models-are-hesitant-to-criticize-repressive-governments-2000786689


10) 'The SaaS apocalypse is overrated': How Workday and other software provders plan to survive AI

www.zdnet.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Could you still have a work surface like that? For vendors, the question of 'What durable capabilities are you providing? What unique thinking, what mathematical capability?' becomes crucial...He said people wondered whether Snowflake's products would be usurped by cloud giants such as Amazon, especially when Amazon developed its data warehouse service Redshift...As the risk of disintermediation rises, Hickie suggested Workday's durable capability will be its ability to build a trusted platform for cross-business workflows."

*Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/saas-apocalypse-overrated-how-workday-and-software-provders-will-survive-ai/


11) The build vs. buy dilemma at the heart of enterprise AI

www.cio.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Enriching your data inside a vendor’s AI model is the genuinely new question, and organizations that conflate it with their existing cloud posture tend to defend the wrong perimeter...GDPR obligations reinforce this instinct across the European market, requiring organizations to maintain clear accountability for how personal data is processed inside AI systems, including vendor-managed ones...The catch is that these capabilities almost universally depend on your data living in the vendor’s cloud environment."

*Source: https://www.cio.com/article/4197957/the-build-vs-buy-dilemma-at-the-heart-of-enterprise-ai.html


12) Roblox announces 'Build,' AI tools that let anyone create games

mashable.com | Friday, July 17, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Build will be available for age-checked users 9 and older and published games that go through safety checks will be available to age-checked users 16 and older...Roblox is bringing Build, a set of AI tools, to its app in order to help users create games on the platform...The Protect Our Games Act would require game publishers to maintain ongoing online access to their games."

*Source: https://mashable.com/tech/roblox-announces-build-ai-game-creation-tools


13) 19 AgentOps tools for monitoring AI activity, issues, and costs

www.cio.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Setting up an effective improvement cycle for an AI agent requires a strong feedback loop from production data to the agent’s next generation...The platform that began tracking performance of some web applications is now powerful enough to track the flows of data through complex agentic ecologies...Teams trying to choose which agent observability tools is best for their use case should look at the size and nature of their agentic systems and projects."

*Source: https://www.cio.com/article/4195251/19-agentops-tools-for-monitoring-ai-activity-issues-and-costs.html


14) Anthropic's ‘free’ Fable offer — a token lock-in trap for users?

www.computerworld.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "After the free-access period, Anthropic plans to convert Fable to a pay-per-use model, at $10 per million input tokens and a whopping $50 for 1 million output tokens...Sol is cheaper at $5 per one million tokens input, and $30 for 1 million output tokens...That’s a potential boon for proprietary large language model (LLM) vendors offering free tokens in a bid to lock enterprises and vendors into their AI environments."

*Source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4196912/anthropics-free-fable-offer-a-token-lock-in-trap-for-users.html


15) AT&T is using AI to prevent frustrating network outages

www.businessinsider.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "By the first quarter of 2021, the company had also launched its proactive customer notification system, Markus said, which is enabled through its EEIM...AT&T's EEIM also relies on the cloud computing platform Microsoft Azure, data analytics via Databricks, and incident reporting via Snowflake, Markus said...Cefalo calls this method "sharding" and said it allows data to be distributed across multiple machines and handle large data sets."

*Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/att-telecom-ai-network-outage-prevention-2026-7


16) Why AMI Labs’ Alexandre LeBrun won't call his AI 'AGI' or 'superintelligence' | TechCrunch

by Kate Park | techcrunch.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Almost every industry that “touches the real world” could eventually make use of robotics based on world models, LeBrun said, arguing that physical environments remain where LLMs are weakest...He isn’t claiming world models are better than LLMs, which are “complementary, not replaceable” when it comes to AI systems that understand the physical world, LeBrun said...A world model, which incorporates physics to predict and work with the real world, needs to prove itself outside the lab, LeBrun explained."

*Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/16/why-ami-labs-alexandre-lebrun-wont-call-his-ai-agi-or-superintelligence/


17) Linus Torvalds puts his foot down, tells anti-AI programmers to 'fork it'

www.zdnet.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "" Therefore, while Torvalds won't force anyone to use AI, "I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it..."Also: 7 ways AI can help with your Linux system managementThe corner cases with this stance are what bug senior Linux kernel maintainer Theodore "Ted" Ts'o...'AI is a tool, just like other tools we use."

*Source: https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-puts-his-foot-down-tells-anti-ai-programmers-to-fork-it/


18) Did AI decide who lost their jobs? Meta is heading to court over that question

www.computerworld.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "For employees out on leave, “every day that goes by constitutes additional harm, in that Meta is taking away the entire purpose of a protected leave...More than two dozen anonymous plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary injunction that would prevent the company from finalizing their separations or altering their compensation, benefits, or protected leave status...Rather, these circumstances belong in an “independent review lane,” where human reviewers get enough context to “neutralize” the period without receiving specific leave details, Gogia said."

*Source: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4197548/did-ai-decide-who-lost-their-jobs-meta-is-heading-to-court-over-that-question-2.html


19) Former Rippling Cofounder Prasanna Sankar Raises $15 Mn For Vorflux After 0xPPL Shutdown

by Anne Florentyna | inc42.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Stay ahead with the latest news, funding, startup financials, & governments policies on the hottest tech industries in the Indian startup ecosystem...Learn from India’s top 1% of D2C founders & experts through actionable insights, proven strategies and tactics on how to launch a successful D2C Brand in 6 weeks...Get featured, partner or work with India's #1 startup media & intelligence platform and explore what else Inc42 has to offer."

*Source: https://inc42.com/buzz/former-rippling-cofounder-prasanna-sankar-raises-15-mn-for-vorflux-after-0xppl-shutdown/


20) logcat.ai Bags $2.5 Mn To Build AI Platform For Android, Linux Engineering

by Shrishti Bisht | inc42.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "Stay ahead with the latest news, funding, startup financials, & governments policies on the hottest tech industries in the Indian startup ecosystem...Learn from India’s top 1% of D2C founders & experts through actionable insights, proven strategies and tactics on how to launch a successful D2C Brand in 6 weeks...Learn from India's top 1% D2C founders and experts through actionable insights, proven strategies and tactics on how to 10X your D2C brand."

*Source: https://inc42.com/buzz/logcat-ai-bags-2-5-mn-to-build-ai-platform-for-android-linux-engineering/


21) The Download: OpenAI unveils GPT-Red and heat pumps rise in the US

www.technologyreview.com | Thursday, July 16, 2026

Selected Quotes: "(Gizmodo)+ What will power AI’s growth? (MIT Technology Review) 2 A hack shows the Suno AI music generator scraped YouTube, DeezerIt scraped decades’ worth of music to train its models...1 Elon Musk discreetly bought a $1 billion gas turbine firm to power GrokHe acquired fossil fuel company APR Energy in May...(MIT Technology Review) 5 Earth is absorbing energy at a rate that’s alarming climate scientistsThe planet is taking in more heat than models predicted."

*Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/07/16/1140600/the-download-openai-unveils-gpt-red-heat-pumps-rise-us/