Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. Plus the connections. Of mostly everything. tl;dr: Everything is connected Dirk Gently and his Holistic Detective Agency may not be Douglas Adams' most-loved creations. But Dirk does remind us of the Interconnectedness of All Things. And the universe gave us a nudge in precisely that direction this week. The CSO announced that Ireland's economy shrank 1.6

Last Friday, 25 companies urged Washington to avoid 'premature restrictions' on open-weight AI models. The list of signatories has now passed 230. Then on Monday, Moonshot openly released Kimi K3's secrets to all. Its weights - the trillions of numerical settings its training run established that define how the model works - can be downloaded by anyone. The significance? Open weights have never been as close to the frontier as Moonshot’s Kimi K3. To the point that it’s making

By volume of code, a production AI agent is mostly scaffolding. Around the core model, which supplies the reasoning, sits everything that turns intelligence into work: a loop that decides what happens next, memory that persists between steps, tools that act in other systems and gates that determine what each action may do. Why do we care? Because that balance changes what you're buying. Choosing an agentic system now means looking past 'which model?' to the system around it –

Around your nineteenth birthday, your brain clocks one of its fastest laps. Raw speed – the flat-out, never-seen-this-before kind of thinking – peaks early. From there, it begins to ebb. Cheering, for a Monday. But other things keep climbing. Knowledge, vocabulary, patterns. And ultimately, judgement. Knowing which precedent matters, when the obvious answer is wrong, when your confidence has outrun the evidence. Adulthood is a long exchange. Speed goes out. Experience comes i

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. The hysteria, the kill-switches and the underlying reasons for all of it. tl;dr: Are we talking ourselves into Digital World War I? Given the headlines splashed across web pages this week, you would be forgiven for thinking Global Virtual Nuclear Was had broken out. The preconditions for this collective clamouring? The realisation that the continued succe

AI agents are a bit like brand-new, super-keen interns. They haven’t read the handbook, but want to help, and they can act umpteen times before you start your coffee. But if there’s a hidden instruction in an email, they might think it’s part of the job and just crack on. To the model, documents and commands are the same kind of thing. And unless the surrounding system imposes a boundary, it might obey the wrong ones. The cost of those mistakes depend on what the agents can r

Podcasts of AI-Accelerationist investors have been waving away AI risk as ‘a huge moral panic’. Nothing resembling the feared catastrophes has happened, they say. Then, an OpenAI model slips its sandbox and breaks into AI model hub Hugging Face. And it takes 17,000 ‘actions’ while there. Does this give the AI-Doomers grounds to say: ‘I told you so’? Perhaps. But let’s take a closer look at what actually happened first. From what we know – and this is far from everything – the

Wearables capture a continuous stream of health data. AI finds the signals to remake our understanding of human wellbeing. Pharma, medtech and insurers are building business models around this new learning loop. Join the team? Before this week’s long-read, we thought you might like to get involved in the AI content we make. Join our webinar on 11 August to discover why CHAP - an open protocol for collaboration between humans and AI agents - is gaining traction. Come along and

Some people meet a hard problem after lunch and happily lose the afternoon to it. Others – brilliant people among them – will avoid the same question for a week. You work with both. Psychologists have been measuring the difference since 1982. The trait is called ‘need for cognition’. It measures your appetite for effortful thought. And AI has changed what that appetite is worth. It might, in fact, be the most important factor in successful AI use. In a recent essay for The At

It’s been another month of AI buzz. And in the rush, the hypegeist missed what businesses can learn from bees. A honey bee comes home from a field in full flower and dances the directions. The movements communicate everything her sisters need to know – a map drawn deep in the hive. Von Frisch earned a Nobel Prize for interpreting it decades ago. And now researchers have found that the waggle improves when the right bees gather round. Fill the floor with youngsters too green

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. Wonder at The Gloom. The Numbers that don't spell Doom. And the island buffeted by it all. tl;dr: Warning! Prise your paranoid sub-conscious out of the director's chair. What possessed Anthropic to advertise itself with gravestones? Its new brand film also features a burning house and scenes of mass surveillance. Even Sam Altman assumed it was satire. Why

The screen you’re reading this on can’t show every colour your eyes can see. And even the best screens still have their limits. That’s because RGB displays make colours from three lights – red, green and blue. To plot what it can show you, just draw a triangle. Inside that triangle sits its total gamut of colour. The limits of its possibilities. Mix the R, the G, and the B any way you like to find endless new shades. But you’ll never invent a new colour, one that sits outside

Regulators are already asking: 'Who approved this AI-drafted decision? And why?' What do you show them? A 45-minute session on CHAP, the open standard for provable human oversight, will help answer many of those questions. Register now for 11 August.

In 'Learning Loops & Intelligence Capital' we set out a hypothesis: the organisations that get the most from AI will be the ones that build extensive learning loops. The learning loop is a system which every successful organisation already operates. At least in an analogue, human sense. It embeds people's current expertise into collective information, knowledge and intelligence. It then informs future judgements, procedures and behaviours. Which means, run continuously, it sh

A capital-allocation exercise across 150 cities used to take Uber 15 hours. It now takes 30 minutes. Financial pacing reports took two days. Now they take ten minutes. Web QA went from two weeks to 50 minutes. How? Uber paired around 30 of its most AI-proficient engineers with domain experts from finance, legal, HR and other business functions. Each pod got two weeks to get the work done. And the sprint schedule offers a glimpse into what makes effective agentic sprints. Days

Your AI didn't spend the weekend waiting. It didn't spend the weekend asleep or walking in the park. It's a file on a disk, the way there's a song in sheet music. You, meanwhile, have been being all weekend – asleep, distracted, mid-blink, still there. Being is the one thing you do without trying. The machine does it differently, if it does it at all. The weights persist; the thinking happens. A score on a shelf, until somebody asks a question. Then – briefly – a performance.

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. Who built walls, who worked the gates and who slipped through regardless. tl;dr: A week of walls and gates. We live in a world where intellectual property is no longer entirely human of origin. And yet the IP created by that mix of human and early-stage digital intelligence is arguably, on average, more valuable than any before it. The Money certainly see

If you've never (knowingly) used an AI model router - or if you don't know what one is - that's probably about to change. Until the last three months, model routers were for the optimisers - that hardcore amongst us who wanted each query to be sent to the exactly right slice of digital intelligence. Whether to minimise the cost. Or to maximise the effectiveness. But whilst tokens were in plentiful and cheap supply via subscriptions, there was no need for the rest of us to get

Welcome to all the AI news that matters this week – across tech, biopharma, medtech, advanced manufacturing and insurance. What The Machines asked for, what they got and why they howl at the moon. tl;dr: The Machines want four things. None of them is more compute. We were sold The Machines as the workers who need nothing – no salaries, no sleep, no one looking over their shoulder. The self-running future, staffed by software. So, having come to terms that they actually want h

€96 billion. That’s how much Irish GDP hangs in the balance if we use AI for cost-cutting instead of unlocking higher-value work. But to ensure that happens, there’s another barrier. According to an Ibec report released yesterday, 64% of roles needing significant reskilling for the age of AI. But how do you get more AI-native people? One of the report's core tenets is that it takes training and curiosity. It goes as far as calling curiosity 'the capability we need to manufact

A short guide to competitive advantage in the agentic age by Gordon Suttie & Scott Wilkinson Our hypothesis The real productivity gains from the age of electrification didn't come from using lots of extra current. They took decades to emerge because owners clung to existing assets. The rush of productivity only happened when factories stopped retrofitting electric motors onto steam-era layouts and redesigned the whole plant around distributed power. A fundamental physical re-

The boundary lines between human and digital intelligence collaboration are often murky. And in regulated environments murky is never good enough. Organisations orchestrating human-agent teams require an audit trail of approvals and overrides. This same evidence is also required to learn from the expert judgements your people make when correcting and overriding agents. CHAP - our open-source Collaborative Human-Agent Protocol - gives you one standard way to capture it. Every

You might have missed it. But our ability to place fine electrodes into living, awake human brains is changing how we study intelligence. On 17 June, a team at Massachusetts General Hospital reported, in Nature, recordings from 579 single neurons in eight awake patients as they produced natural speech. The work mapped cellular building blocks by which language is encoded in humans, using large language models to help draw its conclusions. The findings showed neurons firing a

OpenAI’s new 5.6 just popped into orbit. And the US government thinks it’s too hot for (most of) us to handle. For now. But look at the images they’re using. If imitation is the firmest form of flattery, we need to say thank you to the brand team at OpenAI. That sun looks so familiar how could we not be flattered?! And - of course - this only heightens our expectations. Word is that this most celestially-inspired family of models, captained by Sol, offers Mythos-like performa