You can outsource your thinking, but you can't outsource your understanding.

Andrej Karpathy shared this thought at AI Ascent 2026, and it struck a chord.

Today, it's never been easier to outsource cognitive tasks. We use AI to research, summarise, and draft. It drives incredible productivity. But can we achieve …

Leading technical teams across large geographies like APAC requires a tricky balancing act: thinking strategically while staying tactically close to the technology. Nowhere is this dichotomy more apparent right now than in Data and AI. It feels like a month in AI is comparable to a year in other disciplines …

How small can Small Language Models (SLMs) get before they stop being useful?

This is a critical question for edge AI. Currently, even small models waste valuable space memorising an extensive, if lossy, "offline Wikipedia" of facts. Is this embedded knowledge an asset, or just bloat?

I believe we must …

It’s not quite 6:00 am. It's still dark outside, but my attention has been occupied for the last couple of hours. I find I'm able to get most of my chores done while the family is still asleep.

My focus since late last night has been the upcoming …

The agentic framework ecosystem is rapidly evolving 🚀, with AutoGen, MetaGPT, LlamaIndex, LangGraph, CrewAI and most recently, smolagents. Over the past six months, I've experimented with each of these to varying degrees. While I've seen strong results with publicly hosted models from Anthropic and OpenAI, local Ollama integration 🛠️, particularly for tool-calling …

The AI landscape is shifting again. QWQ-32B from Qwen has just thrown down the gauntlet, demonstrating performance gains that not only surpass distilled DeepSeek R1 32B models but also challenge DeepSeek-R 1-671B on key benchmarks. This isn't just incremental progress; we're witnessing a leap.

My initial experience with QWQ has …

How is AI making you more effective, efficient or creative?

Recent advances in coding models and pair-programming tools like Aider have completely changed how I build tools. What used to take hours—or remain unfinished due to lack of time—is now possible in 30 minutes or less.

In the …

Think multimodal AI needs massive models? Think again!

Microsoft's Phi-4-multimodal is here to challenge that, packing speech, vision and language processing into a lean 5.6B parameters. What's the secret? A "mixture-of-LoRAs" architecture that allows it to handle different data types in parallel, creating a truly unified experience. This means …

A few hours ago, Pliny obtained and shared the new system prompt for Claude v3.7, noting only a "few small differences" from the one Anthropic had previously published. Interestingly, the prompt even includes a strawberry-flavoured Easter egg. This level of openness fosters trust—without which there is no foundation …

"Perplexity.ai open-sourced R1 1776, a version of the DeepSeek-R1 model that has been post-trained to provide unbiased, accurate, and factual information."

DeepSeek’s release of R1 was a generous contribution to the world, showcasing innovations in efficient pre-training, attention mechanisms and the sparse use of mixture-of-experts (SMoE). This new …