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 …

Thinking Machines – the latest AI research and product company. They plan to:

• Frequently publish technical blog posts, papers, and code.
• Build things correctly for the long haul, maximising both productivity and security rather than taking shortcuts.
• Contribute to AI safety by: -- Maintaining a high safety bar—preventing misuse of released …

How comfortable would you be attending a meeting with delegate agents or sending your own delegate? Is this a cultural step too far? While I was not surprised by the topic of this paper, it raises some important questions on transparency, authenticity, cultural acceptance and data ownership.

Can AI help a child prepare for a spelling test?

That’s the question I asked this week while helping my daughter study for hers. Instead of just drilling words the old-fashioned way, I wondered—how hard would it be to build an AI-powered spelling assistant?

With Open WebUI, it …

Ever wondered how a transformer (LLM) works? How input text is tokenised, embedded, normalised and passes through multi-head self-attention layers? Well, someone decided to make it into an interactive visualisation. Wow.

Have you ever worked with a professional interpreter? They perform impressive mental gymnastics, especially in simultaneous translation, where they listen to a live audio stream in one language while translating and speaking in another at the same time.

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve travelled extensively across APAC, speaking …