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The Commoditization of Intelligence: Why AI Aggregators Will Beat Foundation Models

Everyone is currently watching the major tech giants throw billions of dollars at the AI arms race, cheering for whichever foundation model happens to top the leaderboards this week.

It is an incredible spectacle to watch unfold, but focusing too closely on the tech itself might mean we are missing the actual business revolution happening right under our noses.

We have seen this exact economic shift before. The biggest winners of the internet era weren’t the ones who built the physical infrastructure or supplied the goods; they were the platforms that organized the supply and owned the user relationship. The same economic laws are now coming for artificial intelligence, actively turning “intelligence” into a basic, interchangeable utility.

The real value moving forward is no longer in the models themselves, but in the seamless interfaces that aggregate them. If you want to protect your business from vendor lock-in and position your team for ultimate flexibility, it is time to rethink your approach.

Read my full blog post to dive into why the future of AI belongs to the aggregators, and how your business can strategically capitalize on this shift.

We spend an enormous amount of time obsessing over the titans of the AI arms race. Every single week seems to bring a breathless new headline about OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Meta releasing a foundation model that edges out the competition on some obscure benchmark test. We find ourselves endlessly arguing over parameter counts, context windows, and raw reasoning capabilities, captivated by a multi-billion-dollar war unfolding in real-time.

Continue reading “The Commoditization of Intelligence: Why AI Aggregators Will Beat Foundation Models” | >

Deep Dive: The Agentic AI Economy

The Moat: The moat is no longer how smart your AI is; it’s what your AI is allowed to touch. An agent that has “Write Access” to a company’s internal financial system or a medical record database is 100x more valuable than a “smart” chatbot that can only read public websites. Connectivity is the new Intellectual Property.

In the agentic economy, the most valuable human skill isn’t “coding” or “writing”—it is Agentic Orchestration.

The agentic economy thrives on Data Flywheels. As an agent performs a task (e.g., “Review this legal contract”), it gets human feedback (“This clause was too aggressive”). That feedback isn’t just a correction; it’s training data that makes the agent more valuable for the next task. This creates a winner-take-all dynamic for whoever has the most active agents in a specific niche.

We are moving toward an outcome-based economy. However, the real “gold rush” isn’t in building the smartest AI; it’s in building the safest and most connected AI—the one that humans trust enough to give the “keys” to their bank accounts, their calendars, and their businesses.

New rules for used prosthetic feet could curb ‘medical equipment graveyards’

Researchers have proposed new standards into the decades-old prosthetic donations market, improving the quality of lower limb prosthetic feet by two-thirds—a major quality of life boost for recipients.

An interdisciplinary team of charities, prosthetists and academics led by King’s College London designed and implemented the very first set of standardized regulations for exporting prosthetic feet to the Global South, reducing unusable donations from 16% to 5%.

In so doing, the team have laid the foundation for improved prosthetics provision in the UK and an ethical framework for a global circular economy of prosthetics—the first of its kind.

This Magnetic Field Trick Creates Entirely New Forms of Matter

Scientists have shown that changing magnetic fields in precise ways can create exotic quantum matter that does not normally exist. The discovery could eventually lead to more reliable quantum technologies and powerful new computing systems.

Quantum technology is widely seen as one of the most promising future tools for processing massive and complicated amounts of information. Although most quantum systems are still confined to laboratories and research facilities, scientists are steadily working toward applications that could eventually impact industries across the economy.

Magnetic fields and exotic quantum states.

Inference is the True Point of Sale for Our Forthcoming Token Economy

In our last conversation, we opened up the hood of the artificial intelligence engine to look closely at tokens. We talked about them as the raw materials of this new digital world—the invisible gears and cogs constantly churning in the dark to process language, calculate probabilities, and synthesi

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Anthropic research warns AI could build itself by 2028

In this exclusive interview, Axios co-founder Mike Allen sits down with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark to discuss his warning that by 2028, AI systems may be able to improve and build better versions of themselves.

Clark explains why Anthropic is preparing for the possibility of an “intelligence explosion,” how advanced AI could accelerate breakthroughs in science and medicine, and why governments, companies and researchers need new plans for cyber threats, bio risks, economic disruption and the future of work.

Timestamps:
00:00 — Introduction: the future of AI
00:41 — The 2028 prediction: AI building itself.
01:49 — The risks of rapid acceleration.
03:11 — The 3D printer metaphor.
05:21 — Intelligence explosion and fire drill scenarios.
06:55 — Building a \.

A Token of Our Imagination: The Invisible Economy Powering GenAI

Ever wonder what actually happens inside the AI after you hit “Enter”?

You type a prompt into your favorite generative AI, and within seconds, your screen fills with exactly what you asked for—whether it’s a quarterly report or a cinematic image of a cyberpunk golden retriever. It feels like absolute magic.

But behind that seamless curtain lies a bustling, microscopic economy running entirely on a digital currency you’ve probably heard of but might not fully understand: the token.

Most of us only ever see the input and the output. We don’t see the internal cash register ringing, the mathematical gymnastics, or the sprawling “assembly line” churning through billions of calculations.

What actually happens between the moment you hit send and the moment your final masterpiece appears? In my newest blog post, I peel back the curtain to trace the fascinating journey of an AI token.

I break down this invisible economy—from the “toll booth” of the input phase to the heavy lifting of the output phase—and show you exactly how the machine balances the books.

Continue reading “A Token of Our Imagination: The Invisible Economy Powering GenAI” | >

Mathematical framework solves asteroid route planning exactly for first time

A new publication from Bielefeld University sets a benchmark in optimization research. Together with an international team, Professor Michael Römer from the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics has developed a mathematical framework that solves a complex problem from space logistics exactly for the first time: the optimal planning of a route to visit several asteroids under conditions that are as close to reality as possible. The study is published in the INFORMS Journal on Computing.

At the center of the research is the so-called Asteroid Routing Problem. It addresses the question: In what order should a spacecraft visit multiple asteroids if both travel time and fuel consumption are to be minimized? The challenge is that, unlike in classical routing problems, the travel time between destinations is constantly changing because all celestial bodies are in continuous motion.

The idea for the study originated in Bielefeld, sparked by a success in a competition organized by the European Space Agency (ESA). During a research stay in Bielefeld, lead author Isaac Rudich revisited the topic and, together with the team, developed a new solution approach.

Time-varying magnetic fields can engineer exotic quantum matter

Quantum technology has promising potential to revolutionize how large and complex amounts of information are processed. While already in use primarily in laboratory and research settings globally, quantum technologies are in a transition phase for broader industry applications across many economic sectors.

In researching fundamental aspects of quantum physics, or the behavior of nature at the smallest scales—involving atoms, electrons and photons—a study led by Cal Poly Physics Department Lecturer Ian Powell analyzed how a changing magnetic field can make matter behave in unusual ways.

Powell and student researcher Louis Buchalter, who graduated with a Cal Poly bachelor’s degree in physics in 2025, published the article “Flux-Switching Floquet Engineering” in the journal Physical Review B, highlighting how changing magnetic fields over time can create quantum states that do not exist in any stationary material (remaining in the same state as time elapses).

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