Latest Articles from the world of Artificial Intelligence
19 August 2026
A 13th-Century Manuscript Promised What AI Promises Today
A monk in the 1300s stopped studying to use a manuscript that promised to transmit all knowledge to him in a lunar month. He could not stop, even after realizing that the book hid something dark. Seven centuries later, the same promise arrives in the form of a chatbot, and it is worth asking whether we have learned anything in the meantime.
17 August 2026
Open Source AI Agents Compared: OpenClaw, Hermes, Prime Agent, OpenCode...
On August 5, 2026, Prime Intellect released Prime Agent, a self-defined coding harness capable of rewriting its own prompts, skills, and even sub-agents while it works. The news quickly made the rounds of industry newsletters, not so much for its declared score on the ARC-AGI-3 benchmark (95.5%, above the reference human threshold), but for a more uncomfortable question: what really distinguishes one agent from another today? Until recently, it was enough to look at the model under the hood—GPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, open or proprietary. With the new generation of agents, this logic has broken down.
14 August 2026
I Built Karpathy's LLM Wiki from Scratch on My Articles
For a year, I have written on AiTalk, accumulating article after article a sort of personal diary on artificial intelligence. At a certain point, I found myself with 164 files in a folder, each full of concepts, names, companies, and models, all mentioned but never truly connected. I knew I had written something on a certain topic, but I couldn't remember where, and finding it meant opening files one by one, hoping for memory or a lucky "search in text". In short, an archive, not knowledge.
12 August 2026
OmniVoice Studio: Cloning Voices Locally
I installed OmniVoice Studio on a Friday evening with the typical expectation of someone who has already seen too many "free alternatives to ElevenLabs" end up as shaky demos. The result was surprisingly good, but not flawless: the Italian holds up, though some pronunciations stumble on less common words, and the voice I chose from the library didn't always match 100% of what came out of the speakers. It is precisely in this discrepancy that the project becomes interesting, as it highlights both the leap forward in synthetic audio and its more sensitive side—namely security and responsible use, since voice cloning can be invaluable for dubbing or accessibility, but easily abused by anyone wishing to impersonate someone else.
10 August 2026
Laguna S2.1: The American Open-Weight Model
Every time this series opens its doors to a new model, the disclaimer remains the same: this is not a scientific benchmark, but the report of a demanding user who runs an open-weight model on their home PC and puts it to the test with the same tasks reserved for past contenders. This time, however, the model's origin changes the weight of the question.
07 August 2026
A Conversation with Enrico Papalini on 'Non-Deterministic Loop Engineering'
When we spoke with Enrico Papalini a year ago about his first book, the central theme was a broken silent pact: the one between developers and deterministic machines, shattered the moment code stopped doing exactly and always what it was written to do. Papalini, Head of Software Development for Issuances, Custody, Data & UX/UI Solutions at Euronext Securities, with a past at London Stock Exchange Group and Borsa Italiana, recounted that transition with the voice of someone who manages systems where an error is not a contractual option, but an incident.
05 August 2026
Soofi S: a German model, and the continental ambition
On June 17, 2026, from Berlin, a consortium of German research institutes announced "Soofi S", presenting it not as just another language model looking for attention, but as the first piece of a family of European AI models. Behind the acronym, Sovereign Open Source Foundation Models, is a project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy within the IPCEI-CIS initiative, designed to offer businesses, public administration, research centers, and startups a transparent alternative to non-European models. It is a sentence that, read with the right glasses (those of Rowdy Piper in They Live, to be clear, those that reveal what hides behind the advertising sign), does not talk about benchmarks. It talks about power.
03 August 2026
DwarfStar: the dwarf star illuminating local frontier AI
There is a scene in William Gibson's novel *Neuromancer where the protagonist connects directly to an immense intelligence, distributed over inaccessible servers, through a connection he does not control and does not own. It was science fiction in 1984. In 2026, it is, more or less, the daily reality for anyone using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini: gigantic models, hosted on billion-dollar infrastructures, reachable only through an internet connection and for a monthly subscription or a cost per token. Your conversation, your data, your reasoning: everything passes through somewhere you don't see and don't manage.*
31 July 2026
Prompt injection and AI agents: the problem is architectural, what CaMeL proposes
There is a subtle difference, often overlooked in glossy presentations of AI products, between a model that responds and an agent that acts. The former processes text and returns text; the latter reads mail, opens documents, browses web pages, calls payment APIs, and writes code in the corporate repository. This leap, from "phrase generator" to "task executor," is why in 2026 the security of AI agents became a boardroom topic.
29 July 2026
Meetily, the local meeting assistant
At a time when almost all meeting assistants rely on cloud services and external infrastructure, Meetily tries to take a different path. The idea is simple but powerful: record, transcribe, and summarize meetings directly on the user's device, minimizing the exposure of sensitive data. It's a promise that intercepts two very strong themes in the current technological debate, privacy and data sovereignty, and it does so just as the cost of getting it wrong on this front continues to rise. The 2024 IBM report on the cost of data breaches estimates an average cost of 4.4 million dollars for each corporate breach, while overall GDPR sanctions exceeded 5.88 billion euros by 2025, according to figures reported by the development team themselves in the project documentation.
27 July 2026
Jacobian lens: what Claude 'thinks' and does not say
When an artificial intelligence paper talks about "mind," "workspace," and "unspoken thoughts," we are facing useful metaphors to make complex concepts accessible, but also potentially misleading for the very public they should simplify things for. On July 6, Anthropic published a new study that uses exactly this kind of language, and in the following days the web was divided between those who read the news as the antechamber of a conscious machine and those who dismissed it as engineering disguised as philosophy. The truth, as often happens, lies in the middle, but to find it one must carefully separate the data from the words chosen to describe them.
24 July 2026
Loop Engineering: current trend or the next leap?
In mid-June, a post by Peter Steinberger, a developer known for building and then selling PSPDFKit, circled among insiders for weeks: AI agents are no longer prompted, the loops that run them are designed. A few lines, a tone of revelation, and within a few days the term "loop engineering" appeared everywhere, from Analytics Vidhya to corporate blogs specialized in agent infrastructure like Requesty. Even Boris Cherny, among the architects of Claude Code, upped the ante by talking about a leap comparable to that from compiled source code to autonomous agents, as BDTechTalks recounts while reconstructing the genesis of the debate.
22 July 2026
Why AI agent benchmarks underestimate real capabilities
For years we have treated an AI agent's capability as a fixed number, almost like a sprinter's time: you run, you time it, you write the result on a board. But what if that number depended on the breath we allow the runner before stopping them? A report published on July 2, 2026, by the AI Security Institute, the UK government's AI safety institute, suggests that this is exactly the hidden error in many agent evaluations: we are timing them with a whistle that blows too early.
20 July 2026
Colibrì: the mini engine that runs a 744B model on consumer hardware
Every week, the local open-source artificial intelligence community seems to look for its favorite conversation topic, and the one that just passed seems to have elected a GitHub repository with a curious name and an almost absurd promise: running GLM-5.2, a 744-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model, on a computer with just 25 GB of RAM. The project is called Colibrì and is the work of a single developer, JustVugg, who in the acknowledgments section of his README admits with disarming honesty that he wrote and tested everything on a twelve-core laptop. No lab, no cluster, no hardware sponsorship. Just a technical obsession carried to its conclusion.
17 July 2026
DSpark: DeepSeek's bet on speed that doesn't betray quality
DeepSeek has not only presented a new approach to speculative decoding; with DeepSpec, it is trying to transform it into a reproducible industrial pipeline. The paper is called DSpark, the acronym is yet another in a long series that the Chinese lab churns out almost quarterly, and the temptation to scroll through it distractedly is strong. That would be a mistake, because behind the acronym hides a very concrete question: how much can the inference of a language model really accelerate if the model that generates the draft responses stops being naive, and if the system that checks them learns not to waste time on those destined for the bin.
15 July 2026
I taught AI to stand guard: how I built a zero-cost security system
In the TV series 'Person of Interest', a superintelligence nicknamed simply "the Machine" monitors every corner of the planet through cameras, microphones, and sensors of all kinds, identifying threats before they materialize. It's science fiction, of course. But the underlying idea—using computer vision to understand what's happening in an environment—is now accessible to anyone with a PC and a webcam. Less than 250 lines of code. No subscription, no cloud, no video traveling the world. Just a notification on your phone, with a photo, when someone enters the house.