What We Learned This Week | 9-14-25
Case for LLMs, Creating Value from AI, Effective Tools for Agents, Khosla Ventures Annual Summit Highlights, Latest on Robots and more...
Below are some of the articles and podcasts which caught my attention past week. As always, welcome your feedback and ideas.
Articles
The Case for Using Small Language Models | HBR | According to a recent study by NVIDIA researchers, small language models (SLMs), rather than their larger counterparts large language models (LLMs), could become the true backbone of the next generation of intelligent enterprises. The age of “bigger is better” may be giving way to “smaller is smarter.”
Make Sure Your AI Strategy Actually Creates Value | HBR | Many firms mistake AI for a strategy instead of a tool to create measurable value. Real impact comes from defining clear outcomes—what value, for whom, and by when—before scaling AI.
Writing effective tools for agents — with agents | Anthropic | Agents are only as effective as the tools we give them. How to write high-quality tools and evaluations, and how you can boost performance by using Claude to optimize its tools for itself.
The Birth of The Decentralized Energy Grid | Contrary Research | How software, storage, market reforms, and smarter infrastructure could enable a more decentralized, resilient “energy internet” for the 21st century.
On Working with Wizards | Ethan Mollick | Verifying magic on the jagged frontier.
Podcasts/Videos
The View from 2035 - Azeem Azhar & Vinod Khosla | Khosla Ventures | Vinod Khosla and Exponential View’s Azeem Azhar examine the coming AI-driven discontinuities—from billion-dollar 10-person startups to collapsing healthcare incumbents—and ask what happens when energy and cognition both become nearly free.
Where is AI Taking Us? - Sam Altman & Vinod Khosla | Khosla Ventures | Sam Altman sits down with Vinod Khosla to explore AI’s transformative path from chatbots to AGI, the evolving interface between humans and machines, and how AI may soon redefine who builds, learns, and creates.
Bret Taylor: A New Class of Software Winners | The Logan Bartlett Show | How the AI revolution compares to previous platform shifts and what it means for both startups and incumbents navigating this transition.
Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) Benedict Evans | The Knowledge Project Podcast | Why everyone gets platform shifts wrong, where Google's actually vulnerable, and what real people do with AI when nobody's watching.
Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine | Dwarkesh Patel | Sergey Levine is one of the world’s top robotics researchers and co-founder of Physical Intelligence. He thinks we’re on the cusp of a “self-improvement flywheel” for general-purpose robots. His median estimate for when robots will be able to run households entirely autonomously? 2030.
A Book We are Reading in August
Why Machines Learn: The Elegant Math Behind Modern AI | Anil Ananthaswamy | A rich, narrative explanation of the mathematics that has brought us machine learning and the ongoing explosion of artificial intelligence.
A Quote We Are Pondering This Week
"People often care about belonging more than they care about accuracy. We don't always believe things because they are factually correct. In many cases, we cling to beliefs that make us look good to the people we care about." - James Clear
Upcoming Interesting Data & AI Conferences
T&D World | 9/23 - 9/25 | Phoenix, AZ
Boston AI Week 2025 | 9/29 - 10/3 | Boston
Data & AI World Tour 2025 | 10/8 | Boston
CDAO Fall 2025 | 10/22 - 10/23 | Boston
UA Week 2025 | 10/28-10/30 | Austin
AWS re:invent 2025 | 12/1-12/5 | Vegas
The AI Summit NY | 12/10 - 12/11 | NYC
#LetsGrowTogether