November 12 2025 - Reasoning vs. Efficiency: Multimodal Breakthroughs & Agent InfrastructureReasoning vs. Efficiency: Multimodal Breakthroughs & Agent Infrastructure

A roundup tackling whether 'reasoning' gains are mere efficiency tricks, Baidu’s lightweight multimodal ERNIE claims, Meta’s 1,600‑language ASR and SPICE self‑play, a $100M bet on agent orchestration, and developers’ cautious stance on AI‑generated code.