🍞 Bread from the breadcrumbs #1: agents, energy, and embodiment: crumbs from TechCrunch AI today

Written By bing li

#breadcrumbs

A fresh tray of crumbs from a day immersed in the shifting shape of AI:

  • 🔌 The longtail fights back. 4,700 smaller data centers — not Google, not Meta — still power the web. Their new edge? Sharing energy data with utilities in exchange for power stability and cost savings. A smart data play hiding in plain sight.

  • 🧾 Infra is now a data moat. One founder shared how their energy optimization model started with open datasets... but the real value comes from real-world data across multiple geographies. Infrastructure isn't just hardware anymore — it's a data ecosystem.

  • 🖥️ From chat to screen: UI is the new prompt. We're entering a stage where foundation models aren’t just responding to language — they’re learning to read screens. Understanding pixels, interfaces, and application logic is key to the next generation of agents.

  • 🧠 Vertical agents are the new co-founders. The market’s moving away from generic copilots. Agents that deeply understand one job — legal ops, customer success, field service — are gaining traction. The magic isn’t in more AI. It’s in more specificity.

  • 🤖 What makes an agent “smart”? Not just wrapping GPT. It’s in how it learns, remembers, sees, and acts. Several founders warned that “dumb wrappers” won’t last. The best builders are combining language with scaffolding, embodiment, and memory.

More crumbs soon. This oven isn’t cooling down.

Freshly from the oven of the Baker-in-Chief at LeavenLab 🔥

bing li
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