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- 👨💻 Top 7 Small Language Models You Can Run on a Laptop
👨💻 Top 7 Small Language Models You Can Run on a Laptop
🦾Plus: 🏛️ Pentagon hits Claude with ultimatum over guardrails

Hey folks! Let’s get into Big Data and AI craziness…
In today's edition: What's Shaping the Future of Data?
🤖Top 20 Artificial Intelligence Platforms for 2026
💬Perplexity tests Messages integration and usage credits
🧪AWS Launches Strands Labs to Give Developers a Sandbox
🤖What Are Chinese People Vibecoding?
🤝 Meta and AMD signs $100B AI Chips deal
💡 AI Tutorial:How to check if your AI code reviewer is actually good
🤖 AI Tools and Data Tools to checkout

This guide covers seven practical small language models, ranked by use case fit rather than benchmark scores. Each has proven itself in real deployments, and all can run on hardware you likely already own. Powerful AI now runs on consumer hardware. The models covered here work on standard laptops and deliver production-grade results for specialized tasks.
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In 2026 as new updates and improvements take over the field of AI, the ranking of these AI platforms will have to shift. We look at the 20 best artificial intelligence platforms for 2026, and why we think they deserve to be on the list.

Perplexity is testing a Messages connector for its Comet browser, enhancing local integration with Apple's Messages app. This appeals to macOS power users by merging communication history with web data. A new "Usage and Credits" feature allows users to buy additional credits, addressing backlash from reduced Pro plan limits.

AWS Strands Labs is a new GitHub organization aimed at helping developers explore and experiment with cutting-edge AI techniques. It is currently available for three specific projects: robots, robots sim, and AI functions. AWS considers these areas the ones that most clearly reveal what changes when software becomes agentic. Strands Labs gives AWS and the broader community a dedicated space to experiment boldly.

This post takes a look at the many interesting coding projects that developers, creatives, and entrepreneurs in China have been creating with AI tools over the past year. Tinkering culture has no borders, and companies are cashing in. Vibecoding is changing the landscape of technology in China. Highlights include a lighting app that became the most downloaded paid iPhone app in China,
Learn how financial institutions are deploying conversational AI agents with enterprise-grade governance — reducing costs, improving satisfaction, and ensuring regulatory trust.
Read The State of Conversational Agents in Financial Services from ElevenLabs to see how enterprise leaders are scaling responsibly.
👨💻 Data Tools, Libraries
Sqids
Sqids is an open-source library that lets you generate YouTube-looking IDs from numbers. These IDs are short, can be generated from a custom alphabet and are guaranteed to be collision-free.
semantic-kernel
Integrate cutting-edge LLM technology quickly and easily into your apps.
MachineAuth (GitHub Repo)
MachineAuth provides secure OAuth 2.0 client credentials flow for AI agents, enabling machine-to-machine authentication.
XBert AI by Nextiva answers calls and texts 24/7, handling unlimited conversations. It books appointments, answers FAQs, and routes urgent calls to your team. Most front desk staff cost $50K+/year. XBert does it for $4/day. Try it free for 7 days..
AI News:

Anthropic released a major update to its Cowork agentic platform with new department-specific AI agents, private plugin stores, and new connectors for Gmail, DocuSign, and more — escalating the enterprise agent war with OAI's Frontier. New pre-built agents cover 10 departments out of the gate, ranging from HR and engineering to banking, equity research, and wealth management.
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Meta has agreed to buy 6 gigawatts' worth of AI computing power from AMD in a deal valued at more than $100 billion. AMD has agreed to give Meta warrants to buy up to 160 million AMD shares, roughly 10% of the company, for $0.01 apiece, as long as certain milestones are met.

The Pentagon and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just delivered a Friday ultimatum to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: remove Claude's military safeguards, or face contract termination, government blacklisting, and forced compliance. Amodei has refused to budge on two Claude uses — autonomous weapons without a human in the loop, and bulk surveillance of American citizens.

Standard Intelligence introduced FDM-1, a ‘computer action’ model that learns to operate computers by watching video — already showing it can do CAD modeling, find software bugs, and drive a real car through San Francisco. FDM-1 is trained on 11M hours of screen footage, 550,000x (!) the largest open dataset, with an AI that reverse-engineers what actions produced each frame.

Google has added an autonomous agent to Opal, its vibe-coding app that lets users build mini web apps without writing code. Powered by Gemini 3 Flash, the agent can interpret text prompts, create step-by-step plans, and choose the right tools to complete tasks. It can connect to services like Google Sheets to store information across sessions, such as maintaining a shopping list.
Better input, better output
Voice-first prompts capture details you forget to type. Wispr Flow turns speech into clean prompts you can paste into your AI tools for faster, more useful results. Try Wispr Flow for AI.
AI Tutorial
How to check if your AI code reviewer is actually good

Go to the Entelligence Code Review Benchmark 2026. They benchmarked 8 tools on actual pull requests and published the full methodology. You can check the results there.
The report includes a live comparison tool where you can benchmark your own code review bot. Just scroll down and select "Try on your repo."

Sign up, set up code review, and select 'Bot Comparison' to see how your tool stacks up against the others.

The gap between some of these tools compared to others was huge. If you're responsible for any kind of tooling decisions, this one is definitely worth a look.
🔥Top AI tools to increase productivity:
Alice - A native app that offers fast and reliable experience with models (OpenAI, Perplexity, Claude and more)
Linktopia - Community link-building for bloggers, entrepreneurs and startup brands to grow
VerifactAI is an AI fact-checking tool that allows you to fact-check your articles within a minute.
Undress AI Tool is a website that offers a deepnude application, allowing users to create modified images
Screenloop is the ultimate Talent Operations Platform, seamlessly integrating a next-gen ATS
Postlyy - All in one platform to create, schedule, and analyze content on X and LinkedIn
View our database of all the best AI tools for your needs: aitoolsup.com
Have cool resources to share? Submit AI tool
A.I. Generated Image of the Day
👀 Cyberpunk Locomotive

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