TAI #191: Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 Ship Minutes Apart as the Long-Horizon Agent Race Goes Vertical
Author(s): Towards AI Editorial Team Originally published on Towards AI. What happened this week in AI by Louie On February 5th, Anthropic and OpenAI released Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.3-Codex, respectively, within minutes of each other. Both are point releases, but both …
9 Agentic AI Projects I’d Build in 2026 to Learn What Agents Really Are
Author(s): Khushbu Shah Originally published on Towards AI. Most “ AI agent demos” online are just chatbots with a loop. I’ve seen enough agent demos that look impressive and teach nothing. These AI agent projects are different. Each one forces you to …
I Analyzed 1 Million Prompts — And Here Are The Findings — Industry Version
Author(s): Alara W Originally published on Towards AI. What 90 days of data revealed about why some industries thrive with AI tools while others struggle — and how to position your project for success. The question that started this research Three months …
The Death of CNNs: How Vision Transformers Rewrote Computer Vision in 3 Years (Part 1: The CNN Era)
Author(s): Ampatishan Sivalingam Originally published on Towards AI. From AlexNet’s 2012 revolution to ResNet’s dominance, and why it all became obsolete overnight In 2012, a neural network called AlexNet won the ImageNet challenge by a margin so absurd that researchers initially thought …
The 5 Normalization Techniques: Why Standardizing Activations Transforms Deep Learning
Author(s): TANVEER MUSTAFA Originally published on Towards AI. The 5 Normalization Techniques: Why Standardizing Activations Transforms Deep Learning Training deep neural networks is difficult. Add more layers, and training becomes unstable — gradients explode or vanish, learning slows, or the model fails …
This ASR Actually Handles 52 Languages
Author(s): Gowtham Boyina Originally published on Towards AI. And the Forced Alignment Model Is the Interesting Part I’ve tested dozens of speech recognition models over the time. Most claim multilingual support but quietly fall apart when you give them actual Chinese dialects, …
AI Agents Are Stuck in the Terminal
Author(s): Gowtham Boyina Originally published on Towards AI. Smooth Gives Them a Browser They Can Actually Use I’ve watched Agents autonomously refactor entire codebases, write test suites, and debug complex systems. But ask it to check a flight price on Google Flights? …
Leveraging Emerging AI Agents in Composable CDPs
Author(s): Clarencer R. Mercer Originally published on Towards AI. Cover Image Credit: Created by Author using DALL-E 3. How Warehouse-First Architectures Enable Agent-Driven Customer Intelligence AI Agents are rapidly emerging, enabling autonomous decision-making across customer-facing workflows. From personalized recommendations to real-time churn …
From CS230 Theory to Production Android: Building a Privacy-First Credit Risk Classifier
Author(s): Vortana Say Originally published on Towards AI. How I transformed deep learning mathematics into a real-world FinTech application that processes loan decisions entirely on-device I was sitting in my home office, working through Andrew Ng’s CS230 Deep Learning course, scribbling equations …
GPT-5.3-Codex vs. Claude Opus 4.6: Two Titans Launched Minutes Apart
Author(s): Kushal Banda Originally published on Towards AI. GPT-5.3-Codex vs. Claude Opus 4.6: Two Titans Launched Minutes Apart On February 5, 2026, at practically the same moment, Anthropic unveiled Claude Opus 4.6 and OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex. The timing wasn’t coincidental. It was …
LookML: An Alternative Semantic Layer Approach to build a Reliable AI Analytics Agent with BigQuery
Author(s): allglenn Originally published on Towards AI. Before we talk about where to store your registry, let’s address the elephant in the room: What about LookML? If you’re already using Looker, you might be wondering whether you need to build this YAML-based …
Mastering Authentication in MCP: An AI Engineer’s Comprehensive Guide
Author(s): Neel Shah Originally published on Towards AI. As an AI engineer working with the Message Control Protocol (MCP), I’ve implemented and evaluated three authentication methods to secure client-server communication: API Key-based, JWT-based with custom implementation, and JWT-based with FastMCP’s built-in authentication. …
Concurrent vs. Parallel Execution in LLM API Calls: From an AI Engineer’s Perspective
Author(s): Neel Shah Originally published on Towards AI. As an AI engineer, designing systems that interact with Large Language Models (LLMs) like Google’s Gemini is a daily challenge. LLM API calls are inherently I/O-bound — waiting for responses from remote servers — …
From Simple RAG to Agentic RAG: Unlocking Smarter AI Workflows as an AI Engineer
Author(s): Neel Shah Originally published on Towards AI. As an AI engineer who’s spent countless hours tweaking retrieval systems and wrestling with hallucinations in large language models (LLMs), I’ve seen firsthand how Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has evolved from a straightforward tool into …
RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: Why Your LLM Strategy is Probably Half-Baked
Author(s): TANVEER MUSTAFA Originally published on Towards AI. RAG vs. Fine-Tuning: Why Your LLM Strategy is Probably Half-Baked When I first started building LLM applications, I fell into a common trap: I treated RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and Fine-Tuning as interchangeable tools. I …
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