Hi all, here are today's three links:

Lessons from 2025 on agents and trust

Google Cloud experts offer their thoughts on the Year of Agents:

Successful AI deployment requires building the infrastructure to deploy systems that learn, the evaluation frameworks to measure improvement, and the trust mechanisms to integrate AI into workflows gradually. In 2025, we saw the start of these shifts at enterprise scale.

Meta Buys AI Startup Manus for More Than $2 Billion

Manus, one of the first pure-play agent startups, has been scooped up:

Meta said Manus has built an autonomous agent that can independently handle complex tasks such as market research, coding, and data analysis, and the technology will be integrated across consumer and business products, including Meta AI.

True agentic AI is years away

A detailed, if skeptical, piece on how today's AI agents can be improved:

Judging by how long it took to get from Google's original, breakthrough LLM, the Transformer, in 2017, to its progeny, ChatGPT, in 2022, an optimistic estimate of the time needed for the industry to achieve reliable agents is another five years.

If you have any agent-related links you'd like to feature, let me know!

Cheers,
Ivan