What I Read This Week…
President Trump announces his 2025 tax plan, AI agents are currently unable to complete certain workflows in browser environments, and human brain tissues show high concentrations of microplastics
Read our Deep Dive: The Current State of AI and Follow-Up Conversation with Sina Sojoodi
Caught My Eye…
President Trump's 2025 tax plan proposes a restructuring of the U.S. tax system, built on extending provisions from his 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that are set to expire by the end of the year. The plan makes lower income tax rates permanent across all income brackets and includes corporate tax reforms, such as lowering rates to 15% for domestic manufacturing companies. For individual taxpayers, the proposal eliminates taxes on income categories including tips, overtime pay, and Social Security benefits, while also expanding the State and Local Tax deduction. The proposal also aims to address tax loopholes by closing the carried interest provision and reducing tax benefits for sports stadium owners. To advance this tax plan through Congress, it would need to be introduced as a bill in the House of Representatives, likely through the Ways and Means Committee, which handles tax legislation.
The Federal Reserve maintains direct control over short-term interest rates through the Federal Funds Rate, but the Federal Reserve’s influence on long-term rates depends on market confidence in its ability to control inflation. When markets lose confidence in the Federal Reserve's inflation-fighting credibility, they demand higher long-term yields regardless of monetary policy. This is why President Trump and Scott Bessent are focusing their attention on the long end of the yield curve. Their strategy involves implementing fiscal and regulatory reforms to convince markets that long-term inflation will be contained, allowing long-term interest rates to fall without requiring Federal Reserve intervention. This approach faces a balancing act: the reforms must be substantial enough to shift market sentiment and lower borrowing costs, but not so aggressive that they trigger a pullback in consumer spending, which accounts for 70% of U.S. GDP.
As agentic AI advances into browser-based workflows, OpenAI's Operator has emerged to automate workflows on web browsers, though it still makes mistakes today. For example, in an attempt to automate expense reporting, Operator mismatched receipts to amounts, nearly deleted key data, and failed on various edge cases without manual intervention. Its reliance on chat-based prompts also leaves it vulnerable to prompt injection attacks, and low reliability means it can't yet replace humans for precise tasks. But even if agents like Operator were able to work flawlessly, the "last mile" for these workflows involves unspoken rules and subtle judgment that people cannot easily articulate in words to prompt the agent. With the expense report example, there are exceptions like handling international charges or ambiguous receipts that rely on understanding unspoken rules that AI agents cannot figure out today. We are still a few breakthroughs away from AI agents working in browser environments that can flawlessly do tasks without any human supervision.
A new study from Nature Medicine indicates that human brain tissues contain micro- and nanoplastics with concentrations 7–30 times greater than in the liver or kidneys. The study analyzed brain samples from deceased individuals, detecting nanoscale plastic fragments—such as polyethylene and polystyrene—using chemical and imaging methods. Notably, brains from people with dementia showed higher micro- and nanoplastic accumulation, particularly in blood vessel walls and immune cells. The study found that micro- and nanoplastic levels in organs rose between 2016 and 2024, suggesting escalating environmental contamination. While the direct health impacts remain uncertain, the findings raise concerns because micro- and nanoplastics in the brain may interact with neural or immune processes, and their proximity to critical structures like blood vessels could increase the risk of neurological disorders. This study provides the first direct evidence of pervasive plastic accumulation in human brain tissues.
Other Reading…
DOGE Working with Trump Appointees to Examine Medicare and Medicaid Books (Politico)
Rahm Emanuel: ‘Democrats have become the party of permissiveness’ (Washington Post)
Pentagon Ejects Washington Post and CNN in Favor of The Free Press and Others (Mediaite)
Meta’s Hyperscale Infrastructure: Overview and Insights (Association for Computing Machinery)
Anthropic Expected to Raise $2 Billion in Megaround (Bloomberg)
The Superconductivity of Layered Graphene Defies Conventional Theory (New Scientist)
Circle’s USDC Stablecoin Regains Market Cap Lost From FTX Collapse (Bloomberg)
Cities Can Cost Effectively Start Their Own Utilities Now (Kevin Burke)
On X…
"Even if agents like Operator were able to work flawlessly, the "last mile" for these workflows involves unspoken rules and subtle judgment that people cannot easily articulate in words to prompt the agent. With the expense report example, there are exceptions like handling international charges or ambiguous receipts that rely on understanding unspoken rules that AI agents cannot figure out today."
This is not a difficult problem to solve. The way you train humans to do the task is to have them first do everything they know for sure and escalate the ambiguous cases to their supervisors for clarification. By seeing how their supervisors handle ambiguity, they learn those rules and know how to handle such cases in the future. AI agents will do the same.
I would like to see the folks from All In bringing a guest from the "other side". All I seem to be able to find on the internet as people in their echo chambers preaching to the converted. Bringing somebody smart and articulate like Timothy Snyder or Mark Cuban or somebody anybody.