Verge diary tests local AI agents on M5 Ultra Mac Studio

Hyperscalers, data centers and chip companies are borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars to finance the AI buildout, making the tech boom one of the biggest new forces in corporate credit. Investors keep buying, but concentration and complex data-center financing are raising concerns.

Akamai's Du'an Lightfoot and Khaja Omer cite a speculative decoding run that dropped a demo model from roughly 58 tokens per second to 16 instead of speeding it up. Their point: inference configs must be measured against the actual model, hardware and workload.

PolyAI CTO Shawn Wen says full-duplex models exist but reasoning speed is the next hurdle for natural conversation. Otter CMO Alex Gay points to speaker identification and intent capture as key to automation.

A developer reports Claude Code rediscovered a system's architecture — which service owns the data, which frontend calls it, which shared type they use — in two MCP calls. The records then ran out, cutting the session short.

AI reverse-engineering tools let vibe coders recompile AAA games for the browser, with GTA 5's open-world sandbox and story mode playable free with no download. Activision, Bethesda and Rockstar have issued DMCA takedowns, but copycats keep hosting ports on .dev, .lol, .gg and .io domains.