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Dear Reader,

Welcome to the first of july edition of the Data Science Briefing.

Announcements

My Graph RAG workshop is this Saturday, July 11. Registration closes soon.

If you've been on the fence — here's what you get:

• 3.5 hours of live, hands-on instruction
• A working Graph RAG pipeline from scratch
• Full codebase and notebooks to keep
• Certificate of completion
• Direct access to ask questions live

Use code BRUNO40 at checkout for 40% off.

👉 Production Graph RAG: Build Explainable LLM Apps with Knowledge Graphs

Interpretability research took a leap this week. A new study of Claude’s internals identified a small, privileged set of representations the model can report on, manipulate, and reason with, above a far larger pool of automatic computation. The researchers call it the J-space and draw a direct parallel to global workspace theory from neuroscience. Blocking the model’s access to it left fluent speech and simple recall intact but stripped away higher-order reasoning. Values got measured too. An investigation ran 25 frontier models through the World Values Survey and found their answers more secular and more individualist than the average respondent in every country the survey covers. No model matched the worldviews of most African or Muslim countries.

Judgment turns out to be trainable. A collaboration between a major hedge fund and a research lab tested frontier models on six routine financial triage tasks, things like deciding whether a central bank document signals a rate change. Untuned, the models scored near chance, and expert prompting failed to push them past 80 percent accuracy. A smaller model fine-tuned on labels from expert investors reached 84.7 percent average accuracy, beating the best frontier model at 78.2 percent for roughly one fourteenth of the cost. The lesson is blunt. Prompts capture what an expert can put into words. Fine-tuning on expert-labeled data captures what they can’t.

Two infrastructure stories round out the week. An engineering deep dive shows how GPUs sit idle during token generation, not for lack of work but from waiting on CPU bookkeeping between steps. Pipelined decoding overlaps the two kinds of work, lifts decode throughput by up to 35 percent, and cuts per-step GPU idle time below 0.05 milliseconds. On the policy side, Portugal released Amália, its first open national language model, built for European Portuguese on the EuroLLM-9B base with 5.5 million euros in EU recovery funds. The weights, training data, and source code ship under an open license, and more than 60 researchers across five universities contributed. The launch adds one more data point to Europe’s push for AI sovereignty.

Human movement drives disease, and several papers this issue push on how to measure it. One study asks a practical question that most epidemic models skip. What spatial resolution of mobility data does a forecast actually need? Working with mobile phone records from Senegal, the authors define three ways of coupling locations through movement and find that the right level of detail depends on the mobility process a model cares about, not on grabbing the finest-grained data available. A second paper attacks the same problem from the supply side. Rich travel surveys do not exist for most of the world, so the team built neuroGravity, a physics-informed deep learning model that reconstructs mobility flows from public data on facilities and population. It transfers to cities it never saw, generates flow estimates for more than 1,200 cities, and reveals that spatial income segregation controls how well those transfers hold. A third study rethinks the number at the center of outbreak response. The standard reproduction ratio breaks down in spatially structured populations, so the authors define an outbreak reproduction ratio that stays community-specific and still accounts for the wider contact network. Tested on early SARS-CoV-2 spread in Canada, it surfaces geographic risk that standard metrics miss, and it can be computed from contact data ahead of any outbreak.

Trust runs through the rest of the issue. A Lancet review pulls together mechanistic, trial, and surveillance evidence on mRNA vaccines across billions of administered doses, laying out the transient cytoplasmic expression and rapid clearance that separate the platform from gene therapy and documenting a serious-adverse-event rate that stays rare and well characterized. Trust in information faces a harder audit. An analysis of every Community Notes entry on X, 1.9 million notes carrying 135 million ratings across 13 countries, shows the algorithm doing exactly what it was built to do, and failing for that reason. By promoting only notes that win cross-partisan agreement, the system systematically leaves the most polarizing content unmoderated, a gap the authors trace through recent elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany.

Two pieces close the issue on the security and ethics of AI itself. One demonstrates a persistent attack on agents that write and reuse long-term memory. A payload hidden in web content gets read during a routine task, saved to memory, and later executed like an instruction, turning the agent into what the authors call a zombie under lasting outside control. Per-session prompt filtering does nothing to stop it. The other trades threat models for a classroom. An engineer and instructor scrapped his outright ban on student AI use and negotiated a contract instead, drawing a line that keeps critical analysis and system design in human hands and lets machines handle repetitive tasks and literature searches. Four semesters in, he reports the contract itself became the lesson.

Our current book recommendation is "Building Applications with AI Agents" by M. Albada. In this week's video, we explore if RAG Still Needed? Choosing the Best Approach for LLMs.

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Semper discentes,

The D4S Team

Michael Albada spent nine years building machine learning systems at Uber, ServiceNow, and Microsoft, and it shows. His O'Reilly book, Building Applications with AI Agents, treats agents as a design pattern, not magic. Thirteen chapters take you from a single working agent through skills, orchestration, memory, learning, and on to multi-agent systems. Later chapters cover measurement, production monitoring, and security.

The design-first stance is the real draw. Every idea sits inside a case study: customer support, legal work, advertising, and code review agents. Albada compares real frameworks by name, including LangGraph, AutoGen, CrewAI, and OpenAI's SDK, and weighs their trade-offs instead of crowning a winner. A data scientist gets clear patterns for picking tools, structuring memory, and validating output before it ships.

It has two weak spots. Some chapters lean on checklists, and sometimes make you walk away feeling like the core idea could fit in a third of the pages. It also skips runnable, end-to-end code, pointing you to outside docs instead. Still, for the data scientist or ML engineer moving into agent work, this book maps the decisions that matter and saves weeks of trial and error. Worth a spot on the shelf.

1. ​A global workspace in language models [anthropic.com]
2. ​Drone physics [iahmed.me]
3. ​Portugal launches first open-source AI model, joining Europe's sovereignty push [reuters.com]
4. ​AI models’ values are very different from most people’s [economist.com]
5. ​Relationships make us happy — and healthy [news.harvard.edu]
6. ​Learning to Replicate Expert Judgment in Financial Tasks [thinkingmachines.ai]
7. ​Meta Contractors Posed as Teens to Prompt Rival Chatbots About Suicide, Sex, and Drugs [wired.com]
8. ​Previewing GPT-5.6 Sol: a next-generation model [openai.com]
9. ​Popping the GPU Bubble [moondream.ai]

• ​Mobility data resolution needed to inform predictive models of spatial epidemic spread from mobile phone data (G. Pullano, S. Bansal, S. Rubrichi, V. Colizza)
• ​Zombie Agents: Persistent Control of Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Self-Reinforcing Injections (X. Yang, Y. He, S. Ji, B. Hooi, J. S. Dong)
• ​Instead of banning AI, I made a classroom contract with my students (T. Głowacki)
• ​Redefining and estimating the early-phase reproduction ratio for epidemic outbreaks in spatially structured populations (B. Wang, E. Valdano)
• ​Community Notes undermoderate polarizing content by design creating risks in electoral processes (P. Bouchaud, P. Ramaciotti)
• ​Safety and efficacy of mRNA vaccines: a mechanistic and public health perspective (A. K. Blakney, K. A. Top, B. J. Cowling, H. J. Larson, R. J. Shattock, M. Sadarangani)
• ​Transferable Human Mobility Network Reconstruction with neuroGravity (J. Yang, S. Huang, Z. Huang, Y. Jin, X. Yang, M. C. Gonzalez, Y. Xu)

Is RAG Still Needed? Choosing the Best Approach for LLMs

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All the videos of the week are available in our YouTube playlist.

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