Brendan Lally

Fidelma McGuirk CEO of @PayslipGlobal showing their growth At @dexcom @portershed 10 year anniversary event #Galway

@heynavtoor Some not seen before. Will check em out. Thanks

Everyone knows ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. Here are 10 underdog AI tools the smart 1% are quietly using in 2026. 1. DeepSeek Free GPT-4-class reasoning at zero cost. The Chinese AI that shook the entire industry by matching ChatGPT for 1/10th the training cost. The rest of the world is still pretending it doesn't exist. Site → chat.deepseek.com 2. Kimi Free 2 million token context window. Longer than any Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini model. Drop in entire books, full codebases, or 100 PDFs at once. Site → kimi.ai 3. Qwen Alibaba's flagship AI. Ranks top three on global benchmarks against ChatGPT and Claude. Free, multilingual, aggressive on coding tasks. Site → chat.qwen.ai 4. Mistral Le Chat The fastest AI responses on the market. French-built, multilingual, free. Mistral is the European answer to the US AI giants. Site → chat.mistral.ai 5. You AI search with built-in image generation, code execution, and citations. The Swiss Army knife of AI search engines. Site → you.com 6. Komo Search Privacy-first AI search. No tracking, no ads, no data harvesting. The DuckDuckGo of AI. Site → komo.ai 7. Krea AI Real-time AI image generation that updates as you type. Watch images form in front of you. Free tier ships hundreds of images. Site → krea.ai 8. Glasp AI highlights and summaries for any article or YouTube video. The reading assistant every serious researcher quietly uses to read 10x more. Site → glasp.co 9. HuggingChat Free chat with 50+ open-source AI models in one interface. The playground every AI engineer uses to compare models before paying for one. Site → huggingface.co/chat 10. Lepton AI Free fast inference for any open-source AI model. Run Llama, Mistral, and Qwen at GPT-4 speeds without owning a GPU. Site → lepton.run

@MarcusSpillane @FundamentEdge So true. Data slop always been as issue. Now its #1

@FundamentEdge Citadel can do this because their data was already structured and audited before agents entered the picture. Most enterprises are trying to do the same thing on top of 10 years of SharePoint and PDFs nobody can find. The capability gap is real. The precondition gap is bigger.

A big pivot from Ken Griffin on AI: “Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. These are not these are not mid-tier white collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And I gotta tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. When you witness it in your own four walls, when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks, it's like, wow, like that's the first time I've seen real impact in our four walls.” This echoes my own experience with agents and the conversations I am having with students, friends & clients. The toolkit has dramatically transformed and it feels like in finance, for the first time, AI is real.

@patrickc @stripe Micro payments... could this be THE framework

@patrickc @stripe Hugh list. Like the custom objects, private db, ab testing, usage billing

We just announced a large raft of improvements at @Stripe Sessions. My meta reflections: • It feels that the entire economy is replatforming right now. • Many charts at Stripe are inflecting in quite dramatic ways. What GitHub recently reported for commits we are seeing in economic activity (such as new company formations). • It is increasingly clear that agents will be responsible for most transactions in the not overly distant future. • Stripe was always developer-centric, but AI is making developer-centricity strategic in a new way: agents are even hungrier for good DX than developers themselves are. • Things that we’re launching are increasingly network products at heart. (Instant transfers between Stripe businesses, new kinds of fraud prevention with Stripe Radar, stablecoin payouts to anyone with Link.) "How can we turn Stripe's economies of scale into user benefits?" is increasingly the relevant question. • Between Privy, Bridge, Tempo, and Stripe’s core capabilities, we’re now doing a lot in stablecoins/crypto, and companies like DoorDash, Ramp, Meta, and Klarna are using our crypto stack to deploy meaningful new functionality in production. “But where’s the production use?” is rapidly becoming stale when applied to crypto. • After more than a decade of building, we seem to have hit some kind of critical mass of core platform capabilities such that building new things now feels easier and faster than before. (AI also helps.) We announced Stripe Treasury last year (originally called Financial Accounts); since then, we’ve added multi-currency support, global payouts, card issuance and rewards, and a bunch of other sophisticated functionality. By the end of this year, Treasury will support 15 more currencies and be available to businesses in 160 countries. On the launches themselves, a small selection that I thought were cool, though this is really just a subset: • The @Link AI wallet. Point your agent to github.com/stripe/link-cli and ask it to make purchases on your behalf with secure single-use tokens. (To test it, I asked Claude Code to buy a small gift for me yesterday. It purchased HTTPZine on Gumroad.) • New payment methods for Link, including Pix (largest payment method in Brazil) and UPI (largest payment method in India). We’re also adding stablecoin support to Link (which I think will be huge if we execute well). • We’re adding a lot of new Machine Payments Protocol functionality, including micropayment and recurring payment support. • We announced Checkout studio: a sophisticated dashboard for managing your checkout flow, including things like transaction replays and A/B tests. Today this tends to require a lot of fussy edits to production code. • Adaptive Pricing (which automatically localizes the price and currency that customers see) now supports subscriptions. We’ve seen pretty huge (4–5%) conversion rate improvements after enabling it — customers really like paying in their home currency. • New Stripe Terminal reader (the T600) with a customer-facing screen that can run native apps, plus support for 15 new international markets for Stripe Terminal. • General availability for Stripe Managed Payments, our merchant of record solution. (Natively handles tax, disputes, fraud.) Maybe sounds a bit arcane, but it’s one of those iykyk products. It saves a lot of schlep. • Fraud is a *much* bigger priority for customers than it was 2 years ago (AI makes fraud easier + unlike software, tokens can be resold), so we’ve been extending Stripe Radar to support things beyond payments fraud: free trial abuse, multi-account abuse, pay-as-you-go abuse. Early results are extremely positive. We also announced Stripe Signals — new scoring APIs for customers, businesses, and other objects, not just payments on and off Stripe. • Usage-based billing is also becoming the de facto business model of the AI era, and we launched a bunch of new pricing models in @getMetronome and features like low-balance alerts, automatic credit top-ups, and multidimensional pricing structures. • We showed streaming payments built on @Tempo and Metronome — track usage and get paid the instant value is delivered. Hard to predict, but I think this could be big. (Why wouldn’t you want to get paid as costs are incurred?) • We added automatic US tax filing in Stripe Tax. • We announced Stripe Database -- a hosted PostgreSQL database with all of your Stripe data, updated in real time. Read-only to start but we’ll make it read-write. • Stripe Workflows are now GA. • We showed Stripe Console, a full agentic execution environment built directly into the Stripe Dashboard. It’ll happily write code and use tools to answer your questions. • We previewed custom objects: model your business data directly in Stripe, with custom objects, typed fields, and relationships. • As mentioned above, Stripe Treasury accounts will support storage in 15 currencies by the end of the year. And instant/free(!) transfers between US Stripe businesses. • You can use a Stripe card with your Treasury balance and get 2% cash back on purchases. • We’re massively expanding our Global Payouts coverage -- soon 100 countries with fiat rails and 160 with stablecoins. • Atlas companies can now raise money directly within Stripe. • We launched the platform growth studio, which uses Stripe’s network data to generate specific recommendations for optimization/growth. • We announced the Stripe Managed Risk API — platforms can outsource risk handling to Stripe while maintaining full UI/UX control. • Connected accounts now benefit from networked onboarding, which hugely increases conversion rates. • We’re launching Treasury for Platforms. Connected accounts can get spend cards with just a few lines of code. (Plus cash rewards, cash acceptance, check acceptance, real-time payments…) • We announced Issuing for agents: easily create cards for agents. But that’s really just a subset of a subset. (See stripe.com/roadmap for more.) The Stripe team is cooking! And if you’re interested in building the economic infrastructure for this new world, we’re hiring.

Words of wisdom from @BrianO_Rourke from on @CitySwift journey #Galway @portershed 10 years @dexcom event

@BrettBruen @mchalfant16 Aren't we grand

St Patrick’s Day is a good day to remind Americans that the Irish - despite being a country of only 5.2 million - now invest more here than any other country… Thanks for the great write up, @mchalfant16

@eoghan good on ye

@thinklikekai @theo_wayt @steph_palazzolo @waynema Like that

@theo_wayt @steph_palazzolo @waynema $200 million and couldn't keep him for a year The talent war in AI is genuinely insane Money doesn't buy loyalty anymore It just rents attention

Meta poached AI research superstar Ruoming Pang from Apple last summer with a pay package worth a reported $200 million-plus, part of a series of flashy and expensive hires by Mark Zuckerberg. Now, 7 months later, Pang has left for OpenAI. Scoop w/ @steph_palazzolo @waynema

@andrew_barba impressive support

10 hours ago I was in Guadalajara on way to Puerto Vallarta when chaos broke out in the airport and had to hide in a bathroom. Vercel leadership got together and didn’t stop until my wife and I were safe. Internet barely worked so they booked every US bound flight on our behalf, chancing that one would take off. Eventually one did. We just landed in Dallas. The US flight was Plan A but they were ready to act on a Plan B and Plan C if they had to. We are beyond grateful 🖤

@BrianButler111 @nlevine19 Fiction and costs are Huge drivers

@nlevine19 We used to mail letters. Then email made communication instant and free. Everyone joined. We used to stand in line at Western Union. Now we open a wallet and move money in seconds. When friction drops, participation explodes.

@inazarova showers not working !

Claude code, Rails and layered-rails skills is why you don’t see me at events anymore. I was planning to do smth in a couple months and it’s lunched after 2 weekends. Problem: I’m lagging on everything else.

@maciejmensfeld good improvements

Today is a good day. I made WaterDrop (Ruby Kafka messages producer) up to 60% faster, with 40% less memory usage and significantly lower CPU consumption when idle 🤯 #ruby #kafka #opensource

@joehas 400 real human workers or 400 AI bots?

Bonanza for lawyers, accountants and property developers. No spin off effects plus increased costs for companies started in ireland.

@MarkLTighe good luck on new adventures

Some personal news - after almost four years at the Sunday Independent, last weekend's was my last edition. It was a privilege working with so many great journalists. I'll hopefully have details on an exciting new project soon.

Enjoying Brian Hanly's talk from @brightbeam at #itag at #AI event in Hardiman Hotel #Galway on their company AI dashboard and systems

@joemasilotti destresser

Doing some deep business analysis between hikes this weekend.

@Shpigford no ; its hard .... : (

the one thing i've realized about the recent clawdbot fad is a TON of you are addicted to information and complexity. everyone acting like they need a personal assistant when what they really need is to learn how to say no to things.

@thejournal_ie That soon...

Contactless payments will come into effect on public transport in 2028, over a decade after the technology first began cropping up in European cities. jrnl.ie/6934067

@danobrien20 @thecurrency Like the WSJ

Very good news for @thecurrency subscribers - access to the Wall Street Journal now comes for free. This is a big deal. It's surprising how few people in Ireland read the WSJ given the hard-to-overstate importance of Ireland-US economic ties and the fact that it is the paper of record of corporate America, both financial and non-financial. The reasons to read it include not only being up to speed on what corporate America reads but also 1) The quality of the reporting is world class, both for US and international coverage. News articles are very well sourced, scrupulously impartial and analytically rigorous. 2) It has some excellent columnists. Walter Russell Mead on global affairs on Tuesdays, Karl Rove on US politics on Thursdays (today's column below) and Peggy Noonan on the world from Washington on Saturdays are among the most informative and thought-provoking. 3) A daily book review in the opinion pages Monday-Friday and a heavyweight book review section on Saturdays. 4) Its three daily leading articles (the paper's own views on issues) advocate a right-of-centre political worldview. This is particularly important for an Irish readership as no mainstream media outlet here makes the intellectual case for non-government led solutions. Public discourse, as a result, has become overwhelmingly statist/leftist, to a degree that is unhealthy in my view. 'Is the government doing enough?' is now the default question put by Irish media. That's fine, but unless 'is the government doing too much?' is asked as often, analysis of political choices tends to come overwhelmingly from one political viewpoint. Ideas matter in shaping political choices and decisions. While I very frequently disagree with the paper's editorial position on issues, real diversity of views is always needed in truly pluralistic societies. Well done to Ian, Tom and The Currency team for this initiative.