Jared Coyle could have been SAP Americas’ first chief Awesome New Stuff officer.

Before becoming the company’s inaugural chief AI officer, Coyle led a team by that name that explored emerging AI technologies and how they might be of use to the German enterprise software giant.

“It was one of those kinds of grassroots communities—if you could call it that—and then it really converted into a formalized identity because of the hot topic,” Coyle said.

The Awesome New Stuff group even played around with a fledgling GPT model for customer service years before ChatGPT made the tech mainstream. (Could Coyle sense then that it would later become a tech revolution? “I would love to say I had that prescience; no.”)

Fast forward a few years, and generative AI is now a much bigger deal for SAP. The company’s AI copilot, Joule, is embedded throughout its products. SAP has spun up AI agents under the Joule umbrella for tasks like expense validation, sales and customer service, and supply chain management. “We are once again doubling down on AI in 2025,” CEO Christian Klein said on an earnings call in January.

Keep reading here.—PK

Can reasoning models actually, well, reason through problems? Sure, up to a point.

At least that was the conclusion of a new paper from machine learning researchers at Apple this month, and it landed with a splash in an industry that’s staked hopes for AI superintelligence on this emerging capacity for reason.

In the paper, titled “The Illusion of Thinking,” Apple researchers found that large reasoning models “face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.” At a certain difficulty level, reasoning models seemed to give up, experiencing a “counterintuitive scaling limit” as the puzzle games they were tested on became more difficult. Apple tested reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3 mini, Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking, and DeepSeek R1.

Without reason: The researchers also studied how reasoning models “think” by examining reasoning traces—or the model’s own explanation of the steps it took. They compared them to standard LLMs and found that LLMs outperformed reasoning models at low-complexity tasks, while reasoning models beat out LLMs at medium-complexity levels. Both types failed at highly complex puzzles.

“Our detailed analysis of reasoning traces further exposed complexity-dependent reasoning patterns, from inefficient ‘overthinking’ on simpler problems to complete failure on complex ones,” the researchers wrote.

Keep reading here.—PK

Most EV charging is done at home, which tends to be a fairly simple proposition for homeowners who can set up a charger in their garage, plug their vehicle in overnight, and forget about it.

But for the millions of people in the US who live in apartments (nearly a third of US households are in multi-family housing) or in big, dense cities where at-home charging isn’t an option, the charging calculus is a little trickier.

But what if we could bring EV charging to the curb? Curbside charging, which is already common in Europe, is starting to emerge as a solution for US EV drivers.

Now, New York-based startup Voltpost is starting to scale an EV charging solution that makes use of existing infrastructure: lampposts. The company claims that its lamppost EV charging platform makes for a speedier installation process, brings down construction costs, and has the flexibility of being able to retrofit lampposts with either two or four EV chargers.

Voltpost recently had its commercial launch in Oak Park, Illinois, and then kicked off a series of 12 planned deployments in Michigan by retrofitting a lamppost in the parking lot of the American Center for Mobility in southeast Michigan. Other sites in Detroit and across the state are coming soon, according to the company.

“Voltpost is on a mission to decarbonize mobility by democratizing charging access,” Jeff Prosserman, Voltpost’s cofounder and CEO, told Tech Brew at a ribbon-cutting event for the first Michigan lamppost charger. “We do that by retrofitting streetlights into an EV charging platform.”

Keep reading here.—JG

Usually, we write about the business of tech. Here, we highlight the *tech* of tech.

Look here: It’s been more than a decade since Meta acquired encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp, which has been free of ads since its inception during the Obama administration. But your days of messaging your friends and family without encountering ads in the Updates tab are over, Marketing Brew reported.

Fried surveillance: Do you ever feel like your air fryer is surveilling you as you prep dinner? Well, some are, and the UK Information Commissioner’s Office told makers of devices including air fryers and smart speakers to knock it off, according to The Guardian.