Today we explore how artificial intelligence is evolving in surprising ways - from tiny but mighty language models that challenge the 'bigger is better' assumption, to virtual agents that simulate entire financial markets with human-like behavior. Meanwhile, a breakthrough in digital art creation shows how AI is reimagining creative workflows, raising questions about the future relationship between human expertise and machine assistance. Links to all the papers we discussed: SmolLM2: When Smol Goes Big -- Data-Centric Training of a Small Language Model, TwinMarket: A Scalable Behavioral and Social Simulation for Financial Markets, Demystifying Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs, LIMO: Less is More for Reasoning, Boosting Multimodal Reasoning with MCTS-Automated Structured Thinking, LayerTracer: Cognitive-Aligned Layered SVG Synthesis via Diffusion Transformer