As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, researchers are finding ways to make systems both smarter and more resource-efficient, with new breakthroughs in how AI processes information and solves complex problems. From models that can scale their thinking time like humans do, to systems that process everything as visual information similar to human perception, to advanced video editing capabilities, these developments signal a shift toward AI that more closely mirrors human cognitive patterns while becoming increasingly practical for everyday use. Links to all the papers we discussed: s1: Simple test-time scaling, Reward-Guided Speculative Decoding for Efficient LLM Reasoning, Self-supervised Quantized Representation for Seamlessly Integrating Knowledge Graphs with Large Language Models, PixelWorld: Towards Perceiving Everything as Pixels, MatAnyone: Stable Video Matting with Consistent Memory Propagation, DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning