AI Agents

Google Cloud’s AI Monthly Recap: Agent Platform, TPU 8i, and Security

Google Cloud's monthly recap reveals the core tension of 2026: the explosion of AI models, tools, and frameworks creates fragmentation, making it hard for teams to build, scale, and secure production agents without drowning in choices. The article surfaces this as a coordination and infrastructure problem, not a model quality one. Google Cloud's answer is to unify everything under the **Agent Platform**, folding Vertex AI into it and offering no-code designers, long-running sandboxed agents, and governance tools like CodeMender. Meanwhile, hardware advances like **TPU 8i** deliver 80% better inference performance per dollar, and new models from Claude Fable 5 to Nano Banana 2 target both frontier reasoning and cost-effective scale.

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How Schrödinger sped up molecular discovery by 4x with AlphaEvolve

Schrödinger achieved a 4x speedup in molecular dynamics MLFF training by using AlphaEvolve, an evolutionary AI coding agent from Google DeepMind, to optimize the computationally expensive Ewald summation algorithm. The agent replaced simple for-loops with parallel batch matrix multiplication, improving performance from a baseline of 7.9 to nearly 30 and raising the program success rate from under 1% to over 60%.

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Databricks’ Agent Cloud: Why Open Source and LTAP Matter for AI

Databricks co-founders Matei Zaharia and Reynold Xin unpack Omnigent (an open-source meta-harness above coding and enterprise agents), LTAP (their database bet for live transactional data in column-oriented formats), and why agent security, spend controls, and a common API matter more than ever. The thesis: traditional software gets rewritten once the data is in the right place and agents sit on top.

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Build real agentic apps using CUGA: lightweight harness, two dozen examples

CUGA (Configurable Generalist Agent) is an open-source harness from IBM that strips away the repetitive plumbing of agentic apps, letting you focus on tools and prompts. With two dozen single-file examples and built-in governance, it shows how to build agents that scale from a laptop to a governed production deployment without rewriting.

Read MoreBuild real agentic apps using CUGA: lightweight harness, two dozen examples