Outpoll | Outpoll Weekly Recap: AI (February 16

AI

The week in AI felt like a collective deep breath before the next sprint, a moment of recalibration where the focus shifted from raw capability to the intricate dance of deployment and governance. The most significant tremor came from the EU, where the newly operational AI Office flexed its regulatory muscles for the first time, issuing formal information requests to three major foundation model providers under the AI Act's stringent transparency requirements.This wasn't a fine—yet—but a clear signal that the era of voluntary disclosure is over; the prediction market on 'First Major EU AI Act Fine' saw volatility, with odds shortening on a Q2 2026 enforcement action. Meanwhile, the open-source community rallied around a surprising new entrant: 'Cortex-7B', a model from an academic consortium that, while not topping benchmarks, demonstrated a novel, energy-efficient architecture that has researchers buzzing about its potential for edge computing.This sparked a fierce debate on prediction platforms about whether the next breakthrough will come from scale or efficiency, with the 'Efficiency-First AGI Path' contract seeing a 15% surge. In the corporate sphere, the narrative was integration, not invention.A major cloud provider's announcement of deeply embedded, real-time translation across all its productivity suites felt mundane until you considered the sheer computational diplomacy required—seamlessly handling context and jargon across legal, engineering, and creative documents. This practical, 'boring' AI is where the real market transformation is happening, a point underscored by another week of steady capital flow into vertical-specific AI applications in logistics and biotech. The AGI timeline markets, however, remained eerily stable, suggesting a consensus that we're in a phase of consolidation, wrestling with the profound socio-technical puzzles of the tools we've already built, rather than on the immediate cusp of a new paradigm shift.

#Weekly recap

Outpoll Weekly Recap: AI (February 16 – 22, 2026)