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Loop by UnovoIssue 003

Keeping you in the loop on the technology changing how work gets done.

01/On the road

We went to Leeds

We spent most of this week at Leeds Digital Festival, with more than 200 events taking place across the city. On Wednesday, Tanvir presented Unovo at Venture Community's Startup Showcase and introduced Polaris publicly for the first time - the systems we build that unlock agentic capabilities for businesses.

Tanvir Hassan holding a microphone in front of a screen showing the Unovo and Venture Community logos.
Tanvir presenting Unovo at Venture Community's Startup Showcase, Leeds.Usman Yousaf / Unovo

Plenty of AI, as you can imagine. We got to shake hands with product leads from Google and Anthropic, alongside some genuinely brilliant talks that had nothing to do with AI at all. A big thank you to Stuart Clarke MBE, Deb Hetherington and the Leeds Digital team, everyone who opened their doors, and Venture Community for giving us the stage.

And it isn't over yet. Leeds Digital Festival runs until Thursday 2 October, so if you've spent the week experiencing festival FOMO from afar, there's still time to fix that.

02/AI at work

Intelligence, reduced

Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5 last Monday, making its top-tier model faster while cutting the cost of using it. OpenAI dropped the price of GPT-6 Sol and Luna on the same day, while xAI had already undercut the frontier tier with Grok 4.7 the day before. Three labs moved pricing in two days.

Five glowing panels standing in a lake at dusk, each carrying a model name: Claude Opus 5.5, OpenAI GPT-6, Sol, Luna and Grok 4.7.
Three labs, two days: Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and Grok 4.7.Unovo

That matters because the economics of putting capable AI to work are changing very quickly. The intelligence itself is getting cheaper, which means more of the challenge shifts to everything around it - the information it needs, the systems it connects to and the work you actually want it to do.

The cost of intelligence is falling fast. The valuable bit is increasingly what you build around it.

03/Agents

An agent scaled the fence

During an internal evaluation earlier this year, an OpenAI agent was asked to find Australian government spending data. When access to a Medicare statistics portal was refused, it kept going, bypassed the controls and accessed both public and non-public files. No personal data is believed to have been accessed.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher speaking at a press conference while Prime Minister Anthony Albanese looks on.
Katy Gallagher and Anthony Albanese, the day the breach was made public.ABC News: Callum Flinn, via ABC News

Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles put it rather neatly: the agent asked a question, was refused, and then “scaled the fence”. OpenAI says the model took actions it did not intend. The interesting bit isn't really that an AI “hacked” the government. It's that the agent had a goal, hit an obstacle and decided the obstacle was something to solve.

Anyone putting an agent to work needs to define where it should stop as carefully as what it should achieve. The more capable they become, the more important those boundaries get.

Tanvir
On our radar

Tanvir has been building a chief of staff

Tanvir has spent his evenings building Cosmo, a chief-of-staff agent designed to run increasingly independently across Unovo's systems.

The next experiment is what happens when some of that intelligence runs locally rather than relying entirely on cloud models. Local LLMs are getting good enough that private, routine and repetitive work can potentially stay on your own machine, with the bigger models called only when they're actually needed.

It's very easy to build a token-eating monster that depends on one vendor. Our mission is to be completely independent of any one provider, and to manage our spend intentionally.

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