As artificial intelligence evolves at breakneck speed, researchers are finding innovative ways to make complex AI systems more efficient and practical for everyday use. From streamlined language models that avoid 'overthinking' to lightning-fast image generators, these breakthroughs could democratize access to powerful AI tools - but they also raise pressing questions about how to properly test and evaluate these increasingly autonomous systems. Links to all the papers we discussed: One-Step Residual Shifting Diffusion for Image Super-Resolution via Distillation, Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models, Survey on Evaluation of LLM-based Agents, Unleashing Vecset Diffusion Model for Fast Shape Generation, Scale-wise Distillation of Diffusion Models, DiffMoE: Dynamic Token Selection for Scalable Diffusion Transformers