Oct 19, 2026

Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI

Jean-Denis Greze, Town's CEO and former Plaid CTO, explains why he shut down a nearly $1M-revenue AI tax business for SMBs and pivoted to Town, an AI assistant that works from email and calendar. The conversation with a16z's Alex Rampell covers founder decision-making under time pressure, product-market fit, the consumer-grade enterprise thesis, token allocation as a business model, neutrality versus frontier labs, horizontal versus vertical strategy, uneven AI diffusion, and how agents may reshape commerce and advertising.

Oct 19, 2026

The Model Swap Workshop: GPT-5.5 vs Kimi vs DeepSeek vs Mistral

Pamela Fox runs a guided workshop comparing GPT-5.5, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4 Flash, and Mistral Large 3 on Microsoft Foundry, showing that benchmarks cannot predict how a model will behave in a specific application. The talk covers counting, RAG groundedness, vision, multilingual failures, tool calling, parallel tool calls in agents, string-check and LLM-as-a-judge evals, Microsoft's ASSERT tool for generating test sets, and DSPy prompt optimization that lets a cheap model satisfy a spec.

Oct 19, 2026

What Is Loop Engineering? Building Better AI Agents

Martin Keen explains loop engineering as the next step beyond prompt engineering: designing systems where AI agents act, observe, adjust, and repeat toward verifiable goals. The discussion covers goal design, triggers, context and persistent state, tools via MCP and APIs, verifier subagents, and why humans must remain in the loop to manage comprehension debt, intent debt, and cognitive surrender.

Oct 19, 2026

Version-Controlled Search: The Web as It Was — Ryan Ahern, Exa

Ryan Ahern of Exa presents Exa Snapshot, a point-in-time web search that lets agents query the web as it appeared on any past date, and shows how teams can backtest predictive signals and financial models without overfitting.

Oct 19, 2026

Backtest Your Agent Against Yesterday's Web — Ryan Ahern, Exa

Ryan Ahern of Exa explains how version-controlled search through Exa Snapshot lets you view the web as it existed on a past date, enabling backtests of AI agents while avoiding look-ahead bias. A hands-on acquisition-prediction exercise illustrates feature tuning and the dangers of overfitting without holdout sets.

Oct 18, 2026

Stop Telling Agents How — Dan Barrett, Raymond Weitekamp & Jose Montes de Oca, OpenProse

The OpenProse team presents a declarative approach to multi-agent workflows, where developers and domain experts write contracts in plain markdown that any harness can compile and run. The talk covers event-driven jobs triggered by webhooks and pull requests, a grumpy-senior PR reviewer demo, a bank model-documentation workflow, composing contracts, pinning successful runs into deterministic workflows, and how the approach contrasts with DSPy.