Pauline Brunet, VP of Forward Deployed Engineering at Cursor, details how FDE drives AI adoption in enterprises. She distinguishes FDE from traditional services, outlines the 'magical unicorn' FDE profile, shares Cursor's project-based co-development approach, and offers best practices for team structure, customer engagement, and measuring ROI.
Addy Osmani discusses the evolving role of software engineers in the age of AI agents, emphasizing a shift from code production to human judgment, accountability, and system ownership. He highlights new challenges like cognitive debt and the "orchestration tax," proposing that the modern engineer's value lies in "answerability," taste, and discerning which paths warrant human investment and responsibility.
Martin Keen debunks five common AI myths, covering topics from reduced AI hallucinations and the misinterpretation of AI's "thinking" process, to the rising costs of AI inference, the limitations of large context windows, and the current challenges to fully autonomous AI agents.
Steve Mock, investor and entrepreneur, discusses aisavedme.org, a platform born from his father's question, "How does one use AI?". The site gathers real-world stories of AI's positive impact, revealing surprising human outcomes in healthcare, education, and personal fulfillment, often less about technology and more about connection. He also shares his unique no-code journey in building the site and his venture capital insights into the "data flywheel" and "vertical AI" as key to successful investments.
Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang, leaders of Anthropic's developer platform, outline their strategy built on a "three-layer cake": knowledge, execution, and coordination. They emphasize moving towards advanced "strategies" or meta-harnesses that assign distinct jobs to tokens, fostering a robust and open AI ecosystem. The discussion covers empowering builders, setting industry standards, and Anthropic's nuanced approach to an open platform versus a walled garden, focusing on architectural soundness over infrastructure ownership.
Alistair Pullen, CEO of Cosine, discusses the UK's sovereign AI initiative, born from US export controls. He outlines Cosine's unique economic model, competing with "millions" against "billions" by licensing models instead of hosting inference. Pullen delves into why open models lag frontier systems, emphasizing active parameters and post-training data. He explains Cosine's innovative approach to "slop" through process-based RL and credit attribution, advocating for runtime proof in code review. The conversation covers their hierarchical "Swarm" sub-agent system, the challenges of memory, and advanced synthetic data generation, concluding on the geopolitical impact of export controls as an unexpected catalyst for UK AI.