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Your AI Agent Starts Every Session Like a New Hire - Killian Carlsen-Phelan, Sonar

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Machine Learning

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Judge a Transaction by the Company It Keeps — Somya Rai & MD Sharique, EXL

Judge a Transaction by the Company It Keeps — Somya Rai & MD Sharique, EXL

EXL developed an advanced fraud detection system that augments XGBoost with Graph Neural Network (GNN) embeddings. Traditional tabular models struggle to capture fraud signals residing in transaction neighborhoods. The system's innovative design includes meticulous sampling strategies, disjoint monthly graph construction for leakage control, and a GraphSAGE architecture that aggregates mean, max, and standard deviation of neighbor features to detect subtle fraud patterns. Emphasizing explainability for regulatory compliance and analyst trust, it also features a highly optimized serving architecture achieving 3ms P99 latency, pivoting to edge prediction to reduce cache footprint from 60GB to 2-3GB. This led to a 27-33% relative lift in true positive rates and a projected $65 million incremental fraud capture.

From 15% to 90% GPU Utilization: Fix the Data Pipeline, Not the Model

From 15% to 90% GPU Utilization: Fix the Data Pipeline, Not the Model

Tarun Sunkaraneni from Amazon AGI shows how a multimodal SFT pipeline that spent about 85% of its time waiting on data was brought to roughly 90% GPU utilization. He walks through concurrency with asyncio and Ray actors, prefetching, zero-copy transfer via Ray's object store, and a network-card bottleneck that appears only at scale, and argues that the hardest part of training throughput is often keeping GPUs fed rather than optimizing the model.

Small Models, Big Results: Training a Finance Agent for Under $500 — Charles Dickens, Snorkel AI

Small Models, Big Results: Training a Finance Agent for Under $500 — Charles Dickens, Snorkel AI

Snorkel AI and UC Berkeley's Sky Computing Lab show that a 4B Qwen3 model, trained with reinforcement learning for under $500 using the rLLM framework, beats its 235B sibling on expert-validated financial question answering built from SEC 10-K filings. The talk covers the FinQA dataset construction and verification, common failure modes of frontier models, transfer to multi-table and general tool-use tasks, and ablations showing that simple data and binary rewards outperform more elaborate setups, since the real bottleneck is disciplined tool use rather than reasoning depth.

Artificial Intelligence

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How to Decide What Your AI Agent Should Remember - Wojciech Pluta, Oracle

How to Decide What Your AI Agent Should Remember - Wojciech Pluta, Oracle

Wojciech Pluta, head of technical marketing for Oracle AI Database, argues that RAG gives agents a read path while memory gives them a write path, and that the write path is where business value lives. He explains memory promotion, a pipeline that admits, rejects, or escalates candidate memories, and demonstrates it with a mortgage agent that remembers preferences across sessions while refusing unsafe rules. The talk also covers short-term, long-term, and shared memory, why databases are a strong storage layer, and the context card that keeps prompts lean.

Your AI Agent Starts Every Session Like a New Hire - Killian Carlsen-Phelan, Sonar

Your AI Agent Starts Every Session Like a New Hire - Killian Carlsen-Phelan, Sonar

Killian Carlsen-Phelan of Sonar introduces Sonar Vortex, a plugin that gives coding agents a map of a codebase and its guidelines before they write, then deterministically verifies every edit. In a live demo, it catches a temp-file permissions bug that the agent's own tests missed and rejects the agent's first fix.

Please Stop Telling Your AI to “Search Harder”

Please Stop Telling Your AI to “Search Harder”

A discussion of how agent-driven traffic overwhelms APIs, gateways, and cloud infrastructure built for predictable load. It compares microservices with agent workloads, revisits SaaS multi-tenancy, and examines Agent Substrate's actor and worker model for suspend-and-resume agent sessions, with a critical view of whether most users will ever need this layer directly.

Technology

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Why Founders Are Betting Big on Factories, Mines, and Energy

Why Founders Are Betting Big on Factories, Mines, and Energy

Erin Price-Wright and Connor Love unpack the AD50 and the rebuilding of America's industrial base, covering how defense demand is financing manufacturing capacity for commercial markets, how AI is reshaping factory economics, how a new generation of founders applies lessons from SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, and Palantir to mining, energy, and manufacturing, and why private capital is now willing to fund physical infrastructure before government demand is guaranteed.

Mark Cuban’s Plan to Make Healthcare Affordable

Mark Cuban’s Plan to Make Healthcare Affordable

Mark Cuban and Julie Yoo discuss how transparency, direct contracting, and AI could reshape healthcare economics, from Cost Plus Drugs and modular pod manufacturing to personalized medicine, the future of physicians, and advice for founders who want to use AI to learn rather than to stop thinking.

Exploits Now Beat Patches: Open Source Security in the AI Era - Patrick Smyth, Chainguard

Exploits Now Beat Patches: Open Source Security in the AI Era - Patrick Smyth, Chainguard

Patrick Smyth of Chainguard examines how frontier AI has compressed the time between vulnerability disclosure and exploitation, leaving 30-day remediation cycles obsolete. The talk covers AI-assisted attacks, waves of supply chain malware, four attack surfaces spanning malware, known CVEs, zero days, and side doors like CI/CD, developer laptops, and agent skills, and practical defenses including cooldown periods, faster CVE remediation, and signing artifacts with SLSA and Sigstore.

Recent Post

The First Dedicated YC GPU Cluster - With Together AI

The First Dedicated YC GPU Cluster - With Together AI

YC and Together AI have partnered to launch the first dedicated YC GPU cluster, addressing the critical compute bottleneck faced by AI-native startups. This initiative provides flexible, cost-effective access to GPU resources, enabling companies from early-stage research to major players to train, fine-tune, and run inference on AI models, and mitigating the financial strain of long-term compute commitments.

6 Ways to Enhance Developer Productivity with AI

6 Ways to Enhance Developer Productivity with AI

Discover how top-performing teams achieve 100-150% productivity gains with AI by strategically restructuring workflows, automating wisely, prioritizing design, fostering deep work, reducing cognitive load, investing in growth, and optimizing tools. This goes beyond mere AI adoption, focusing on human-centric practices and intelligent measurement to drive real impact and retention.

Why Your Agent Disagrees With Itself (And What To Do About It) - Diane Lin, Datadog

Why Your Agent Disagrees With Itself (And What To Do About It) - Diane Lin, Datadog

This session addresses the critical problem of AI agent inconsistency, particularly in LLMs, which leads to "flip-flops" in high-stakes domains like cybersecurity. It argues that this isn't a model failure but a signal of ambiguity in the "gray zone" near decision boundaries. The proposed solution involves using active learning to identify these ambiguous cases, followed by augmenting agents with semantic memory (explicit policies) and episodic memory (past similar cases) to clarify decisions, improve consistency, and adapt to customer-specific preferences without relying solely on expensive fine-tuning.

Enterprise Agents Have a Structure Problem - Ishita Daga, Tesla

Enterprise Agents Have a Structure Problem - Ishita Daga, Tesla

Ishita Daga, a Senior ML Engineer at Tesla, explains why enterprise AI agents fail, highlighting that current fixes like larger models or more RAG are insufficient. She identifies ambiguity, staleness, and user preference as key structural problems. Daga proposes a solution built on semantic retrieval infrastructure: a hierarchical approach to knowledge sources, including a curated semantic layer and metadata graphs. She also details a robust context life cycle with live data sources and continuous feedback loops to combat staleness. The challenge of integrating individual preferences, requiring agents to reason over business concepts rather than raw schemas, is also discussed.

From Tokens to Cells: Foundation Models for Single-Cell Biology - Akram Baharlouei, Altos Labs

From Tokens to Cells: Foundation Models for Single-Cell Biology - Akram Baharlouei, Altos Labs

Akram Baharlouei from Altos Labs discusses the engineering hurdles in developing foundation models for single-cell biology. The talk covers the importance of single-cell analysis for cellular rejuvenation and drug discovery, the complexities and challenges of single-cell data (particularly RNA-seq), and a comparative analysis of current foundation model approaches, highlighting the limitations of transformer-based models and the potential of flow matching techniques like PrimeFlow.

You Didn't Ship a Bug. You Just Wrote It for a Human. - Ravi Madabhushi, Scalekit

You Didn't Ship a Bug. You Just Wrote It for a Human. - Ravi Madabhushi, Scalekit

Ravi Madabhushi details how existing infrastructure, designed for human users, fails AI agents, leading to issues like rate limits and over-permissioning. He argues for treating agents as first-class principals with fine-grained, context-aware authorization and robust visibility to prevent non-deterministic and potentially rogue behaviors.

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