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If Your AI Scores 100%, Your Eval Is Wrong - Ramakrishnan Lokanathan, eslams.com

Nov 01, 2026

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Machine Learning

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Oct 13, 2026

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.

Oct 10, 2026

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.

Oct 10, 2026

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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Nov 01, 2026

If Your AI Scores 100%, Your Eval Is Wrong - Ramakrishnan Lokanathan, eslams.com

Ramakrishnan Lokanathan argues that AI evals are broken because they are overcomplicated, and lays out a practical framework for building them for high-stakes applications: define the most ambitious version of success, test every step of a workflow, combine automated checks with human review and adversarial tests, guard against regressions, and turn real user failures into tests. He also introduces eSlams, an open-source package where models compete in games like chess, Go, and poker as a window into how they reason.

Oct 31, 2026

Your AI Agent Wants Your Data. Here's How to Lock It Down - Jeff Smith, Oracle

Oracle's Jeff Smith explains how to let agents query enterprise databases safely through an MCP server, covering reports exposed as vetted tools, the risks of natural language to SQL, performance tuning on read-only standbys, schema annotations, and deep data security enforced at the database layer.

Oct 31, 2026

Everyone Has the Same AI Models. Here's What Sets Agents Apart - Richmond Alake, Oracle

Richmond Alake argues that after the control plane, agent architectures need an intelligence plane covering what an agent knows, remembers, is allowed to see, and how it improves. He draws on the WWII Midway codebreaking story to separate information from intelligence, then demos a governed agent using an ontology and semantic layer that answers correctly about 99% of the time with far fewer tokens than a naive agent. The talk also covers Oracle's agent memory package, deep data security, private inference, and fine-tuned decision models for memory routing.

Technology

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Oct 29, 2026

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.

Oct 28, 2026

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.

Oct 28, 2026

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

Jun 09, 2026

From Transcription to Live Music: Gemini's Audio Stack — Thor Schaeff, Google DeepMind

Thor Schaeff from Google DeepMind demos the advanced audio AI stack, starting with a single API call to Gemini for rich transcription (speaker names, emotions, translation). He showcases speech generation directed by "director's notes" instead of a voice catalog, the real-time, sound-to-sound Gemini 1.5 Flash Live model, and a live demo of Gemini Live using the Lyria 2 model as a tool to generate a full song on stage.

Jun 09, 2026

[404] – Developer Not Found: The Continuing Developer Evolution • Derek Bingham • YOW! 2025

Derek Bingham explores the rapid evolution of developer tools with AI, from coding assistants to autonomous agents. He emphasizes the shift from prompt engineering to context engineering, introduces Spec-Driven Development (SDD) as a framework for quality AI-generated code, and dispels fears about AI replacing developers, arguing instead for increased demand and the necessity of new skills like ethical and systems thinking.

Jun 09, 2026

Building AI Agent Systems and Scaling Challenges in Agentic AI

Scaling agentic AI systems presents unique challenges beyond traditional software scaling. This summary explains why expanding a single agent's capabilities leads to non-linear increases in cost, latency, and failure propagation. The talk frames this as a systems design problem solved by moving from a monolithic agent to a multi-agent architecture with distributed responsibilities, and it explores the critical architectural trade-offs between horizontal and vertical scaling of agent capabilities.

Jun 08, 2026

OpenAI on OpenAI: Stacie Faggioli, Business Finance Officer Applications, OpenAI

OpenAI's finance team showcases how they've transformed operations using AI tools like ChatGPT, ChatGPT for Excel, and custom agents built with Codex. They highlight principles of AI-native design, headcount leverage, rapid iteration, and specific applications that significantly boost individual productivity and organizational efficiency, including investor relations, LBO modeling, marketing analytics, sales insights, financial reporting automation, and agent-driven procurement, credit checks, contract review, and vendor risk management.

Jun 06, 2026

Building safe Payment Infrastructure for the autonomous economy — Steve Kaliski, Stripe

This talk addresses the challenge of enabling AI agents to spend money autonomously and safely. Steve Kaliski from Stripe presents a framework for separating non-deterministic discovery from deterministic transactions. He introduces three key components of Stripe's solution: Shared Payment Tokens for secure credential sharing with enforced spending limits, the Machine Payments Protocol for paying for API tool calls, and the Agent to Commerce Protocol (ACP) for structured, API-driven e-commerce checkouts. Through code examples, the talk demonstrates how these primitives create a secure and auditable payment infrastructure for the emerging autonomous economy.

Jun 05, 2026

Building Agent Interfaces: Lessons from Chrome DevTools (MCP) for Agents — Michael Hablich, Google

Michael Hablich from the Chrome DevTools team shares hard-won engineering lessons on building effective and secure interfaces for AI agents. The talk covers moving from raw data to semantic summaries, measuring interface efficiency with 'tokens per successful outcome', designing for error recovery, and the critical importance of trust boundaries and deliberate friction in UI design for agents.

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