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Why Leibniz Couldn't Find the Mind Inside the Mill (Joscha Bach)

Nov 02, 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 02, 2026

Why Leibniz Couldn't Find the Mind Inside the Mill (Joscha Bach)

Joscha Bach lays out his Machine Consciousness Hypothesis, the claim that consciousness is a simple biological learning algorithm which self-organising machines might rediscover. The discussion covers causal patterns and software, why IIT and the explanatory gap fail to explain experience, zombies and LLM self-reports, functionalism, Gödel and the Ruliad, and what evidence could ever settle the question.

Nov 01, 2026

I Made a Fruit Fly Review My Code - Nick Nisi, WorkOS

Nick Nisi argues that human reviewers have become the bottleneck in software development and demonstrates a simulated fruit fly connectome trained to judge code quality, reaching about 88% accuracy in testing. He then proposes a tiered review system where team skills, classifiers, and automated reviewers send only risky pull requests to people, backed by verifiable proof.

Nov 01, 2026

Why We Rebuilt Microsoft Office From Scratch for AI Agents - Yijia Liang, Compound AI

Yijia Liang, founder of Compound and former finance analyst, explains why personal agents succeeded and what finance needs beyond them: multiplayer agents with their own inboxes, a headless Office engine rebuilt with agents, and agent swarms that navigate massive data rooms and models while keeping every output grounded in citations.

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

Apr 30, 2026

OpenAI's Greg Brockman: Why Human Attention Is the New BottleneckOpenAI's

Greg Brockman, co-founder and president of OpenAI, discusses the company's insatiable need for compute, the state of scaling laws, and the belief that we are 80% of the way to AGI. He explores how agentic coding tools are transforming software development, the emerging role of human attention as the ultimate bottleneck, and the future of AI in pushing scientific frontiers.

Apr 30, 2026

100 Years of Progress in 100 Days: Sequoia AI Ascent 2026 Keynote

Sequoia Capital partners argue that AI is a revolution in computation, not just communication. They explain how long-horizon agents are reshaping every layer of work, comparing the current shift to the Industrial Revolution's impact on manual labor and suggesting that innovations that once took a century are now possible in a hundred days.

Apr 30, 2026

Robotics' End Game: Nvidia's Jim Fan

Jim Fan of Nvidia outlines the endgame for robotics, arguing it will mirror the successful playbook of Large Language Models. He introduces "The Great Parallel," a roadmap where World Models replace Language Models, and data collection shifts from limited teleoperation to scalable egocentric video, culminating in a future of physical APIs and automated research.

Apr 30, 2026

LLM codegen fails and how to stop 'em — Danilo Campos, PostHog

Danilo Campos of PostHog details the common failure modes of LLM-based code generation—from model rot to security risks—and shares the practical, prose-driven strategies his team uses to make their autonomous coding agent reliable for thousands of users.

Apr 30, 2026

The 3 Words That Secretly Drive Developer Productivity & Motivation • Yanina Ledovaya • GOTO 2025

Cognitive psychologist Yanina Ledovaya explains how to boost developer productivity and satisfaction by focusing on three universal human needs from Self-Determination Theory: Autonomy, Competence, and Relatedness. This talk delves into how these psychological drivers underpin developer motivation, influence the adoption of AI tools, and provide a practical framework for managers to create more effective and engaging work environments.

Apr 30, 2026

Replacing 12K LoC with a 200 LoC Skill — David Gomes, Cursor

David Gomes from Cursor explains their transition from a complex, 15,000-line Git WorkTrees feature to a lightweight, flexible solution built on Markdown prompts. He details how 'Skills' and 'Sub-agents' recreated parallel coding workflows, and discusses the trade-offs, failure modes, and lessons learned from shifting product logic from hard code to natural language instructions.

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