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Machine Learning

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Guardians of the State: An Air-Gapped AI Fortress for Consumer Data — Rachna Srivastava, DFPI

Guardians of the State: An Air-Gapped AI Fortress for Consumer Data — Rachna Srivastava, DFPI

Rachna Srivastava discusses building a legally defensible AI system for financial fraud detection, emphasizing that generative AI has eroded traditional trust. Her team at DFPI engineered an offline, hardware-secured data pipeline using Kafka, Spark, and semantic routing to ensure explainability, reproducibility, and auditability. They implemented a one-way data diode for secure learning and Apache Iceberg for time-travel queries, asserting that "trust is a physical property" built into the system's core.

Invited Research Talk: Measuring Generalization in EEG Foundation Models

Invited Research Talk: Measuring Generalization in EEG Foundation Models

This talk presents a multi-dimensional evaluation and interpretability framework for EEG foundation models. It reveals that current models often fail to outperform supervised baselines for BCI tasks, lack robustness to sparse channels, and exhibit an aperiodic low-frequency bias, making them better at capturing subject-specific rather than task-specific information. The analysis highlights critical deficiencies and suggests future directions for pre-training objectives and data collection to improve generalization.

Can LLMs Write Fast Multi-GPU Kernels? — Simran Arora, Together AI

Can LLMs Write Fast Multi-GPU Kernels? — Simran Arora, Together AI

Simran Arora discusses the critical bottleneck shift in large AI workloads from GPU compute to inter-GPU communication. Her team's solution, ParallelKittens, offers a set of primitives to optimize multi-GPU kernels by leveraging fundamental transfer mechanisms and compute-communication overlapping. They introduce ParallelKernelBench, a benchmark to evaluate AI models' ability to generate such kernels, revealing that while models can handle syntax, they struggle with deeper reasoning about communication patterns and hardware trade-offs.

Artificial Intelligence

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AI-Native Organisations Run on Skills: How to Structure and Scale Them — Imad Touil, QuantumBlack

AI-Native Organisations Run on Skills: How to Structure and Scale Them — Imad Touil, QuantumBlack

Imad Touil explores the critical need for governing AI skills within organizations, asserting that skills represent the true repository of enterprise know-how. He contrasts simplified coding agent loops with complex, real-world product lifecycles, demonstrating how ungoverned skills lead to technical debt—including duplication, quality degradation, security risks, and lack of discoverability. Proposing a microservices-inspired approach, Touil outlines a centralized skills platform and human-led governance model essential for achieving deterministic workflows, boosting productivity, and mitigating risks in AI-native enterprises.

Your Code Has Bugs. Lean4 Has Proofs: Formal Verification for Engineers — Varun Pant, AWS

Your Code Has Bugs. Lean4 Has Proofs: Formal Verification for Engineers — Varun Pant, AWS

Varun Pant introduces formal verification as the solution to reliably validate AI-generated code, proposing a division where humans define specifications and machines handle code and proof. He details Lean's role as a unified language for code and proof, exemplified by an AI rewriting zlib with 32,000 lines of proof, and AWS's Cedar using Lean specs with Rust production code reconciled by 100 million nightly tests. The talk also covers deductive verification with solvers and future cross-language verification with Strata, aiming for "provably correct" software.

How to Get Your Org to Adopt Coding Agents (Without Shipping Garbage) — Eyal Blum, Figma

How to Get Your Org to Adopt Coding Agents (Without Shipping Garbage) — Eyal Blum, Figma

Figma's internal AI agent adoption journey faces challenges like reduced developer agency, skepticism from senior engineers, and communication inefficiency. Solutions include investing in verification, using a testing pyramid for agent review, prioritizing detailed planning over prompting, engaging skeptics to build AI safety roadmaps, and implementing attention-aware communication by clearly marking AI-generated content.

Technology

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Platform Engineering for Developers, Architects & the Rest of Us • Daniel Bryant • GOTO 2025

Platform Engineering for Developers, Architects & the Rest of Us • Daniel Bryant • GOTO 2025

Daniel Bryant discusses platform engineering for software developers and architects, emphasizing treating platforms as internal products with developers as customers. He outlines a three-layered architecture, the evolution from monolithic systems to microservices, and the importance of 'golden bricks' over 'golden paths' for composability. Key takeaways include API-first design, minimizing cognitive load, avoiding leaky abstractions, and measuring success through frameworks like DORA and DevEx to achieve speed, safety, and scale.

Modern Enterprise Architecture: Architecting for Outcomes • Simon Rohrer • GOTO 2025

Modern Enterprise Architecture: Architecting for Outcomes • Simon Rohrer • GOTO 2025

Simon Rohrer challenges traditional Enterprise Architecture (EA) principles, proposing a modern approach focused on outcomes, continuous evolution, and socio-technical alignment. He outlines five key tenets: Aligning Value, People & Technology; achieving Better Value Sooner, Safer, Happier; implementing Continuous Conversational & Automated Governance; scaling DevOps across the enterprise; and fostering Evolutionary Enterprise Architecture.

Elon's Former Battery Chief on Making Transformers 100x Smaller | Drew Baglino, Heron Power

Elon's Former Battery Chief on Making Transformers 100x Smaller | Drew Baglino, Heron Power

Drew Baglino, former Tesla Powertrain & Energy head and now CEO of Heron Power, reveals why the current electricity grid is inadequate for the explosive growth of AI data centers. He explains how Heron Power's wideband gap power semiconductors will revolutionize grid-to-chip infrastructure, cutting power losses by half, shrinking massive transformers by 100x, and transforming data centers into grid-positive assets for a more efficient and sustainable energy future.


Recent Post

A2A:The Agent-to-Agent Protocol

A2A:The Agent-to-Agent Protocol

Heiko Hotz and Sokratis Kartakis of Google Cloud introduce the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, a new open standard for enabling stateful, secure, and asynchronous collaboration between AI agents built on different frameworks. They contrast it with tool-use protocols like MCP and discuss its microservices-like architectural benefits.

Riding AI Waves: Agentic AI, Open Source Tools, & AI Adoption Challenges

Riding AI Waves: Agentic AI, Open Source Tools, & AI Adoption Challenges

Grant Miller uses a surfing analogy to explore the challenges and strategies of AI adoption. He discusses the historical waves of technological innovation, the current surge in AI—from generative models to agentic systems—and offers practical lessons on navigating this rapid change by being prepared, patient, and adaptable.

Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business

Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi: How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business

In a conversation with a16z, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi and co-founder Ben Horowitz share pivotal stories and lessons from building Databricks. They cover Ali's transition to CEO, the strategies behind scaling an intense yet sustainable culture, the art of high-stakes dealmaking with giants like Microsoft, and the mindset required to turn down lucrative acquisition offers to build a trillion-dollar company.

No Priors Ep. 136 | Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell

No Priors Ep. 136 | Base Power CEO and Co-Founder Zach Dell

Base Power CEO Zach Dell explains that the explosive energy demand from AI and other industries is creating a crisis for the electric grid. He outlines Base Power's mission to lower electricity costs through a vertically integrated model, building a distributed power plant using smart batteries in homes. This approach tackles the rising cost of energy transmission and modernizes the grid for an era of energy abundance.

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

Nathan Labenz joins Erik Torenberg to challenge the narrative that AI progress is slowing down. He argues that despite perceptions around GPT-5, capabilities in reasoning and frontier science are advancing exponentially. They discuss the future of AI agents, the prospect of recursive self-improvement, the impact on jobs, and progress beyond language models into robotics and biology. The conversation culminates in a call for a more imaginative, positive vision to guide AI's trajectory.

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

Is AI Slowing Down? Nathan Labenz Says We're Asking the Wrong Question

Nathan Labenz argues that AI progress is not slowing down but is instead manifesting in less obvious but more powerful ways, such as advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities. He deconstructs the debate around GPT-5's perceived impact, highlights the revolutionary potential of AI agents in science and engineering, and discusses the tangible effects on job automation. The conversation also explores the rise of robotics, the challenges of emergent AI behaviors like reward hacking, and concludes with a call for a collective, positive vision to steer this transformative technology.

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