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

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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

Make some noise: Teaching the language of audio to an LLM using sound tokens

Make some noise: Teaching the language of audio to an LLM using sound tokens

Shivam Mehta from KTH presents a method for teaching Large Language Models (LLMs) to understand and generate audio by treating it as a discrete language. The approach involves a two-step process: first, creating an ultra-low bitrate (0.293 kbps) audio representation using a causal variational autoencoder, and second, fine-tuning a Llama 7B model with these audio tokens using LoRA.

Building Better Language Models Through Global Understanding

Building Better Language Models Through Global Understanding

Dr. Mazi Fadai discusses the critical challenges in multilingual AI, including data imbalances and flawed evaluation methodologies. She argues that tackling these difficult multilingual problems is not only essential for global accessibility but also a catalyst for fundamental AI innovation, much like how machine translation research led to the Transformer architecture. The talk introduces new, more culturally aware evaluation benchmarks like Global MMLU and INCLUDE as a path toward building more robust and globally representative language models.

Scaling AI Agents Without Breaking Reliability — Preeti Somal, Temporal

Scaling AI Agents Without Breaking Reliability — Preeti Somal, Temporal

Preeti Somal from Temporal explains that as AI agents move to production, they face significant reliability and scalability challenges. She introduces Temporal as a platform to abstract away this complexity, allowing developers to build robust, stateful AI agents by focusing on business logic instead of infrastructure plumbing like retries and error handling.

Balaji Srinivasan: How AI Will Change Politics, War, and Money

Balaji Srinivasan: How AI Will Change Politics, War, and Money

Technologist Balaji Srinivasan joins a16z's Erik Torenberg and Martin Casado to discuss the limitations and societal impact of AI, framing the conversation around the concept of "Polytheistic AGI"—multiple, culturally-specific AIs—versus a singular, god-like intelligence. They explore the practical system-level constraints on AI, its surprising evolution, the critical role of cryptography in grounding AI in reality, and the future of work and security in an AI-driven world.

Scale, Flow & Microservices • James Lewis • YOW! 2019

Scale, Flow & Microservices • James Lewis • YOW! 2019

Drawing on research from complexity science, this presentation explores why organizations slow down as they grow and how architectural and organizational patterns, like those in microservices and at Amazon, can create superlinear scaling. It explains that by fostering networked structures over rigid hierarchies, companies can mimic the innovative and resilient properties of cities.

Government Agents: AI Agents vs Tough Regulations — Mark Myshatyn, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Government Agents: AI Agents vs Tough Regulations — Mark Myshatyn, Los Alamos National Laboratory

Mark Mashottton of Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) discusses the lab's 70-year history in applied AI, its current focus on using agentic AI to accelerate scientific discovery, and the critical architectural and governance principles required for successful AI collaboration within the high-stakes U.S. federal and national security landscape.

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