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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

Agents at Scale: Inside MiniMax's Model and the Infrastructure Behind It — Olive Song

Agents at Scale: Inside MiniMax's Model and the Infrastructure Behind It — Olive Song

Olive Song, RL lead at MiniMax, details the engineering behind MiniMax's open-weight models, focusing on M3's multimodal and agentic capabilities, the necessity of day-zero inference stack readiness, and continuous GPU kernel optimization. She discusses multimodal training challenges, long-horizon task evaluation, and expresses optimism for open models rapidly closing the gap with frontier labs.

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI

Jeff Dean discusses the evolution of AI, drawing parallels between Google's past breakthroughs (like fitting search in RAM and the origin of TPUs) and current challenges. He emphasizes that AI is becoming an energy problem, driving the need for specialized inference hardware. Dean highlights 'context engineering' and multi-agent systems as crucial for long-running, complex AI tasks, and offers advice for startups on finding niches where they can outperform larger entities by focusing on specific domains, data, and models. He stresses the importance of clear specifications for agents and 'taste' in problem selection, encouraging founders to question fundamental assumptions and automate the scientific method to build 'AI that builds AI.'

First Steps Toward Automated AI Research — Richard Socher, CEO Recursive AI

First Steps Toward Automated AI Research — Richard Socher, CEO Recursive AI

Richard Socher introduces the "Eureka machine," a concept for automating scientific research and invention through AI. Inspired by open-ended evolution and Karl Popper's philosophy of science, he argues that AI can compress the timeline of scientific discovery, overcoming human-centric bottlenecks. The machine relies on four pillars (knowledge, data, simulations, physical labs) orchestrated by an agent swarm, requiring a rethinking of existing infrastructure. Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), where AI improves its own code and addresses its shortcomings, is presented as the path forward, with early proof points in model optimization, training speed, and GPU kernel efficiency.

How Lassie Is Automating Healthcare Administration

How Lassie Is Automating Healthcare Administration

Lassie cofounders Steijn Pelle and Frédéric Renken, alongside investor Alex Rampell, discuss automating administrative work for small businesses, particularly dental practices, using AI agents. They highlight the shift from traditional software (data storage) to AI that performs labor, the challenges of onboarding AI into non-technical environments, and the vast market opportunity in underserved sectors where human labor is scarce.

Developer Productivity at a Developer Productivity Startup • Robert-Jan "RJ" Huijsman • GOTO 2025

Developer Productivity at a Developer Productivity Startup • Robert-Jan "RJ" Huijsman • GOTO 2025

Robert-Jan Huijsman, Founding Engineer at Reboot.dev, outlines a pragmatic approach to developer productivity by tackling friction and non-determinism in both human collaboration and software development. He shares Reboot.dev's strategies, including async workstreams, full-stack typing, unit testing with AI, and foundational engineering principles like retries, durable execution, and strong consistency, to build reliable and efficient systems.

Your AI Evals Are Lying

Your AI Evals Are Lying

Andrew Burt of Luminos discusses how current AI risk evaluation methods are insufficient, advocating for a "high dimensionality" approach using granular sub-risks and diverse legal and technical expertise. He critiques common practices like guardrails and single-LLM evaluations, highlighting the need for multimodal systems and continuous, automated monitoring to address the evolving complexities of AI, particularly with the rise of open-weight models.

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