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The new post-quantum cryptography executive order. Plus: What is Q-Day, really?

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Machine Learning

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Frontier results, on device - RL Nabors, Arize

Frontier results, on device - RL Nabors, Arize

RL Nabors discusses the significant costs associated with using frontier AI models, covering security, latency, and financial implications. She introduces a framework for right-sizing AI solutions by leveraging smaller, task-specific models and Small Language Models (SLMs). The framework details how to prove task feasibility, establish success criteria with golden datasets, conduct capability evaluations (using tools like Phoenix), and select the most appropriate "Small And Good Enough" (SAGE) model. Nabors further demonstrates how prompt engineering, particularly few-shot prompting, and post-processing can close performance gaps with larger models, while advocating for continuous regression evaluations to maintain performance integrity. The overarching message is to "prototype big, deploy small" to optimize AI deployments.

Research to Reality: Bringing Frontier ML Research to Production - Vaidas Razgaitis, Higharc

Research to Reality: Bringing Frontier ML Research to Production - Vaidas Razgaitis, Higharc

Vaidas Razgaitis, Senior Research Engineer at Higharc, shares three tactical tips to accelerate the transition of novel AI/ML research into production-ready features. He emphasizes addressing the critical handoff challenge between ML researchers and software engineers through structured documentation (Research Prototype Taxonomy Document), a well-organized monorepo utilizing decoupled microservices, and a systematic approach to code decomposition and PR review. These strategies aim to improve legibility, maintainability, and delivery speed for ML-driven products.

Uncertainty-Guided Data Augmentation for Engineers | Deep Dive - Yongmin Kwon

Uncertainty-Guided Data Augmentation for Engineers | Deep Dive - Yongmin Kwon

This session details a data-efficient method for training engineering surrogate models by using uncertainty quantification (UQ) to guide geometric data augmentation. Instead of random deformations, the approach lets the deep ensemble model identify its own knowledge gaps (epistemic uncertainty), then uses Free-Form Deformation (FFD) to generate new shapes specifically in those uncertain regions. This ensures every expensive simulation run yields maximally informative data, significantly improving model accuracy for a fixed computational budget across domains like structural mechanics and aerodynamics.

Artificial Intelligence

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The Benchmark With No Instructions — Tufa Labs (ARC-AGI-3)

The Benchmark With No Instructions — Tufa Labs (ARC-AGI-3)

Tim Scarfe visits Tufa Labs to explore their top-ranking ARC-AGI-3 system, a benchmark for agentic intelligence that challenges LLMs in goal discovery and action efficiency. The team delves into the complexities of fractured representations, the role of human priors, and whether LLMs truly plan or merely simulate it effectively, all while balancing the bitter lesson with AI safety concerns.

Session on Reasoning

Session on Reasoning

This session features two talks on optimizing and verifying AI reasoning. Hongxiang Fan discusses cross-stack co-design for efficient AI, focusing on Test-Time Scaling (TTS) challenges, optimal verification granularity, and system-level optimizations for edge deployments. Nagarajan Natarajan introduces 'Advancing Verified Reasoning' with the InterVent platform, aiming to ensure AI agents comply with complex policies through formal verification, dynamic steering, and leveraging verification signals for training. Both emphasize addressing the computational and reliability costs of advanced AI.

Multimodal & Embodied Intelligence (Pt 1), Panel on Multimodal AI: Progress, Pitfalls, Possibilities

Multimodal & Embodied Intelligence (Pt 1), Panel on Multimodal AI: Progress, Pitfalls, Possibilities

This session explored Multimodal and Embodied Intelligence, featuring talks on hybrid AI in robotics (classical vs. end-to-end), AI's role in healthcare (focusing on NCDs, deployment, and uncertainty modeling), and fundamental perception challenges in multimodal reasoning (using educational video QA and visual puzzles). A panel discussed the impact of foundation models, the blurred lines between AGI and human-like AI, critical deployment pitfalls (human factors, efficiency, architectural limits), and future directions, emphasizing task-specific models and the redefinition of 'foundation models.'

Technology

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Are Your Tests Slowing You Down? • Trisha Gee • GOTO 2025

Are Your Tests Slowing You Down? • Trisha Gee • GOTO 2025

Trisha Gee delivers a compelling talk on Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) for testing, dissecting common pain points in writing, troubleshooting, and running tests. She advocates for strategic use of IDEs, advanced tooling like build caches and predictive test selection (leveraging ML), and a disciplined approach to test design to overcome these challenges, emphasizing that good tests serve as crucial living documentation.

The new post-quantum cryptography executive order. Plus: What is Q-Day, really?

The new post-quantum cryptography executive order. Plus: What is Q-Day, really?

This episode delves into Q-Day, the anticipated future when quantum computers can break public key cryptography, and the U.S. Executive Order accelerating the transition to post-quantum cryptography. Experts discuss why Q-Day is a gradual process rather than a sudden event, the critical importance of "crypto-agility" as a long-term strategy, and the necessity for organizations to begin immediate discovery and planning to secure data against "collect now, decrypt later" threats. The discussion also touches upon the broader, transformative benefits of quantum computing beyond just security.

Plenary Talk 3​: Challenges and research opportunities for global hyperscale services

Plenary Talk 3​: Challenges and research opportunities for global hyperscale services

Jim Kleewein's talk outlines the immense challenges and critical research opportunities in building and operating global hyperscale services like Microsoft 365 and Azure. He emphasizes that at this scale, traditional approaches fail, necessitating a "new golden age of applied research" across areas like continuous availability, data management, security, and sustainability. Kleewein also discusses AI's powerful but limited role, stressing the ongoing need for human expertise, and highlights the ethical imperative to prevent failures that can have life-or-death consequences.

Recent Post

AI Won't Replace You—But Someone Using AI Will

AI Won't Replace You—But Someone Using AI Will

In this episode, Ben Lorica and Evangelos Simoudis discuss how AI is fundamentally reshaping the modern workplace. They explore the necessary evolution of knowledge work, from a focus on routine execution to problem definition and spec-driven development, and outline the critical skills professionals must cultivate—including rapid experimentation, AI agent orchestration, and systems thinking—to remain valuable and navigate a more volatile labor market.

CROSS — Leveraging AI ASICs for Homomorphic Encryption

CROSS — Leveraging AI ASICs for Homomorphic Encryption

The talk presents CROSS and Morph, two compiler frameworks that enable existing AI accelerators, like Google's TPUs, to efficiently execute cryptographic workloads. CROSS focuses on Homomorphic Encryption (HE) and Morph on Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), demonstrating how to transform high-precision modular arithmetic into low-precision matrix operations that TPUs excel at, thereby achieving state-of-the-art performance and energy efficiency without any hardware modifications.

Efficient Distributed Orthonormal Optimizers for Large-Scale Training

Efficient Distributed Orthonormal Optimizers for Large-Scale Training

Kwangjun Ahn from Microsoft Research provides a technical overview of orthonormal optimizers (like Muon and Dion2), a new class of algorithms for large-scale AI model training that are emerging as powerful successors to AdamW. The talk covers their theoretical foundations, empirical benefits, distributed implementation strategies, and practical guidelines for integration into modern training pipelines.

Inside Perplexity Computer’s agent platform

Inside Perplexity Computer’s agent platform

Experts on the Mixture of Experts podcast analyze Perplexity Computer's pivot to agent orchestration and debate its closed-system approach versus open alternatives like OpenClaw. They also discuss Anthropic's new memory import feature for Claude, questioning if memory is still a competitive moat, and explore NullClaw, a minimalist agent framework that sparks a conversation about the future of edge-based agent swarms. Finally, they tackle the controversial debut of Tilly Norwood, the world's first AI actor, and debate the implications for the entertainment industry and the personification of AI.

Cursor's Third Era: Cloud Agents — ft. Sam Whitmore, Jonas Nelle, Cursor

Cursor's Third Era: Cloud Agents — ft. Sam Whitmore, Jonas Nelle, Cursor

Cursor's team discusses their latest Cloud Agents launch, which gives agents full cloud VMs to test changes, record demo videos, and provide remote access. We explore parallel model swarms, bug reproduction workflows, and the future of agentic coding where throughput and new bottlenecks in review and CI/CD take center stage.

This Startup Built the Infrastructure Powering Voice AI

This Startup Built the Infrastructure Powering Voice AI

In a YC Founder Fireside chat, AssemblyAI founder Dylan Fox discusses his journey from a solo founder in 2017 to leading a major voice AI infrastructure platform. He covers the early challenges, the technological shifts that fueled growth, the development of intelligent, promptable voice models, and the lessons learned in scaling a deep-tech company.

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