Tokenless

Interactive discovery

Explore the topic map

Follow the connections between themes, people, and ideas across the Tokenless archive in an interactive topic modeling map.

Machine Learning

View All
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

View All
How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor

Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor discusses how his company is rapidly advancing nuclear energy through hardware iteration, manufacturing, and a unique regulatory pathway. He explains their intrinsic safety philosophy, the strategic importance of vertical integration for speed and cost reduction, and their venture-backed approach to building gigasites. Taylor highlights how the demand for AI compute is a major driver for nuclear, showcasing their direct powering of an NVIDIA Blackwell chip, and casts a compelling vision for a future of "hyper-technoindustrialism" enabled by abundant, cheap atomic energy.

The Platform Engineer’s Handbook • Ajay Chankramath & Kaspar von Grünberg • GOTO 2026

The Platform Engineer’s Handbook • Ajay Chankramath & Kaspar von Grünberg • GOTO 2026

This conversation with Ajay Chankramath, author of 'The Platform Engineer’s Handbook,' delves into why practical, code-first guidance is essential for building Internal Developer Platforms. He argues that developer adoption failures stem from a "product discipline gap," not a technology one, emphasizing developer experience as a first-class outcome. The discussion covers the book's arc from foundations to enterprise-grade features and its focus on 100% open-source, vendor-agnostic tooling. Crucially, it highlights how agentic AI raises the stakes for platform engineering, requiring new IDP layers for agent context, memory, and guardrails, asserting that these must be built, owned, and operated internally for safe and productive AI adoption.

Ex-Google Cloud AI Boss: Your Data Is the Real Moat

Ex-Google Cloud AI Boss: Your Data Is the Real Moat

Andrew Moore, CEO of Lovelace AI, discusses YottaGraph, a rapidly growing, automatically constructed knowledge graph designed as a context engine for enterprise AI agents. He highlights Lovelace's differentiation from public knowledge graphs by focusing on integrating private enterprise data, the engineering challenges of entity resolution and fast multi-hop reasoning, and the critical importance of graph amendability and auditability for mission-critical applications. Moore also touches upon the future of computer science education, advocating for product management skills and emphasizing the strategic importance of domestically developed open-weights models.

Technology

View All
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

How to Think About Scale, Funding & Competitive Positioning | David Solomon & Ben Horowitz

How to Think About Scale, Funding & Competitive Positioning | David Solomon & Ben Horowitz

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz discuss the current macro environment, the unique competitive dynamics of AI, enterprise adoption strategies like Goldman's "One GS 3.0" initiative, and the critical policy debates surrounding AI and crypto.

Real-time features, AI search, Agentic similarities

Real-time features, AI search, Agentic similarities

Varant Zanoyan and Nikhil Simha Raprolu of Zipline AI explain why traditional feature stores are the wrong abstraction. They detail the journey of Chronon, the open-source engine born at Airbnb and battle-tested at Stripe, which focuses on compute, orchestration, and real-time correctness to solve the hardest data engineering challenges in ML, from fraud detection to powering modern AI agents with features and embeddings.

State of the Art of Biological Computing • Ewelina Kurtys & Charles Humble • GOTO 2026

State of the Art of Biological Computing • Ewelina Kurtys & Charles Humble • GOTO 2026

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys of FinalSpark discusses the ambitious goal of building computers from living neurons, aiming for a 1-million-fold increase in energy efficiency over digital systems. The conversation delves into the technical challenges of neural encoding and plasticity, the use of brain organoids, and the profound ethical and philosophical questions surrounding determinism and consciousness in biological hardware.

Inside The New YC Website

Inside The New YC Website

YC's Aaron Epstein and Eve Bouffard detail the redesign of the YC homepage, shifting from a utilitarian, B2B-style site to an inspirational, founder-centric narrative. They discuss the new design's focus on storytelling, the unconventional AI-assisted development process, and the future of interactive web design.

State of the Art of DORA Metrics & AI Integration • Nathen Harvey & Charles Humble

State of the Art of DORA Metrics & AI Integration • Nathen Harvey & Charles Humble

Nathen Harvey, leader of Google's DORA research team, discusses the surprising findings from their latest research on AI's impact on software development. While initial AI adoption correlated with decreased stability and throughput, the latest data shows a reversal for throughput. The conversation explores why this happens, presenting AI as an amplifier of existing systems and introducing DORA's seven essential capabilities for successful AI adoption, including the critical roles of documentation, trust, and expertise.

962: Wharton Prof Ethan Mollick on Why Your AI Strategy Is Already Obsolete

962: Wharton Prof Ethan Mollick on Why Your AI Strategy Is Already Obsolete

Ethan Mollick, author of "Co-Intelligence", discusses the necessity for US firms to reignite their experimental approach to management to successfully adopt AI. He introduces his "Leadership, Lab, and Crowd" framework for fostering internal innovation and cautions against over-reliance on external consultants and opaque vendor solutions, urging companies to empower their "secret cyborgs" to drive productivity.

Stay In The Loop! Subscribe to Our Newsletter.

Get updates straight to your inbox. No spam, just useful content.