An expert overview of post-training techniques for language models, covering the entire workflow from data generation and curation to advanced algorithms like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), and Reinforcement Learning (RL), along with practical advice on evaluation and iteration.
This talk introduces Anaximander, a system designed to bridge the gap between traditional, GUI-driven Geographic Information System (GIS) workflows and modern, code-heavy machine learning practices. Anaximander integrates geospatial foundation models directly into QGIS, allowing experts to interactively orchestrate, run, and evaluate models for tasks like semantic segmentation and object detection on satellite imagery.
At Applied Compute, efficient Reinforcement Learning is critical for delivering business value. This talk explores the transition from inefficient synchronous RL to a high-throughput asynchronous 'Pipeline RL' system. The core challenge is managing 'staleness'—a side effect of in-flight weight updates that can destabilize training. The speakers detail their first-principles systems model, based on the Roofline model, used to simulate and find the optimal allocation of GPU resources between sampling and training, balancing throughput with algorithmic stability and achieving significant speedups.
Zevi Arnovitz, a non-technical Product Manager at Meta, shares his complete workflow for building and shipping sophisticated applications using AI tools like Cursor. He details a structured, multi-step process that leverages different AI models for specific tasks, including a novel "peer review" technique where models critique each other's code.
![Why Every Brain Metaphor in History Has Been Wrong [SPECIAL EDITION]](https://img.youtube.com/vi/pO0WZsN8Oiw/maxresdefault.jpg)
An exploration of scientific simplification, questioning the metaphors we use to understand the brain and intelligence. This summary delves into the tension between creating useful models and mistaking them for reality, featuring insights on the mind-as-software debate, the limits of prediction versus understanding, and the philosophical underpinnings of our quest for AGI.
Thomas Wolf, co-founder of Hugging Face, discusses his journey from physics to AI, the power of open-source models to accelerate innovation, the practical challenges of productionalizing AI demos, and why the biggest opportunities for founders now lie in the application layer on top of powerful foundation models.
Jeff Crume and Patrick Fussell from IBM's X-Force team share a real-world ethical hacking war story, demonstrating an attack from an 'assume breach' perspective. They break down how vulnerabilities in Identity and Access Management (IAM) and legacy systems can lead to a full compromise, starting from an insider threat and escalating to domain administrator privileges through advanced C2 attacks and lateral movement.
Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, shares his unconventional journey and leadership philosophy. He provides a masterclass in building a multi-platform company through strategic M&A, explains why founders should sometimes ignore customers, and reveals how to lead with conviction while managing imposter syndrome.
Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Slack and Flickr, shares the product frameworks and leadership principles that guided his success. He delves into concepts like "utility curves" for feature investment, the "owner's delusion" in product design, and why focusing on "comprehension" is often more important than reducing friction. He also introduces powerful mental models for organizational effectiveness, such as combating "hyper-realistic work-like activities" and applying Parkinson's Law to team growth.
Rakesh Kumar from Lyft details the evolution of their real-time feature generation platform, from cron jobs to a sophisticated streaming architecture using Apache Beam and Flink. Key discussions include solving the 'hot shard' problem with geohashes, building a custom geospatial feature store, and optimizing pipelines with YAML-based configurations.
Randy Shoup, SVP of Engineering at Thrive Market, shares insights on architectural evolution, detailing the transition from monoliths to microservices, the principles of building effective platform engineering teams using DORA metrics, and how core distributed systems patterns have both endured and evolved.
Babak Hodjat, CTO of AI at Cognizant and a co-inventor of the technology behind Siri, discusses the strategic shift from generative AI to autonomous, multi-agent systems. He explores how these agentic systems will redefine enterprise operations, the intense "arms race" for AI talent, and the critical need for a decentralized, secure framework for agent collaboration.
Edwin Chen, CEO of Surge AI, discusses the critical role of high-quality human data in training frontier models, the flaws in current evaluation benchmarks like LMSys and IF-Eval, the future of complex RL environments, and why he bootstrapped Surge to over $1 billion in revenue.
A deep dive into the internal workings of Large Language Models like GPT, explaining the journey from a text prompt through tokenization, embeddings, and the attention mechanism to generate a response.
While general-purpose quantum computers are a decade away, specialized quantum accelerators are already tackling high-speed inference for AI problems in finance and pharma. This summary explores the practical use cases, the immense data ops and MLOps challenges due to the 'no-cloning theorem,' and the need for a new modeling paradigm based on topological data analysis.
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