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The Prompt Is Still a Punch Card - Ted Johnson, JoinIn AI

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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 Prompt Is Still a Punch Card - Ted Johnson, JoinIn AI

The Prompt Is Still a Punch Card - Ted Johnson, JoinIn AI

Ted Johnson argues that current AI interfaces, particularly prompting, operate on an outdated "batch processing" protocol akin to punch cards. Despite advanced LLM capabilities, this interface design forces humans to adapt to machines, hindering natural interaction. He advocates for a shift towards human-compatible interfaces where AI actively participates in real-time conversation, leveraging its intelligence to remove user burdens and amplify human potential.

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.

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

Real-Time Voice Agents in Production

Real-Time Voice Agents in Production

Panos Stravopodis, CTO of Elyos AI, shares the infrastructure and orchestration challenges of building production-ready voice AI agents. He details the four pillars for success—latency, consistency, context, and recovery—and provides engineering patterns for error handling, context management, and achieving conversational coherence in real-time systems.

What OpenAI & Google engineers learned deploying 50+ AI products in production

What OpenAI & Google engineers learned deploying 50+ AI products in production

Aishwarya Naresh Reganti and Kiriti Badam, with experience from OpenAI, Google, and Amazon, share a framework for building successful enterprise AI products. They detail why AI development differs from traditional software, emphasizing the challenges of non-determinism and the agency-control trade-off, and introduce their 'Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development' (CC/CD) lifecycle to build reliable, value-driven AI systems.

Humanoid Robots: Hype vs. Reality

Humanoid Robots: Hype vs. Reality

A deep dive into the key takeaways from CES 2026, covering the surge in humanoid robotics and the evolution of software-defined vehicles, followed by a nuanced analysis of the shifting US-China export controls on advanced AI chips.

Collaborative AI Agents At OpenAI

Collaborative AI Agents At OpenAI

Robert from OpenAI discusses the critical role of structured evaluations (evals) and graders for developing advanced collaborative agents. He explores the limitations of 'vibe-based' assessments, introduces a maturity model for evals, and presents a comprehensive rubric for measuring agent performance beyond simple accuracy, connecting these concepts to the power of Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RFT).

The Limits of Today’s AI Models

The Limits of Today’s AI Models

Karan Goel, CEO of Cartesia, discusses the fundamental limitations of Transformer architectures, arguing they behave more like retrieval systems than learning systems. He explains how State Space Models (SSMs) enable compression and abstraction, and why Cartesia is tackling multimodal intelligence by first solving for voice AI, aiming to develop a transferable 'recipe' for end-to-end representation learning.

Spec-Driven Development: Sharpening your AI toolbox - Al Harris, Amazon Kiro

Spec-Driven Development: Sharpening your AI toolbox - Al Harris, Amazon Kiro

Spec-Driven Development offers a structured, reproducible, and reliable alternative to 'vibe coding' in the AI era. Al Harris from the Kiro team explains how to leverage specs as living documentation, integrate external tools via MCPs, and use property-based testing to create a tight feedback loop from natural language requirements to verified code.

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