Yaser Al, founder of Chatbase, shares his journey of bootstrapping the company from a side project to a $10M ARR business. He details his product-led growth strategy, the evolution of the tech stack from early RAG to a multi-model harness, and his vision for AI agents as 'Chief Customer Officers'.
This talk outlines the challenges of AI pricing, where traditional SaaS models fail due to unpredictable compute costs and margin pressure. It presents a five-step framework for developing a successful hybrid pricing strategy, emphasizing value alignment, customer trust, and rapid iteration as key competitive advantages.
Dmitri Dolgov, co-CEO of Waymo, discusses the 20-year journey from the DARPA challenge to full autonomy. He explains the Waymo Foundation Model—a multimodal world action model powering the driver, simulator, and critic—and how their "end-to-end plus" architecture enables superhuman safety and exponential scaling.
Baseten CEO Tuhin Srivastava discusses the explosive growth in AI inference, driven by the adoption of specialized and post-trained open-source models. He covers the strategic importance of owning the software layer on top of compute, navigating the severe GPU supply crunch with a multi-cloud fabric, the evolving landscape of AI workloads, and the operational lessons learned from scaling 30x in one year.
Recent advancements with Hierarchical Reasoning Models (HRM) and Tiny Recursive Models (TRM) show how recursion at inference time enables small, 7-million parameter models to outperform models 1000x their size on complex reasoning tasks. This is achieved by giving models compute depth to break through the inherent reasoning ceilings of standard feed-forward Transformers.
Rob Ennals, creator of Broomy, discusses a paradigm shift in working with AI coding agents: moving away from micromanagement towards orchestrating teams of parallel agents. The key is to design robust, automated validation systems and reshape the development environment to empower agents to work autonomously, efficiently, and at scale.