Ben Kus, CTO of Box, outlines the technical evolution of their AI platform, detailing the transition from a promising but fragile LLM-based metadata extraction system to a robust, scalable agentic architecture. He explains why this shift was necessary to handle enterprise-level complexity and the key lessons learned.
Garrett Lord, CEO of Handshake, details the company's extraordinary pivot from a college career network to a dominant AI data provider. He explains how they leveraged their proprietary network of 500,000 PhDs and 3 million advanced degree holders to build a business on track to surpass $100 million ARR in its first year by providing high-quality, expert-generated data for training frontier AI models.
Building successful AI applications requires a sophisticated engineering approach that goes beyond prompt engineering. This involves creating intentionally engineered evaluations (evals) that reflect user feedback, focusing on "context engineering" to optimize tool definitions and outputs, and maintaining a flexible, model-agnostic architecture to adapt to the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
KREA.ai's cofounder Diego Rodriguez discusses the critical failure of current AI evaluation metrics in understanding human perception and aesthetics, advocating for a new paradigm of personalized, perceptually-aware evals.
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, discusses the firm's unique product-first philosophy, the evolution of its organizational structure to specialize in areas like AI and crypto, and the critical challenges posed by the current anti-innovation regulatory environment.
BlackRock engineers Vaibhav Page and Infant Vasanth introduce a modular, Kubernetes-native AI framework designed to accelerate the development of custom knowledge applications for investment operations, reducing deployment time from months to days.