May 20, 2026

Inference, not prediction — Prof. Michael I. Jordan on what modern AI is still missing

Michael I. Jordan, a leading figure in machine learning and statistics, argues for reframing AI from a race for disembodied superintelligence to the design of collective economic systems. He critiques the AGI hype, advocates for integrating economic principles and robust uncertainty quantification into ML, and proposes a new intellectual framework for building technology that augments, rather than replaces, human systems.

May 19, 2026

How to Build a Self-Improving Company with AI

YC General Partner Tom Blomfield explains how to move beyond the 'copilot' mindset and restructure companies as series of recursive, self-improving AI loops. He details how to make company knowledge legible to AI, creating systems that improve overnight with minimal human intervention, ultimately rendering traditional middle management obsolete.

May 19, 2026

What Breaks When You Build AI Under Sovereignty Constraints - Bilge Yücel, deepset GmbH

Bilge Yücel explains that true AI sovereignty is a technical challenge, not just a policy issue, built on four pillars: data, model, infrastructure, and operations. This talk explores the common pitfalls of retrofitting sovereignty—from performance regressions after swapping models to discovering deep vendor lock-in when moving on-prem—and presents a checklist for building genuinely sovereign systems.

May 19, 2026

Personalization in the Era of LLMs - Shivam Verma, Spotify

Spotify is personalizing open-weight LLMs without full fine-tuning by combining three key components: foundational user embeddings from streaming history, 'Semantic IDs' that tokenize its 100M+ item catalog, and a 'soft tokenization' layer that projects a user's embedding directly into the LLM's context. This allows the model to autoregressively generate the next song or podcast as the next token in a sequence.

May 19, 2026

How to Build Your Full-Stack Applications With CDK & AWS Amplify • Erik Hanchett • GOTO 2025

Erik Hanchett from AWS demonstrates how to accelerate the development of full-stack applications using AWS Amplify Gen 2. The talk focuses on its TypeScript-first approach for end-to-end type safety, its abstraction over the AWS CDK, and the integration of generative AI features through the Amplify AI Kit to connect with services like Amazon Bedrock.

May 19, 2026

How to Build AI-First Organizations — with Jacob Miller and Jeremy Mumford

Jacob Miller and Jeremy Mumford, authors of 'Architected Intelligence', discuss the enduring principles for building successful AI products and organizations. They cover why velocity is the only durable moat, why hallucinations are a data curation issue, and the proper progression from skills to workflows to agents, emphasizing a shift from focusing on models to focusing on process and speed.