Ai agents

He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor (Sierra)

He saved OpenAI, invented the “Like” button, and built Google Maps: Bret Taylor (Sierra)

Bret Taylor discusses the AI market's shift to autonomous agents and outcome-based pricing, the future of coding with AI, and strategic advice on GTM, pricing, and where to build in the new AI landscape. He shares career-defining lessons from Google, Facebook, and Salesforce.

How we hacked YC Spring 2025 batch’s AI agents — Rene Brandel, Casco

How we hacked YC Spring 2025 batch’s AI agents — Rene Brandel, Casco

A security analysis of YC AI agents reveals that the most critical vulnerabilities are not in the LLM itself, but in the surrounding infrastructure. This breakdown of a red teaming exercise, where 7 out of 16 agents were compromised, highlights three common and severe security flaws: cross-user data access (IDOR), remote code execution via insecure sandboxes, and server-side request forgery (SSRF).

Safety and security for code executing agents — Fouad Matin, OpenAI (Codex, Agent Robustness)

Safety and security for code executing agents — Fouad Matin, OpenAI (Codex, Agent Robustness)

Fouad Matin from OpenAI's Agent Robustness and Control team discusses the critical safety and security challenges of code-executing AI agents. He explores the shift from models that *can* execute code to defining what they *should* be allowed to do, presenting practical safeguards like sandboxing, network control, and human review, drawing from OpenAI's experience building Code Interpreter and the open-source Code Interpreter CLI.

Enterprise AI Adoption Challenges

Enterprise AI Adoption Challenges

Paul van der Boor and Sean Kenny from Prosus detail the journey of Toqan, an internal AI platform that evolved from a Slack experiment into a sophisticated agentic system. They share insights on driving enterprise adoption, key metrics for measuring productivity, and their future vision of an "AI Workforce" where employees architect AI agents to automate complex, cross-system tasks.

Building a Smarter AI Agent with Neural RAG - Will Bryk, Exa.ai

Building a Smarter AI Agent with Neural RAG - Will Bryk, Exa.ai

Will Bryk, CEO of Exa, explains why traditional keyword-based search is insufficient for AI agents and introduces a new paradigm of neural, semantic search. He demonstrates how a hybrid approach, combining neural for discovery and keyword for precision, enables AI agents to perform complex, multi-step information retrieval tasks that were previously impossible.

Scaling AI Agents Without Breaking Reliability — Preeti Somal, Temporal

Scaling AI Agents Without Breaking Reliability — Preeti Somal, Temporal

Preeti Somal from Temporal explains that as AI agents move to production, they face significant reliability and scalability challenges. She introduces Temporal as a platform to abstract away this complexity, allowing developers to build robust, stateful AI agents by focusing on business logic instead of infrastructure plumbing like retries and error handling.