Ai agents

Session on Reasoning

Session on Reasoning

This session features two talks on optimizing and verifying AI reasoning. Hongxiang Fan discusses cross-stack co-design for efficient AI, focusing on Test-Time Scaling (TTS) challenges, optimal verification granularity, and system-level optimizations for edge deployments. Nagarajan Natarajan introduces 'Advancing Verified Reasoning' with the InterVent platform, aiming to ensure AI agents comply with complex policies through formal verification, dynamic steering, and leveraging verification signals for training. Both emphasize addressing the computational and reliability costs of advanced AI.

The AI Agents Helping Home Services Book More Jobs

The AI Agents Helping Home Services Book More Jobs

Avoca (YC W23) has achieved eight-figure revenue and a $1 billion valuation by building an AI workforce for home services, turning missed calls into revenue. Founders Apurva Shrivastava and Tyson Chen explain how AI expands software's market share beyond 1% by automating labor and operational costs, leading to a 15x larger opportunity. They emphasize that their AI agents augment human workers, reducing attrition in challenging CSR roles and creating new positions for training AI, driven by a deep customer obsession learned at YC.

The Blueprint for Autonomous Work Agents | Gavriel Cohen, NanoClaw

The Blueprint for Autonomous Work Agents | Gavriel Cohen, NanoClaw

Kovid Goyal, founder of NanoClaw, discusses his journey from a serendipitous encounter with Singapore's Foreign Minister to evolving NanoClaw into an enterprise AI deployment company. He shares insights on personal vs. team-managed agents, the "second brain" as a killer use case, NanoClaw's security-first architecture, and the future challenges of managing open-source projects and enterprise AI deployments in an era of rapidly evolving agent technology.

You Can't Prompt the Room: The Last Skill AI Won't Replace - Balázs Horváth, VisualLabs

You Can't Prompt the Room: The Last Skill AI Won't Replace - Balázs Horváth, VisualLabs

AI has shifted the software development bottleneck from coding to defining *what* to build. This talk emphasizes the critical role of human skills in eliciting true requirements and understanding business value, detailing practical tools like story mapping, a 4-question value framework, and the VAD thinking path to ensure valuable AI-driven solutions are built, focusing on impact over mere feature delivery.

Voice In, Visuals Out: The Agony and the Ecstasy - Allen Pike, Forestwalk Labs

Voice In, Visuals Out: The Agony and the Ecstasy - Allen Pike, Forestwalk Labs

Allen Pike (Forestwalk Labs) discusses the power of "voice-in, visuals-out" AI experiences, a paradigm championed by Andrej Karpathy. He highlights the critical challenge of latency in real-time AI interactions and shares three key techniques for achieving low-latency, delightful user experiences: utilizing fast models, employing short inference intervals, and implementing stable caching regimens.

Building an Autonomous Engineering Org - Angie Jones, Agentic AI Foundation

Building an Autonomous Engineering Org - Angie Jones, Agentic AI Foundation

Angie Jones details Block's journey in transforming its engineering organization into an autonomous one using AI agents. She outlines a five-stage AI maturity model, the strategic implementation of an 'AI Champions' program, and the technical steps taken to make repositories AI-ready and enable seamless agent delegation directly within developer workflows. The talk covers challenges in scaling multi-agent parallelism, including code review bottlenecks and resource management, and the development of an orchestrator ('Builder Bot') and 'Company World Model' to achieve full autonomy. It concludes with a critical reflection on the ethical implications of achieving such high levels of AI-driven automation.