Distributed systems

Sep 19, 2026

Operating Distributed Inference Systems at Scale — Nishant Gupta & Naman Ahuja, Meta

Meta's Nishant Gupta and Naman Ahuja explain how AI inference, the company's fastest-growing workload, requires a dedicated orchestration layer akin to Kubernetes for virtual machines. They detail the unique challenges of LLM serving compared to traditional microservices, emphasizing the intricate coupling of infrastructure layers, the distributed transaction nature of requests, and a seven-axis framework for scheduling. The talk concludes with the imperative to optimize for "cost per successful task" and the necessity of an inference-specific control plane to manage the complex interplay of latency, cost, and throughput.

Sep 03, 2026

Why AI Agents Fail

Abi Aryan discusses the shift from MLOps to LLMOps, framing generative AI deployment as a distributed systems challenge. She highlights the critical role of FinOps due to high model costs, the need for custom tooling over generic agent frameworks, and the importance of a 'decision layer' for agent autonomy. Observability is re-conceptualized as anomaly detection, and she points to dynamic RL environments and strong data engineering as future research priorities and essential skills for AI engineers.

Aug 26, 2026

AI in GTM at Notion — Flora Liu

Flora Liu from Notion's GTM engineering team discusses transforming a fragmented Go-to-Market system into a unified, agent-driven platform. She details how Notion tackles challenges like dispersed customer data and unstructured insights by building a four-layered architecture (Know, Decide, Act, Learn) where humans and AI agents operate on the same substrate, leveraging Snowflake, DynamoDB, and Notion itself to create durable, self-improving workflows and boost sales and marketing effectiveness.

Aug 19, 2026

Stateless, Yet Durable: MCP Tasks v2

Cornelia Davis explores the evolution of MCP Tasks, detailing the transition from v1 to v2. She highlights how v2's stateless protocol design supports durable, long-running agentic workflows by shifting durability responsibilities to the client and simplifying elicitation. The presentation includes a demo of a purchase order process and discusses future scalability enhancements through a notification-based approach.

Aug 17, 2026

MCP Goes Stateless | ​John Dellenbaugh & Pankaj Kumar | MCP Release Party - Seattle

This session details the transformation of the MCP protocol to a stateless design, addressing previous scaling challenges by externalizing session state to a database and eliminating the need for sticky sessions and complex infrastructure. The presentation includes a live demo comparing stateful and stateless architectures, highlighting benefits in scalability and simplified deployment. It also covers considerations for security and data resiliency within this new paradigm.

Aug 10, 2026

Taking Reinforcement Learning Cross Datacenter — Nan Jiang, Modal

Nan Jiang introduces "Adam absorption" to revolutionize RL model synchronization. By exploiting finite precision serving and small Adam steps, less than 1% of served model weights actually change, allowing for 500MB patches instead of 500GB checkpoints. This enables a distributed "bulletin board" architecture, decoupling trainers from global rollout fleets and unlocking elastic, cross-region GPU capacity for RL.