Brandon Hill, co-founder and CEO of Vori, discusses how his company is digitizing the $1.5 trillion grocery industry with an all-in-one OS. He covers their journey from a simple ordering app to a full-stack platform, the use of AI agents to automate pricing and inventory, and their vision for the 'self-driving' grocery store.
Varant Zanoyan, original author of the Chronon feature platform, introduces 'agentic experimentation'—a pattern where AI agents improve high-stakes ML systems without making live decisions. He explains how Chronon solves key challenges like infrastructure sprawl, safety, and reproducibility through a semantic API, branch-based isolation, and compute reuse, enabling agents to safely create production-ready pipelines for human review.
A tour of MLX, the on-device AI framework for Apple Silicon. This talk explores real-world applications from real-time vision and multimodal omni models to sub-100ms speech synthesis and video generation, all running locally. It highlights breakthrough techniques like Turbo Quant for 1M context and showcases community projects in robotics and native apps, arguing for a future where powerful AI runs without the cloud.
Alexander Taubman, CEO of Long Lake Management, details their pioneering 'AI take-private' strategy, using a horizontal AI platform called Nexus to acquire and transform traditional service businesses. He explains why ownership trumps SaaS for driving real-world AI adoption, focusing on growth and creating a positive-sum flywheel for employees and customers, exemplified by their acquisition of Amex GBT.
This talk explores the architectural shift required to build durable, long-running AI agents. It argues against traditional replay-based durability, proposing a two-part solution: treating LLM context as a durable, append-only log and managing the compute state (memory, files, processes) with OS-level snapshot and restore, implemented efficiently using Firecracker microVMs.
A product engineer from Granola shares a candid account of the challenges in moving AI features from the playground to production. This talk covers the pitfalls of "one-shot" solutions like web search and generic prompts, and details Granola's strategy of building custom internal tracing and development tooling to create a tight, effective feedback loop for iteration.