Emmanuel Ameisen of Anthropic's interpretability team explains the inner workings of LLMs, drawing analogies to biology. He covers surprising findings on how models plan, represent concepts across languages, and the mechanistic causes of hallucinations, offering practical advice for developers on evaluation and post-training strategies.
Intuit CEO Sasan Goodarzi discusses the operational playbook for reinventing a 40-year-old company, from its slow transition to SaaS to its early adoption of AI. He shares insights on winning the SMB market by treating small businesses like consumers, building effective channel partnerships, and developing a platform strategy. Goodarzi also details his leadership philosophy, emphasizing that grit and curiosity are more critical than raw talent.
Carmela Troncoso from EPFL discusses her collaboration with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to digitalize humanitarian aid distribution. She advocates for a paradigm shift from data minimization to "purpose limitation," designing systems that are structurally incapable of being misused, even if the data is accessed. The talk details a practical, low-cost, and connectivity-resilient system built on this principle, using smart cards and cryptographic techniques to protect vulnerable aid recipients while meeting the operational needs of the ICRC.
Tony Zhao and Cheng Chi, co-founders of Sunday Robotics, discuss the state of AI robotics, framing it as being between a "GPT moment" (the core technology is known) and a "ChatGPT moment" (a scalable consumer product). They detail the key research, data collection innovations, and full-stack engineering required to build Memo, their general-purpose home robot designed to free humanity from chores.
Silicon Valley's historical alliance with US defense fractured over 15 years of hostility, but is now being rebuilt under the "American Dynamism" thesis, driven by the geopolitical realities of Ukraine and competition with China. This shift prioritizes building in the physical world—defense, energy, manufacturing—by leveraging software, AI, and autonomy to innovate faster than legacy, five-year-plan-based incumbents and win by doubling down on America's chaotic creativity.
Tuhin Srivastava, CEO of Baseten, joins Gradient Dissent to discuss the core challenges of AI inference, from infrastructure and runtime bottlenecks to the practical differences between vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, and SGLang. He shares how Baseten navigated years of searching for a market before the explosion of large-scale models, emphasizing a company-building philosophy focused on avoiding premature scaling and "burning the boats" to chase the biggest opportunities.