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Building MCP Before MCP Existed: Inside Despegar's Sofia Agent

Building MCP Before MCP Existed: Inside Despegar's Sofia Agent

A deep dive into Despegar's GenAI travel agent, Sofia. Explore its multi-agent architecture, the custom orchestration layer 'Chappi' built before MCP was a standard, and the strategy of decentralizing agent development across company squads to cover the entire five-phase travel arc.

The Future of AI – Key Trends Shaping What’s Next • Ekaterina Sirazitdinova • YOW! 2025

The Future of AI – Key Trends Shaping What’s Next • Ekaterina Sirazitdinova • YOW! 2025

Ekaterina Sirazitdinova from NVIDIA provides a high-level overview of the latest trends shaping the future of AI, covering the evolution from early deep learning to the rise of agentic and physical AI, and diving deep into the critical optimization techniques required to deploy these powerful models efficiently.

OpenAI’s Daybreak and Mistral’s Mythos competitor

OpenAI’s Daybreak and Mistral’s Mythos competitor

This week's podcast delves into the rapidly evolving landscape of AI-powered vulnerability management, discussing OpenAI's Daybreak, Microsoft's MDASH, and Mistral's Mythos competitor. The panel analyzes the measured real-world results of Anthropic's Mythos on the curl project and explores the implications of the notorious Shai-Hulud npm worm going open source.

Inference, not prediction — Prof. Michael I. Jordan on what modern AI is still missing

Inference, not prediction — Prof. Michael I. Jordan on what modern AI is still missing

Michael I. Jordan, a leading figure in machine learning and statistics, argues for reframing AI from a race for disembodied superintelligence to the design of collective economic systems. He critiques the AGI hype, advocates for integrating economic principles and robust uncertainty quantification into ML, and proposes a new intellectual framework for building technology that augments, rather than replaces, human systems.

What Breaks When You Build AI Under Sovereignty Constraints - Bilge Yücel, deepset GmbH

What Breaks When You Build AI Under Sovereignty Constraints - Bilge Yücel, deepset GmbH

Bilge Yücel explains that true AI sovereignty is a technical challenge, not just a policy issue, built on four pillars: data, model, infrastructure, and operations. This talk explores the common pitfalls of retrofitting sovereignty—from performance regressions after swapping models to discovering deep vendor lock-in when moving on-prem—and presents a checklist for building genuinely sovereign systems.

Personalization in the Era of LLMs - Shivam Verma, Spotify

Personalization in the Era of LLMs - Shivam Verma, Spotify

Spotify is personalizing open-weight LLMs without full fine-tuning by combining three key components: foundational user embeddings from streaming history, 'Semantic IDs' that tokenize its 100M+ item catalog, and a 'soft tokenization' layer that projects a user's embedding directly into the LLM's context. This allows the model to autoregressively generate the next song or podcast as the next token in a sequence.