Sep 30, 2026

The Chief AI Officer: Scientist, Architect, Coach — Rania Khalaf, WSO2

Rania Khalaf, Chief AI Officer at WSO2 and formerly a long-time leader at IBM Research, shares a framework for a role that is still being defined. She covers the Scientist, Architect and Coach focus areas, how the balance shifts by company type and AI maturity, and why she measures AI adoption, agent readiness and market signals instead of token counts. She also addresses the need for CEO backing and the question of who should own AI.

Sep 22, 2026

100x More Reliable Voice Agents

SLNG.ai introduces Unmute, an open declarative standard for voice agents, addressing platform lock-in and the limitations of current agent architectures. It proposes a shift from LLM-centric, sequential pipelines to declared execution with structural guarantees, enabling portable, cost-effective, and robust voice agents by breaking down complex interactions into modular, context-aware steps. This approach minimizes token usage, enhances determinism, and improves agent reliability compared to traditional single-prompt designs.

Sep 19, 2026

Large clusters for small models — Daniel Svonava, Superlinked

Daniel Svonava argues that small open-source models, when specialized and properly served, can achieve frontier performance for specific tasks, offering significant cost savings and latency improvements over large, generalized models or managed endpoints. He highlights challenges with existing serving infrastructure for a fleet of diverse small models and introduces Superlinked's open-source solution, which leverages a pull-based, centralized queuing system, a Rust sidecar for runtime abstraction, and an autoresearch loop for automated model tuning, enabling high throughput (e.g., half a million embedding tokens/sec on one GPU) and efficient deployment of specialized models and LoRAs.

Sep 02, 2026

Why OpenAI is calling for a ‘cyber defense surge.’ Plus: Find Evil! winners and TeamPCP losers

IBM and OpenAI, alongside 100+ organizations, have called for a 'global surge in cyber defense' to counter escalating AI-enabled attacks, emphasizing collective action and proactive remediation strategies over mere threat intelligence sharing. Concurrently, the SANS Institute's 'Find Evil!' hackathon revealed autonomous AI agents capable of advanced cyber investigation, though human oversight remains crucial for incident response actions due to AI's limitations. The podcast also dissects the unmasking of the TeamPCP hacking group, highlighting how basic cybersecurity hygiene failures led to their downfall, underscoring that even sophisticated threat actors are susceptible to fundamental operational security lapses.

Aug 25, 2026

The 12 KB File That Replaces Weeks of Training (with Tristan Handy)

Tristan Handy, founder and CEO of dbt Labs, details the evolution of analytics engineering from a 2016 study into a tool used by over 100,000 data teams. He explains his decision to use SQL over Spark for accessibility, the concept of "progressive complexity," and how dbt projects transform raw data into modeled tables using a Directed Acyclic Graph. Handy elaborates on the critical role of the semantic layer in ensuring consistent metric definitions for both human users and AI agents, especially in large organizations. He introduces the dbt Fusion Engine, aiming to bring type safety and universal SQL understanding, and discusses how 12-kilobyte skill files can revolutionize large-scale dbt migrations, reducing them from years to weeks by enabling AI agents to absorb vast amounts of expert knowledge.

Aug 22, 2026

The Agent Behind the Curtain: Building the Oz Cloud Agent Platform — Safia Abdalla, Warp

Safia Abdalla discusses Warp's cloud agent platform, emphasizing its core principle of absorbing complexity from the user. She details features like flexible sandboxes, multi-harness support, and API-driven agent orchestration. The talk highlights how agents manage Warp's open-source repository—from issue triage to PR review—and introduces the "potter's workshop" analogy as a superior model to the "software factory" for modern, human-centric software development.