Will Bryk, CEO of Exa, explains why traditional keyword-based search is insufficient for AI agents and introduces a new paradigm of neural, semantic search. He demonstrates how a hybrid approach, combining neural for discovery and keyword for precision, enables AI agents to perform complex, multi-step information retrieval tasks that were previously impossible.
Philipp Krenn from Elastic demystifies the 'R' in RAG, arguing that modern retrieval is a sophisticated blend of classic keyword search (like BM25) and modern vector search. This workshop explores the fundamentals of lexical analysis, scoring, dense/sparse vectors, and advanced hybrid search techniques like Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF).
A deep dive into the internal workings of Large Language Models like GPT, explaining the journey from a text prompt through tokenization, embeddings, and the attention mechanism to generate a response.
Douwe Kiela, CEO of Contextual AI, explains the evolution from basic RAG to "RAG 2.0", an end-to-end, trainable system. He argues that this system-level approach, which integrates optimized document parsing, retrieval, reranking, and grounded models, is superior to relying on massive context windows alone and is a fundamental tool for next-generation AI agents.