Reinforcement learning

Sep 01, 2026

Why Your Agent Evals Are Missing the Real Failures (with Aishwarya Srinivasan)

Aishwarya Srinivasan, co-founder of The Gen Academy, discusses the shift in AI and software engineering, highlighting how "cheap code" necessitates strong engineering judgment and a "whole-system eval" approach for agentic AI. She explains the resurgence of reinforcement learning for fine-tuning, the evolution from prompt to loop engineering, and introduces her MIND framework for living with AI. Srinivasan emphasizes experimentation as the most critical career skill and offers insights into what differentiates successful AI startups in today's competitive landscape.

Aug 30, 2026

SOTA Generative Media Panel — Dumitru Erhan, Shane Gu & Nicole Brichtova, Google DeepMind

This detailed discussion with Google AI researchers highlights the latest generative video models (NanoBanana 2 Lite, Gemini Omni Flash APIs) and their applications, including video editing, education, and localization. The conversation critically examines whether language is an adequate intermediate representation for AI, especially for sensory experiences like audio and taste, where human vocabulary is limited. It exposes the unreliability of human preferences in evaluating AI-generated content, citing the "Instagram filter effect" and "wedding ring" reward hacking as examples. The researchers emphasize the importance of high-quality, real-world data and the critical role of forward-deployed engineers in bridging the gap between cutting-edge research and practical applications.

Aug 20, 2026

Why Most AI Agents Fail Horribly

Maarten Grootendorst discusses the foundational understanding developers need for modern AI tools, emphasizing core LLM concepts like tokens, embeddings, and attention. He provides a pragmatic view on AI agents, distinguishing hype from practical applications like coding assistants, and explores the role of memory, guardrails, and the growing importance of open-weight models for control and efficiency in AI infrastructure.

Aug 18, 2026

Training Krea 2: What matters in generative model training — Sangwu Lee, Krea.ai

The talk by Sangwha Lee discusses Krea 2's open-source medium variant, emphasizing stylistic diversity and rapid iteration over the consistency-focused approach of larger models. A significant portion details their robust data curation pipeline, including unique methods for deduplication, filtering out AI-generated images, utilizing sparse autoencoders for unsupervised tagging, and ensuring world knowledge coverage. He outlines an LLM-inspired multi-stage training process, culminating in a prompt expander, and shares insights on fast iteration and future directions for image generation, highlighting the increasing integration of VLM advancements.

Aug 18, 2026

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed: Why AI Models Stop Learning, and How to Start It Again

Rich Sutton and Khurram Javed discuss their radical vision for AI at Oak Lab, advocating for truly continual learning agents that learn from their own experience, rejecting synthetic data due to the "Big World Hypothesis," and outlining a path to overcome catastrophic forgetting with "continual backprop" for a trillion-parameter, self-maintaining mind, while critiquing LLMs as only a fraction of intelligence.

Aug 12, 2026

Chelsea Finn: This is the State of the Art in Robotics

Chelsea Finn, co-founder of Physical Intelligence, discusses the path to building general-purpose robots that operate reliably in the real world. She details how advanced reinforcement learning with human intervention, coupled with multi-scale memory systems, significantly boosts robot autonomy and throughput. Finn argues that robotics is entering its "GPT era," moving from specialized models to powerful, out-of-the-box foundation models like their PIO7, which demonstrates strong compositional generalization across tasks, objects, and robot platforms, matching or exceeding specialist performance without fine-tuning. The talk also covers the unique challenges and opportunities in robotics data, model deployment, and career paths.