Jeff Huber, CEO of Chroma, discusses "context rot," the degradation of AI performance in large context windows, and outlines a new vision for retrieval infrastructure. He covers the evolution of search, the importance of a two-stage recall-then-precision pipeline, and the challenges of agentic memory, advocating for a shift from AI "alchemy" to reliable engineering.
Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, discusses the transformative impact of AI on search, enterprise business models, and cybersecurity. He explores the shift from search to agentic AI, the challenges and opportunities for enterprise adoption, and how AI is fundamentally compressing cyberattack timelines while enabling new, data-centric defense strategies.
Experts discuss the Google antitrust verdict's impact on agentic AI, Anthropic's high valuation driven by its coding prowess, and whether the discourse around GPT-5 signals an "AI winter" or a necessary market reality check.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, discusses the internet's architectural and economic shift from a search-driven model to an AI-native one. He outlines the existential threat to content creators as AI consumes content without providing traffic, and proposes a new marketplace where creators are compensated for providing value and filling knowledge gaps, rather than generating clicks.
David Karam, formerly of Google Search, presents a pragmatic framework for enhancing RAG systems, advocating a "quality engineering" approach. The talk progresses through a ladder of techniques, from in-memory retrieval and BM25 to custom embeddings, re-ranking, and advanced orchestration, emphasizing that the choice of technique should be driven by empirical analysis of system failures ("loss analysis") and balanced by a "complexity-adjusted impact" mindset.
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).