Terrence Lee-St. John, author of "From Garbage to Gold," challenges the "garbage in, garbage out" mantra. He presents a data-architectural theory explaining why models trained on noisy, high-dimensional tabular data can achieve robust predictive performance by focusing on recovering latent signals rather than exhaustive data cleaning.
SAP CTO Philipp Herzig discusses the company's AI-driven transformation, focusing on three core pillars: generative UI, AI-native business processes, and a unified data layer. He explores the primary challenges to enterprise AI adoption—scale, data fragmentation, and security—while emphasizing the critical role of verifiability and "agent mining" in creating reliable, compounding value. Herzig also details the limitations of LLMs for predictive analytics on tabular data and introduces SAP's alternative, Relational Pre-trained Transformers (RPT1).
Nikolaos Vasiloglou, VP of Research ML at RelationalAI, shares his extensive analysis of the 2023 NeurIPS conference, distilling over 200 hours of content. Key themes include the dominance and evolution of agentic AI, the state of open-source vs. frontier LLMs, the first signs of deep learning models outperforming XGBoost on tabular data, and the critical rise of verification systems. He also explores the future of AI with data attribution for monetization and the concept of composable, LEGO-like language models.