Vector search

Essential Skills for Becoming an AI Engineer: RAG, AI Agents, & More

Essential Skills for Becoming an AI Engineer: RAG, AI Agents, & More

Cedric Clyburn outlines the essential skills for AI engineering, distinguishing it from ML research. He details a three-tier skill stack covering foundational programming (Python, Git, APIs), AI-specific techniques (embeddings, RAG, AI agents), and deployment strategies (containerization, observability). The discussion emphasizes judgment over code generation and highlights key use cases like RAG systems and agent-based solutions.

In Case You Missed It in August 2026 (Ep. 1024 with Jon Krohn)

In Case You Missed It in August 2026 (Ep. 1024 with Jon Krohn)

This episode explores the critical gap between AI investment and return, featuring insights from industry leaders. It covers why most organizations fail to see ROI from AI, the crucial role of mathematical optimization in agentic AI to ensure constraint adherence, practical strategies for structuring AI skills in tools like Claude for quality output, and a 10-20-70 budget framework emphasizing upskilling. Additionally, it delves into the growing importance of the semantic layer for analytics agents to ensure consistent data interpretation and efficiency in large enterprises.

The RAG Mistake Almost Every Team Is Making (with Pete Johnson)

The RAG Mistake Almost Every Team Is Making (with Pete Johnson)

Pete Johnson, Field CTO of AI at MongoDB, discusses effective AI strategies, why most organizations struggle with AI ROI, and how to build reliable AI systems. He covers the importance of choosing the right embedding models for RAG pipelines, introduces Matryoshka embeddings, and explains the evolution of agentic memory to combat token maxing and ensure consistency in production AI.

Building Turbopuffer: Gergely Orosz (@pragmaticengineer ) × Simon Eskildsen (CEO)

Building Turbopuffer: Gergely Orosz (@pragmaticengineer ) × Simon Eskildsen (CEO)

Simon Eskildsen, CEO of Turbopuffer, discusses his unique path from early computer fascinations to founding an S3-native vector search company. He shares insights from his eight years at Shopify, detailing infrastructure scaling challenges and the development of Toxyproxy for fault injection. A core theme is his "napkin math" philosophy, using fundamental performance metrics to optimize systems and challenge benchmarks. He explains the impetus for Turbopuffer, its initial minimalist architecture, and how it achieved a 95% cost reduction for its first customer, Cursor. Simon also touches on the unexpected scarcity of CPUs due to AI workloads and his unconventional, principled approach to venture capital and building a remote-first company culture.

AI on Your Lakehouse: Context Comes in Shapes, Not Queries — Zach Blumenfeld, Neo4j

AI on Your Lakehouse: Context Comes in Shapes, Not Queries — Zach Blumenfeld, Neo4j

AI agents often struggle with context in lakehouses, leading to confident but incorrect answers. This workshop by Zach Blumenfeld introduces three Neo4j graph shapes built on lakehouse data—Connections (semantic layer), Trees (document outlines), and Communities (themes)—to provide essential context, enabling agents to accurately navigate structured and unstructured data, answer complex estate-level questions, and overcome limitations of traditional Text2SQL and vector search.

Turbocharge Your Agent's Retrieval with TurboQuant - Shashi Jagtap, Superagentic AI

Turbocharge Your Agent's Retrieval with TurboQuant - Shashi Jagtap, Superagentic AI

This talk introduces TurboQuant, a training-free compression method from Google Research that reduces embedding memory footprint by 5x (from 32-bit to 3-4 bits) without losing search quality. It details how TurboQuant works through scalar quantization and a crucial one-bit error correction step, QJL, enabling agents to remember more on existing hardware by optimizing both KV cache and RAG vector stores. A live demo showcases its effectiveness, making it a vendor-neutral solution for efficient AI agent retrieval.