AI Engineer
Build Systems, Not Code - Angie Jones, Agentic AI Foundation
updated
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Paper Club Year in Review & Future Plans
00:08:00 DeepSeek Paper Discussion
00:09:10 DeepSeek R1 (May 28th Update)
00:12:40 DeepSeek Distillation
00:16:51 Original DeepSeek Model Overview (DeepSeek V3 and R1)
00:21:15 Development of reasoning capabilities through a pure RL process
00:24:46 DeepSeek R10
00:39:05 DeepSeek R1 four-stage training pipeline
00:35:01 Emergence of "reflection moments" and "aha moments"
00:44:15 Distillation Strategy
00:52:34 Community and Call to Action
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About Ben Hylak
Ben Hylak is co-founder at Raindrop, building Sentry for AI products. He was previously a designer at Apple for 4 years, building the Apple Vision Pro.
About Sid Bendre
Sid Bendre is the co-founder of Oleve, a company building a portfolio of iconic consumer software across multiple verticals. With a lean team, Oleve has already launched two virally successful consumer AI products that have amassed over 250 million views across social media platforms. One of their products reached #4 on the App Store's Education charts in 2024 and #5 in 2025, competing alongside giants like Photomath (Google) and Duolingo. Backed by Neo, Cal Henderson (co-founder of Slack), Russell Kaplan (President of Cognition), and Maria Zhang (ex-CTO of Tinder), Oleve is building the AI infrastructure to run a $1B portfolio of consumer software over the next decade. At Oleve, Sid leads technical and AI efforts, running the “Platform” team responsible for the underlying AI infrastructure that powers their lean scaling approach. Before Oleve, Sid led AI experimentation efforts at a startup hedge fund and worked at Slack, Zendesk, and Microsoft.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
In this session, Clay Bavor (Cofounder of Sierra) will join Alessio Fanelli (co-host of Latent Space) in a fireside chat to share what it means to be an AI Architect, success stories from the market, and the future of the role.
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This session explores how the combination of vast structured and unstructured data, often rule-based workflows, and direct financial opportunity to drive meaningful outcomes. We’ll also share practical lessons from our journey evolving a traditional machine learning mindset to incorporate the latest advances in Generative AI, and how that shift is reshaping what's possible in healthcare operations.
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Open source models promise increased ownership of AI systems: control over performance and price, improved uptime and reliability, better compliance, and flexible hosting options. How are these promises playing out after months of implementation? In this talk, I’ll draw on hundreds of conversations with AI leaders at enterprise companies to discuss what has — and hasn’t — changed about enterprise AI strategy in a world where open-source models compete on the frontier of intelligence.
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baseten.co
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This talk explores how to build and deploy foundation model-enabled agent systems that go beyond simple prompt chaining or chatbots. Drawing from real-world implementations and the latest research, it offers a clear and practical path to designing both single-agent and multi-agent systems capable of handling complex workflows with minimal oversight.
Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the core design principles behind agentic systems, the architectural trade-offs involved in orchestrating multiple agents, and the strategies required to develop tailored solutions that enhance efficiency and innovation. Whether just beginning or scaling up, participants will leave with actionable insights to navigate the rapidly evolving world of AI autonomy.
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Timestamps
00:00 - Introduction by Michael Albada, Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft.
01:14 - The Promise and Obstacles of Agentic Development.
02:37 - Defining What an AI Agent Is (and Isn't).
04:42 - Core Component 1: Tool Use and Function Calling.
06:37 - Core Component 2: Orchestration Patterns (Chains, Trees, Agentic).
08:47 - Core Component 3: Multi-Agent Systems.
09:43 - Common Pitfall 1: Insufficient Evaluation.
11:25 - Overview of specific Evaluation Tools.
12:57 - Common Pitfall 2: Lack of Observability.
13:50 - Other Common Pitfalls (Tool issues, complexity).
14:45 - The Critical Importance of Security and Safety.
15:15 - Conclusion and Future Outlook.
Already a quarter of Y Combinator’s latest batch used AI to write 95% or more of their code. AI agents are scaling at an exponential rate and soon, they’ll outnumber human developers by orders of magnitude.
The real bottleneck isn’t intelligence. It’s tooling. Terminals, local machines, and dashboards weren’t built for agents. They make do… until they can’t.
In this talk, I’ll share how we killed the CLI at Daytona, rebuilt our infrastructure from first principles, and what it takes to build devtools that agents can actually use. Because in an agent-native future, if agents can’t use your tool, no one will.
About Ivan Burazin
Ivan Burazin co-founded Codeanywhere, the very first cloud IDE, back in 2009 where he and the team had to create everything from scratch, from the IDE itself, to the entire orchestration. Concurrently, he established Shift, the premier developer conference in Europe, which was later acquired by Infobip - a global communications cloud giant in 2021. Following the acquisition, Ivan served on the executive board of this 4,000-person company and as the Chief Developer Experience Officer, where he oversaw global developer-oriented operations.
In 2023, Ivan co-founded Daytona, a fast-growing open-source platform addressing the limitations of AI coding agents by enabling them to programmatically and securely interact with runtime environments.
Backed by $7M in funding, Daytona empowers developers, from startups to Fortune 500 companies to enable AI agents to achieve their full potential.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Chau Tran
Chau Tran is a Software Engineer at Glean, currently leading the technical work on Glean Assistant and semantic search. They have been with Glean for over 3 years and have a history of impactful contributions in engineering teams. Previously, Chau worked as a Research Engineer at FAIR within Meta and held technical roles at Quora. They graduated from Brown University with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
In this session, Alvaro Morales, CEO and co-founder of Orb, will explore why the often overlooked monetization aspect of AI is critical for businesses. He’ll share real-world examples and data to demonstrate how adaptive pricing models can drive cost savings, enhance customer experience, and reduce operational bottlenecks.
Alvaro will lead a live demo, showcasing how engineers can simulate AI pricing strategies and subsequently integrate them with a simple plug-and-play solution. He’ll also share how real-world revenue simulations enable companies to test and refine pricing before implementing — reducing risk, boosting adoption, and unlocking new revenue streams. As a quick example, cloud software development platform Replit was looking to adopt a usage-based pricing model for a new product, but their existing billing system couldn't support the new model, and building a new billing system would delay the launch timeline. In order to get things done, they turned to Orb, which enabled them to make pricing changes up to the last minute. After the launch, Orb became the single source of truth for both Replit and its customers - providing usage alerts to notify Replit when users hit cost thresholds and provide insights into user spend and payment methods.
Key takeaways:
The challenge of AI monetization – Why traditional subscription-based SaaS pricing models don’t work for AI-powered products.
Precision pricing – Exploring how usage-based, tiered, and hybrid pricing models can maximize revenue potential.
Revenue simulation for AI pricing – Leveraging real-time data to test, adjust and optimize pricing strategies.
Avoiding common pricing pitfalls – Identifying mistakes that can lead to revenue leakage and customer churn.
This session is designed for AI executives, product leaders, and engineering teams looking for actionable strategies to build adaptive, scalable pricing models that drive long-term growth and profitability.
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withorb.com
Our study at Stanford cuts through the noise, analyzing real-world productivity data from nearly 100,000 developers across hundreds of companies. We reveal the hard numbers: while the average productivity boost is significant (~20%), the reality is complex – some teams even see productivity decrease with AI adoption.
The crucial insights lie in why this variance occurs. Discover which company types, industries, and tech stacks achieve dramatic gains versus minimal impact (or worse). Leave with the objective, data-driven evidence needed to build a winning AI strategy tailored to your context, not just follow the trend.
About Yegor Denisov-Blanch
Researcher at Stanford University researching all things developer productivity
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
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The main thesis of the video is that while AI does increase developer productivity, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The speaker, Yegor Denisov-Blanch from Stanford, presents findings from a large-scale study on software engineering productivity to support this claim, arguing that the effectiveness of AI in software development is highly dependent on a variety of factors including task complexity, codebase maturity, language popularity, and codebase size.
timestamps:
- 00:00 Introduction and the context of AI in software development, including Mark Zuckerberg's bold claims.
- 04:37 Limitations of existing studies on AI's impact on developer productivity.
- 07:19 The methodology used by the Stanford research group to measure productivity.
- 09:50 The overall impact of AI on developer productivity, including the concept of "rework."
- 11:42 How productivity gains vary by task complexity and project maturity (Greenfield vs. Brownfield).
- 14:21 The impact of programming language popularity on AI's effectiveness.
- 15:42 How codebase size affects AI-driven productivity gains.
- 17:22 The final conclusions of the study.
This means blending AI assistance with traditional coding in a multimodal approach that maximizes efficiency and control. The future isn't about dropping in an LLM — it requires integrating any model, any data, any system to deliver results.
Companies utilizing this approach can finally turn their slice of the $500B+ of total AI investment into real business results.
About Donald Hruska
Donald is the engineering lead for Retool's new Agents product.
In his three years at Retool, Donald has led teams across AI, Mobile, and Retool's core app building product. Prior to his time at Retool, Donald co-founded and spent 5+ years growing Draftbit, a Y Combinator-backed company in the low code app building space.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Users want explanations of their tax situations - this drives confidence in the product. Over the course of last two tax years, Intuit has built out explanations using Anthropic and openAI’s models to develop genAI powered explanations. This includes design a complex system with prompt engineered solutions and both LLM & human powered evaluations to ensure high quality bar that our users expect when filing taxes with us.
During the course of my talk, I will talk across GenAI development lifecycle at scale - including development , evaluations and scaling. And security evaluations. We also developed a fine-tuned version of Claude Haiku & shall be covering that in the presentation.
We also expanded into tax question and answering powered by RAG, including graphRAG and I would be covering those developments too.
About Jaspreet Singh
I’m Jaspreet Singh, a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 12 years of experience in the tech industry. I am the tech lead for the Smart Turbotax AI team at Intuit - focusing on development of new GenAI powered experiences in Intuit Turbotax. I have worked extensively on Personalization and Recommendations problems in the past and I’m very passionate about bringing the latest in AI to help drive Taxes are done experiences for our users. I recently became a father for the first time, and enjoy spending time with my little one. As a speaker at the AI Engineer World’s Fair, I’m excited to share our journey of transforming our user’s tax filing journeys with the power of Gen AI..
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Harrison Chase
Harrison Chase is the CEO and co-founder of LangChain, a company formed around the popular open source Python/Typescript packages. The goal of LangChain is to make it as easy as possible to use LLMs to develop context-aware reasoning applications. Prior to starting LangChain, he led the ML team at Robust Intelligence (an MLOps company focused on testing and validation of machine learning models), led the entity linking team at Kensho (a fintech startup), and studied stats and CS at Harvard.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
At Sprout Social, we’re in the midst of that transformation—rearchitecting strategy, systems, teams, and incentives to put AI at the heart of how we think, build, and deliver value. This is a story in motion: a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re evolving from isolated AI feature experiments to an AI-native operating model.
I’ll share what we’re learning as we navigate the innovation dilemma—integrating disruptive AI capabilities without breaking what already works or our roadmap. That includes rethinking how we define success, how we hire, reward, grow talent, and how we handle legal and ethical complexity without slowing down. We’ll explore the real-world tensions between rapid innovation, value delivery, making progress on Responsible AI, all while elevating internal AI fluency, and engaging with the broader AI ecosystem to stay at the edge.
This isn’t a playbook from the finish line—it’s a candid reflection from deep inside the journey.
About Rossella Blatt Vital
Rossella Blatt Vital is a passionate AI leader with nearly 20 years of experience turning data into business value—from hands-on research and model-building to strategic executive leadership. She began her journey with a PhD in machine learning, focusing on brain-computer interfaces and cancer detection, and spent years writing code, building models, and shipping AI-powered products before stepping into leadership roles across startups, academia, and Fortune 100 companies.
As VP of AI, Data, and Data Science at Sprout Social, Rossella leads the company’s AI transformation—driving strategy across engineering, applied science, and analytics. Her team is building AI-first capabilities across product experiences, platform infrastructure, and foundational data systems.
She’s passionate about building meaningful technology—and the teams that power it—with the belief that AI, when led with vision and integrity, can help shape a more thoughtful and human-centered future.
About Deepsha Menghani
Deepsha Menghani is a passionate AI leader with over a decade of experience translating data and machine learning into meaningful business impact—from predictive modeling and customer analytics to large language model applications. Her career spans hands-on data science, applied AI, and strategic leadership across global tech organizations. As Director of Engineering – AI at Sprout Social, her team is responsible for embedding AI into core product experiences and delivering insights that accelerate growth, improve customer understanding, and inform business strategy across the company.
She’s especially passionate about building AI that is not only technically robust, but also responsible, human-centered, and aligned with real-world decision-making.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Adam Behrens
Adam Behrens is the co-founder and CEO of New Gen, a company that partners with global brands and merchants to unlock AI native commerce opportunities. New Gen builds infrastructure for brands to host their own conversational AI experiences and to connect their data into 3rd party chat clients like ChatGPT and Claude. Adam previously worked on trading infrastructure at Bridgewater and Banking-as-a-Service at Stripe. Outside of training AI models he is busy training his 8 month old Vizsla puppy.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
In this talk, I’ll share practical lessons from building real-world plan-and-execute agents —covering how to steer autonomous agents using agentic workflows, blueprints, and evals.
If you’re struggling to make your agents behave (without giving up flexibility), this one’s for you.
About Yogendra Miraje
I'm a backend engineer turned ML engineer turned AI engineer, with 16 years of experience building intelligent systems. I hold a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in Boston, and I currently work as an AI Engineer in FactSet.
I'm also the host of AI Blindspot, a podcast where we explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence—and the blind spots we often overlook in its development and deployment.
With a strong foundation in Machine Learning and software Engineering and a product-minded approach, I focus on aligning autonomous agents with real-world user goals, emphasizing safety, control, and robust evaluation techniques.
I'm passionate about building AI that’s not just powerful, but grounded, aligned, and truly useful in practice.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Rita Kozlov
From the very beginning, Rita has been a key figure in the development of Cloudflare's developer platform. Their initial experience as a solutions engineer, helping early enterprise customers adopt the service, gave them firsthand insight into user needs. It was the power of Cloudflare Workers that truly resonated, inspiring a vision for a serverless future. For the past eight years, they have built out the platform which now spans products including storage, compute and AI, and is used by everyone from indie millions of indie developers to Fortune 500 companies.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Beyond the general lessons that apply to most products leveraging GenAI, we'll cover detailed observations within three application areas: multimodal understanding and search, enterprise knowledge retrieval, and AI agent architectures. We will share real-world comparative performance data and metrics on embedding models, vector index implementations, and explore various implementation methodologies that balance performance and cost.
Additionally, the session addresses organizational insights critical to successful AI deployments, such as the importance of clearly defined evaluation processes and understanding real-world user interaction challenges, highlighted by examples from healthcare environments. Attendees will gain an understanding of decision-making criteria, including the appropriate complexity of prompt engineering versus more elaborate orchestration methods, token/cost management strategies in multilingual settings, and the challenges in driving behavioral change with new UX and application interaction capabilities.
Participants will leave equipped with practical, data-supported insights for effectively navigating their own GenAI projects, including benchmarks and criteria for informed technology selection, and techniques to streamline the transition from initial concept to sustainable operational deployment. Please note, we all know this field evolves rapidly and we will mark which lessons we believe are immutable.
About Randall Hunt
Randall Hunt is a technology leader, investor, and hands-on keyboard coder based in Los Angeles, CA. Previously, Randall led software and developer relations teams at Facebook, SpaceX, AWS, MongoDB, and NASA. Randall spends most of his time listening to customers, building demos, writing blog posts, and mentoring junior engineers. Python and C++ are his favorite programming languages, but he begrudgingly admits that Javascript rules the world. Outside of work, Randall loves to read science fiction, advise startups, travel, and ski.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Joel Hron
Joel Hron is a passionate innovator driving the future of product technology and AI at Thomson Reuters. As Chief Technology Officer, he leads Product Engineering and AI Research & Development, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in Legal, Tax, Audit, Trade, Compliance, and Risk solutions.
Joel joined Thomson Reuters in 2022 through the acquisition of ThoughtTrace, where he served as CTO. Previously, he led AI and TR Labs, launching seven groundbreaking GenAI products in just 18 months, transforming legal research, tax analysis, and contract drafting.
His approach is centered on rethinking processes through technology, building teams rooted in trust, transparency, and customer-centric innovation. Joel envisions AI not as a replacement for human expertise, but as a force that enhances professional decision-making, making expert information more accessible and impactful.
A New Orleans native, Joel’s global career spans work in London and Africa, and he now calls Zug, Switzerland home. He holds a Master’s in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor’s in Engineering from Texas Christian University.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
contact: https://x.com/lgandecki
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
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Attendees will walk away with:
• A 3-step framework for operationalizing AI trust
• Real-world lessons from building guardrails in on-prem and hybrid systems
• Tools and techniques for debugging and explaining inferences at scale
• A blueprint for building trust between models, engineers, and executive stakeholders
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Now you can see exactly how your GPUs are being utilized millisecond by millisecond. Our solution helps you move from guesswork to data-driven optimization.
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About Michael Hunger
Michael Hunger has been passionate about software development for more than 30 years.
For the last 15 years, he has been working on the open source Neo4j graph database filling many roles, most recently heading product innovation and GenAI.
As a developer Michael enjoys many aspects of software development and architecture, learning new things every day, participating in exciting and ambitious open source projects and contributing and writing software related books and articles. Michael spoke at numerous conferences and helped organize others.
Michael helps kids to learn to program by running weekly girls-only coding classes at local schools.
About Jesús Barrasa
Dr. Jesús Barrasa is the AI Field CTO at Neo4j, where he works with organisations combining the power of GenAI with Knowledge Graphs. He co-authored "Building Knowledge Graphs" (O'Reilly 2023) and is cohost of the monthly Going Meta live webcast (https://goingmeta.live/) since 2022.
Jesús holds a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence/Knowledge Representation and is an active thought leader in the KG and AI space.
About Stephen Chin
Stephen Chin is VP of Developer Relations at Neo4j, conference chair of the LF AI & Data Foundation, and author of numerous titles including the upcoming GraphRAG: The Definitive Guide for O'Reilly. He has given keynotes and main stage talks at numerous conferences around the world including AI Engineer Summit, AI DevSummit, Devoxx, DevNexus, JNation, JavaOne, Shift, Joker, swampUP, and GIDS. Stephen is an avid motorcyclist who has done evangelism tours in Europe, Japan, and Brazil, interviewing developers in their natural habitat. When he is not traveling, he enjoys teaching kids how to do AI, embedded, and robot programming together with his daughters.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
You'll gain insights into how structured representations significantly improve the effectiveness and reliability of legal agents.
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whyhow.ai
In this talk, I'll share Writer's journey developing a graph-based RAG architecture that achieved 86.31% accuracy on the RobustQA benchmark while maintaining sub-second response times, significantly outperforming vector approaches.
I'll survey the key techniques behind this performance leap and why graph-based approaches excel with complex enterprise information structures like product documentation, financial documents, and technical specifications that challenge traditional RAG systems. You'll learn about using specialized LLMs to build semantic relationships, how compression techniques efficiently handle concentrated enterprise data patterns, and how infusing key data points in the memory layer of the LLM lowers hallucination.
The presentation will provide practical insights into identifying when graph-based approaches make sense for your organization's specific data challenges, helping you make informed architectural decisions for your next enterprise RAG system.
About Sam Julien
Sam Julien is the Director of Developer Relations at Writer and is passionate about helping engineers improve their effectiveness and advance their careers. He loves spending time outside with his family in the Pacific Northwest. You can find more of Sam's work at samjulien.com.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Mitesh Patel
Mitesh Patel is a developer advocate manager at NVIDIA. His team is responsible for creating workflows to showcase how developers can harness GPU acceleration in their workflows using tools and frameworks popular in the developer community. Before NVIDIA, he was a senior research scientist at Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory Inc. (a research subsidiary of Fuji Xerox), where he worked on developing indoor localization technologies for applications such as asset tracking in hospitals and delivery cart tracking in manufacturing facilities. Mitesh received his Ph.D. in Robotics from the Center of Autonomous Systems (CAS) at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia in 2014.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
About Steve Ruiz
Steve Ruiz is founder and CEO of tldraw, a London-based startup building an infinite canvas component for the web.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
The next step in this evolution is to integrate AI into the workflow. We've tried a lot of things with Excalidraw and ended up landing on turning prompt into diagram. Come to the talk to understand how it fits into the workflow and how we implemented it.
About Christopher Chedeau
Co-creator of React Native and Prettier. Creator of Excalidraw, "CSS-in-JS", Yoga and React Conf.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
In this talk, we’ll explore how Clay Christensen’s theory of commoditization from the early PC industry can explain why scaling laws require AI interfaces to remain modular until models fully commoditize. The killer feature of conversational interfaces may not be that they’re natural, but that they’re conformable. Learn how to evolve interfaces as inference scales, spot shifts in the basis of competition, and stop worrying about the next model update steamrolling your design decisions.
Foothill G 1&2: Design Engineering
About Maximillian Piras
Currently the Founding Designer at Yutori working on AI web agents. Previously, Head of Design at Headliner and Sr. Designer at 8tracks. Led cross-platform UIUX design for multiple early-stage consumer startups shipping to millions of users. Contributing writer to Smashing Magazine covering AI-first design. Before that, developed graphics and animations for clients including Giphy, MIT, and Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
In this session, I'll explore UX design principles for multi-agent systems, addressing critical questions: What is the true configuration space for autonomous MAS? How can users arrive at the correct mental model of an MAS's capabilities, if at all? How can we improve trust and safety through techniques like cost-aware action delegation? What makes agent actions observable? How do we enable seamless interruptibility? Attendees will gain actionable insights to create more transparent, trustworthy, and user-centered multi-agent applications, illustrated through real-world implementations in AutoGen Studio - a low code developer tool built on AutoGen (44k stars on GitHub, MIT license) and similar tools.
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About John Pham
I'm John Pham, an engineer and a self-taught designer. I seek the dopamine hits of building delightful experiences for others. I've worked at Vercel, Microsoft and NASA doing just that.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
https://x.com/tokisherbakov
linkedin.com/in/akotha7
In this talk, I will explain the fundamental engineering constraints and design decisions that shape GPUs and trace those up to some counter-intuitive facts about the performance characteristics of AI systems, with actionable insights for their deployers and consumers.
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About Nikhil Abraham
Nikhil is the CEO of CloudChef - reimagining cooking using embodied AI. CloudChef builds robots that enable commercial kitchens to cook high quality meals while solving for availability of skilled chefs. Our robots are already doing full-time work in several leading commercial kitchens. Nikhil is an alum of IIT Bombay and was the cofounder of Rephrase AI (acquired by Adobe)
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
In this workshop, we'll dive into the fundamentals of RL, what makes a good reward function, and how RL can help create agents.
We'll also talk about kernels, are they still worth your time and what you should focus on. And finally, we’ll explore how LLMs like DeepSeek-R1 can be quantized down to 1.58-bits and still perform well, along with techniques to maintain accuracy.
About Daniel Han
I'm building Unsloth and we're an open-source startup trying to make AI more accessible and accurate for everyone! We have 40K GitHub stars, 10M monthly downloads on Hugging Face and worked with Google, Meta, Hugging Face teams to fix bugs in open-source models like Llama, Phi & Gemma models. I was previously working at NVIDIA making TSNE 2000x faster.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Timestamps
About Nathan Lambert
Nathan Lambert is a Senior Research Scientist and post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI focusing on building open language models. At the same time he founded and operates Interconnects.ai to increase transparency and understanding of current AI models and systems.
Previously, he helped build an RLHF research team at HuggingFace. He received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley working at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. He was advised by Professor Kristofer Pister in the Berkeley Autonomous Microsystems Lab and Roberto Calandra at Meta AI Research. He was lucky to intern at Facebook AI and DeepMind during his Ph.D. Nathan was was awarded the UC Berkeley EECS Demetri Angelakos Memorial Achievement Award for Altruism for his efforts to better community norms.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Timestamps:
[00:00] The Current State of Reasoning in AI Models
[01:06] Unlocking New Language Model Applications
[03:48] The Need for Advanced Planning in AI
[04:29] A Proposed Taxonomy for Next-Generation Reasoning
[06:16] Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards
[08:23] Current Challenges and Future Directions
[12:07] The Effort Required to Build New Capabilities
[16:20] A Research Plan for Training Reasoning Models
[17:36] The Shift in Compute Allocation from Pre-training to Post-training
In this talk we’ll learn how to use GRPO to help your agent learn from its successes and failures and improve over time. We’ve seen dramatic results with this technique, such as an email assistant agent that whose success rate jumped from 74% to 94% after replacing o4-mini with an open source model optimized using GRPO.
We’ll share case studies as well as practical lessons learned around the types of problems this works well for and the unexpected pitfalls to avoid.
About Kyle Corbitt
Kyle Corbitt is the co-founder and CEO of OpenPipe, the RL post-training company. OpenPipe has trained thousands of customer models for both enterprises and tech-forward startups.
Before founding OpenPipe, Kyle led the Startup School team at Y Combinator, which was responsible for the product and content that YC produces for early-stage companies. Prior to that he worked as an engineer at Google and studied ML at school.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Timestamps:
[00:00] - Introduction to building reliable agents with RL.
[00:49] - Case Study: ART-E, an AI email assistant.
[02:19] - The importance of starting with prompted models before moving to RL.
[03:17] - Performance improvements of RL over prompted models.
[05:18] - Cost and latency benefits of the RL approach.
[08:02] - The two hardest problems in modern RL: realistic environments and reward functions.
[13:13] - Optimizing agent behavior with "extra rewards."
[15:25] - The problem of "reward hacking" and how to address it.
[18:37] - The solution to reward hacking:
About Ryan Marten
Ryan Marten is co-lead of OpenThinker collaboration and a founding engineer at Bespoke Labs, working on data curation and model post-training. Previously, Ryan has been an AI researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Toronto, University of Oxford, AI2, and Vector Institute. When he's not at the lab, he's probably out surfing.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction to the problem of open-source reasoning in AI models.
1:09 - The effectiveness of Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) for reasoning.
3:38 - Introduction to OpenThoughts 3 and its performance.
7:52 - Key learnings from the data recipe development.
11:34 - Guidance on adapting the dataset recipe to specific domains.
15:15 - Call for open collaboration and where to find the project's resources
About Kelvin Ma
I'm Kelvin Ma. A product engineer with 15 years of experience working across innovative consumer applications that is used by millions of consumers. I'm passionate about using technology to build tools that improves users lives by allowing greater expression, building skills, and fostering communication.
Recorded at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. Stay up to date on our upcoming events and content by joining our newsletter here: https://www.ai.engineer/newsletter


