AI is heading for an energy crisis, with data centers projected to consume as much electricity as France by 2027. Big Tech's current solution—building more power plants—is unsustainable. Real solutions lie in energy-efficient computing (like in-memory and analog) and shifting AI to edge devices. Without these, AI’s progress risks being bottlenecked by electricity limits.

In real-time forecasting (e.g. geohash level demand and supply forecast for an entire region), time series-based forecasting methods are widely adopted due to their simplicity and ease of training. This discussion explores how Lyft uses time series forecasting to respond to real-time market dynamics, covering practical tips and tricks for implementing these methods, an in-depth look at their adaptability for online re-training, and discussions on their interpretability and user intervention capabilities. By examining these topics, listeners will understand how time series forecasting can outperform DNNs, and how to effectively use time series forecasting for dynamic market conditions and decision-making applications.

We break down key insights from the paper, discuss what these findings mean for AI’s role in the workforce, and debate its broader implications. As always, our expert moderators guide the session, followed by an open, lively discussion where you can share your thoughts, ask questions, and challenge ideas with fellow MLOps enthusiasts.

Finetuning is dead. Finetuning is only for style. We've all heard these claims. But the truth is we feel this way because all we've been doing is extended pretraining. I'm excited to chat about what real finetuning looks like - modifying output heads, loss functions and model layers, and it's implications on quality and latency. Happy to dive deeper into how DeepSeek leveraged this real version of finetuning through GRPO and how this is nothing more than a rediscovery of our old finetuning ways. I'm sure we'll naturally also dive into when developing and deploying your specialized models makes sense and the challenges you face when doing so.

Shiny new objects are made available to artificial intelligence(AI) practitioners daily. For many who are not AI practitioners, the release of ChatGPT in 2022 was their first contact with modern AI technology. This led to a flurry of funding and excitement around how AI might improve their bottom line. Two years on, the novelty of AI has worn off for many companies but remains a strategic initiative. This strategic nuance has led to two patterns that suggest a maturation of the AI conversation across industries. First, conversations seem to be pivoting from "Are we doing [the shiny new thing]" to serious analysis of the ROI from things built. This reframe places less emphasis on simply adopting new technologies for the sake of doing so and more emphasis on the optimal stack to maximize return relative to cost. Second, conversations are shifting to emphasize market differentiation. That is, anyone can build products that wrap around LLMs. In competitive markets, creating products and functionality that all your competitors can also build is a poor business strategy (unless having a particular thing is industry standard). Creating a competitive advantage requires companies to think strategically about their unique data assets and what they can build that their competitors cannot.

Demetrios talks with Rohit Agrawal, Director of Engineering at Tecton, about the challenges and future of streaming data in ML. Rohit shares his path at Tecton and insights on managing real-time and batch systems. They cover tool fragmentation (Kafka, Flink, etc.), infrastructure costs, managed services, and trends like using S3 for storage and Iceberg as the GitHub for data. The episode wraps with thoughts on BYOC solutions and evolving data architectures.

As language models have advanced, they have moved beyond code completion and are beginning to tackle software engineering tasks in a more autonomous, agentic way. However, evaluating agentic capabilities is challenging. To address this, we first introduce SWE-bench, a benchmark built from real GitHub issues that has become the standard for assessing AI’s ability to resolve complex software tasks in large codebases. We will discuss the current state of the field, the limitations of today’s models, and how far we still are from truly autonomous AI developers. Next, we will explore the fundamentals of agents based on SWE-agent, a simple yet powerful agent framework designed for software engineering but adaptable to a variety of domains. By the end of this talk, you will have an understanding of the current frontier of agentic AI in software engineering, the challenges ahead, and various tips and tricks on optimizing AI agents for tool use and iterative problem solving of reasoning-heavy tasks.

The open-source AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly, with frequent releases of new models, architectures, and hardware accelerators. While this flexibility drives innovation, it also introduces significant hidden complexities when fine-tuning and deploying AI models. In this talk, we’ll explore the key challenges teams face when updating fine-tuned models, switching between inference engines, and deploying across different GPUs such as the Nvidia A100, L40s, H100, and Intel Gaudi 2. We’ll share real-world examples, including tokenizer issues, multi-GPU fine-tuning hurdles, and API inconsistencies across AI components.