Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community)

Future of Software, Agents in the Enterprise, and Inception Stage Company Building // MLOps Podcast 293 with Eliot Durbin, General Partner at Boldstart Ventures.

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// Abstract

Key lessons for founders who are thinking about or starting their companies. 15 years of inception stage investing from how data science companies like Yhat went to market in 2013-14 and how that's evolved, to building companies around OSS frameworks like CrewAI; Eliot shares key learnings and questions for founders starting out.

// Bio

Eliot has been a General Partner @ Boldstart Ventures since its founding in 2010. Boldstart is an inception-stage lead investor for technical founders building the next generation of enterprise companies such as Clay, Snyk, BigID, Kustomer, Superhuman, and CrewAI.

// Related Links

Website: boldstart.vchttps://medium.com/@etdurbin

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Timestamps:

[00:00] Eliot's preferred coffee

[00:32] Takeaways

[01:36] Investing Regret Lesson

[03:20] Founder-Market Fit Exploration

[06:05] Exciting AI Missions

[16:15] AI Integration Dilemmas

[21:28] Open-source Stack Concerns

[25:30] AI Agent Interaction Layers

[30:02] ChatOps Agent Orchestration

[33:18] Agent Pricing Challenges

[38:37] Evals in Agent Systems

[45:43] Strong Opinions and Enablement

[48:07] Gemini OCR Replacement

[51:56] Wrap up

Agents in Production [Podcast Limited Series] - Episode Five, Dmitri Jarnikov, Chiara Caratelli, and Steven Vester join Demetrios to explore AI agents in e-commerce. They discuss the trade-offs between generic and specialized agents, with Dmitri noting the need for a balance between scalability and precision. Chiara highlights how agents can dynamically blend both approaches, while Steven predicts specialized agents will dominate initially before trust in generic agents grows. The panel also examines how e-commerce platforms may resist but eventually collaborate with AI agents. Trust remains a key factor in adoption, with opportunities emerging for new agent-driven business models.

Guest speakers: Dmitri Jarnikov - Senior Director of Data Science at Prosus

Chiara Caratelli - Data Scientist at Prosus Group

Steven Vester - Head of Product at OLX

Host: Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community

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In Agents in Production [Podcast Limited Series] - Episode Four, Donné Stevenson and Paul van der Boor break down the deployment of a Token Data Analyst agent at Prosus—why, how, and what worked. They discuss the challenges of productionizing the agent, from architecture to mitigating LLM overconfidence, key design choices, the role of pre-checks for clarity, and why they opted for simpler text-based processes over complex recursive methods.

Guest speakers:

Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group

Donne Stevenson - Machine Learning Engineer at Prosus Group

Host: Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community

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Agents in Production [Podcast Limited Series] - Episode Three explores the concept of web agents—AI-powered systems that interact with the web as humans do, navigating browsers instead of relying solely on APIs.

The discussion covers why web agents emerge as a natural step in AI evolution, their advantages over API-based systems, and their potential impact on e-commerce and automation.

The conversation also highlights challenges in making websites agent-friendly and envisions a future where agents seamlessly handle tasks like booking flights or ordering food.

Guest speakers:

Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group

Chiara Caratelli - Data Scientist at Prosus Group

Host:

Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community

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In Agents in Production Series - Episode Two, Demetrios, Paul, and Floris explore the latest in Voice AI agents. They discuss real-time voice interactions, OpenAI's real-time Voice API, and real-world deployment challenges. Paul shares insights from iFood’s voice AI tests in Brazil, while Floris highlights technical hurdles like turn detection and language processing. The episode covers broader applications in healthcare and customer service, emphasizing continuous learning and open-source innovation in Voice AI.

Guest speakers:

Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group

Floris Fok - AI Engineer at Prosus Group

Host:Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community

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In Agents in Production Series - Episode One, Demetrios chats with Paul van der Boor and Floris Fok about the real-world challenges of deploying AI agents across  @ProsusGroup  of companies. They break down the evolution from simple LLMs to fully interactive systems, tackling scale, UX, and the harsh lessons from failed projects. Packed with insights on what works (and what doesn’t), this episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about AI in production.

Guest speakers:

Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group

Floris Fok - AI Engineer at Prosus Group

Host:

Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community

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Kenny Daniel⁠ is the founder and CEO of ⁠Hyperparam⁠, building tools to make ML dataset curation orders of magnitude more efficient.

Look At Your ****ing Data 👀 // MLOps Podcast 292 with Kenny Daniel, Founder of Hyperparam.

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// Abstract

In this episode, we talk with Kenny Daniel, founder of Hyperparam, to explore why actually looking at your data is the most high-leverage move you can make for building state-of-the-art models. It used to be that the first step of data science was to get familiar with your data. However, as modern LLM datasets have gotten larger, dataset exploration tools have not kept up. Kenny makes the case that user interfaces have been under-appreciated in the Python-centric world of AI, and new tools are needed to enable advances in machine learning. Our conversation also dives into new methods of using LLM models themselves to assist data engineers in actually looking at their data.

// Bio

Kenny has been working in AI for over 20 years. First in academia as a ML Ph.D. student at USC (before it was cool). Kenny then co-founded Algorithmia to solve the problem of hosting and distribution of ML models running on GPUs (also before it was cool). Algortihmia was an early pioneer of the MLOps space and was acquired by DataRobot in 2021. Kenny is currently founder and CEO of Hyperparam, building new tools to make AI dataset curation orders of magnitude more efficient.

// Related Links

Website: ⁠https://hyperparam.app⁠

Working with the Apache Parquet file format blog: ⁠https://blog.getdaft.io/p/working-with-the-apache-parquet-file⁠

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Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: ⁠/kennydaniel⁠

Alex Milowski is a researcher, developer, entrepreneur, mathematician, and computer scientist.

Evolving Workflow Orchestration // MLOps Podcast #291 with Alex Milowski, Entrepreneur and Computer Scientist.

// Abstract

There seems to be a shift from workflow languages to code, mostly annotation Python - happening and getting us. It is a symptom of how complex workflow orchestration has gotten. Is it a dominant trend or will we cycle back to “DAG specifications”? At Stitchfix, we had our own DSL that “compiled” into airflow DAGs, and at MicroByre, we used an external workflow language. Both had a batch task executor on K8S, but at MicroByre, we had human and robot in the loop workflows.

// Bio

Dr. Milowski is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist with experience in a variety of data and machine learning technologies. He holds a PhD in Informatics (Computer Science) from the University of Edinburgh, where he researched large-scale computation over scientific data. Over the years, he's spent many years working on various aspects of workflow orchestration in industry, standardization, and research.

// Related Links

Website: https://www.milowski.com/

--------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ -------------

Join our Slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack

Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity

Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register

Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/

// MLOps Swag/Merch

⁠https://shop.mlops.community/⁠

Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmilowski/

Timestamps:

[00:00] Alex's preferred coffee

[00:20] Takeaways

[01:27] Workflow Systems Overview

[05:54] Everything as a DAG

[09:25] Workflows, Layering, and Ownership

[12:46] Workflow Awareness for Success

[17:31] Process Engineering Challenges

[21:20] ML Workflow Trends

[27:57] Data Engineering and ML Tools

[33:18] Infrastructure as Code Pros and Cons

[36:20] DSLs in Organizations

[43:04] Agents vs DAGs

[47:48] Agent Workflow Selection

[50:31] RPA Business Automation Tools

[55:00] LLM Integration in BPA

[1:01:14] Diversity in Decision Workflows

[1:03:09] Shadow AI Governance Risks

[1:08:34] Centralized ML Workflow Standardization

[1:12:50] Wrap up

Willem Pienaar is the Co-Founder and CTO of Cleric. He previously worked at Tecton as a Principal Engineer. Willem Pienaar attended the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Insights from Cleric: Building an Autonomous AI SRE // MLOps Podcast #289 with Willem Pienaar, CTO & Co-Founder of Cleric.

// Abstract

In this MLOps Community Podcast episode, Willem Pienaar, CTO of Cleric, breaks down how they built an autonomous AI SRE that helps engineering teams diagnose production issues. We explore how Cleric builds knowledge graphs for system understanding and uses existing tools/systems during investigations. We also get into some gnarly challenges around memory, tool integration, and evaluation frameworks, and some lessons learned from deploying to engineering teams.

// Bio

Willem Pienaar, CTO of Cleric, is a builder with a focus on LLM agents, MLOps, and open source tooling. He is the creator of Feast, an open source feature store, and contributed to the creation of both the feature store and MLOps categories. Before starting Cleric, Willem led the open-source engineering team at Tecton and established the ML platform team at Gojek, where he built high-scale ML systems for the Southeast Asian Decacorn.

// Related Links

Website: willem.co

--------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ -------------

Join our Slack community:

https://go.mlops.community/slack

Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity

Sign up for the next meetup:

https://go.mlops.community/register

Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more:https://mlops.community/

// MLOps Swag/Merch⁠

https://shop.mlops.community/⁠

Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

Connect with Willem on LinkedIn:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/willempienaar/

Timestamps:

[00:00] Willem's preferred coffee

[00:18] Takeaways

[02:28] AI SRE Challenges

[06:07] Complexity in Knowledge Graphs

[16:25] Agent Budget Loops

[20:07] AI Knowledge Graph Triage

[24:21] Memory in AI Agents

[31:32] Alert Fatigue and UX

[38:21] Pricing for Agent Solutions

[41:34] Tool Integration Challenges

[45:52] Agent Root Cause Analysis

[50:56] True Resolution Challenges

[55:20] Wrap up

Vinu Sankar Sadasivan is a CS PhD ... Currently, I am working as a full-time Student Researcher at Google DeepMind on jailbreaking multimodal AI models.

Robustness, Detectability, and Data Privacy in AI // MLOps Podcast #289 with Vinu Sankar Sadasivan, Student Researcher at Google DeepMind.

// Abstract

Recent rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made it widely applicable across various domains, from autonomous systems to multimodal content generation. However, these models remain susceptible to significant security and safety vulnerabilities. Such weaknesses can enable attackers to jailbreak systems, allowing them to perform harmful tasks or leak sensitive information. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into critical applications like autonomous robotics and healthcare, the importance of ensuring AI safety is growing. Understanding the vulnerabilities in today’s AI systems is crucial to addressing these concerns.

// Bio

Vinu Sankar Sadasivan is a final-year Computer Science PhD candidate at The University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Soheil Feizi. His research focuses on Security and Privacy in AI, with a particular emphasis on AI robustness, detectability, and user privacy. Currently, Vinu is a full-time Student Researcher at Google DeepMind, working on jailbreaking multimodal AI models. Previously, Vinu was a Research Scientist intern at Meta FAIR in Paris, where he worked on AI watermarking.

Vinu is a recipient of the 2023 Kulkarni Fellowship and has earned several distinctions, including the prestigious Director’s Silver Medal. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar in 2020. Prior to their PhD, Vinu gained research experience as a Junior Research Fellow in the Data Science Lab at IIT Gandhinagar and through internships at Caltech, Microsoft Research India, and IISc.

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https://shop.mlops.community/

// Related Links

Website: https://vinusankars.github.io/

--------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ -------------

Join our Slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack

Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity

Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register

Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/

Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/

Connect with Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinusankars/

Timestamps:

[00:00] Vinu's preferred coffee

[00:31] Takeaways

[01:09] AI Detection Limitations

[05:20] AI Text Disclosure Ethics

[14:05] Watermarking AI Models

[25:04] Threshold Trade-offs Explained

[29:41] Red Teaming AI Evolution

[36:30] Adversarial Prompt Optimization

[41:41] Model Strengths and Weaknesses

[47:57] Wrap up