Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering

Every few weeks at Microsoft, someone would build an AI prototype that blew everyone's minds. Three months later? Dead. "We can never ship that." Dan Klein watched this happen for five years before he decided to do something about it.

Dan is co-founder and CTO of Scaled Cognition, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, and winner of the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. His previous startups include adap.tv (acquired ...

Richmond Alake is Director of AI Developer Experience at Oracle and one of the most concrete voices on agent memory right now. His AI Engineer World's Fair talk on architecting agent memory crossed 100,000 views, he built the open-source MemoRIS library, and he co-created a course with Andrew Ng.

In this conversation, Richmond walks through memory engineering as a distinct discipline from prompt engineering and context engi...

Michel Tricot co-founded Airbyte, the open source data integration platform with 600+ free connectors that hit a $1.5 billion valuation. Now he's building the company's next product: an agent engine, currently in public beta. His thesis is that agents don't fail because models are bad. They fail because the data feeding them is wrong: context poisoning is killing them.

Michel demos this live. A simple Gong query through raw...

Yujian Tang started the r/AI_Agents subreddit in April 2023. For the first year, it barely moved. Then it hit 9,000 members, he went on vacation, came back to 36,000, and now it's approaching 300,000. In this episode, Yujian talks about how that community grew alongside his event business (Seattle Startup Summit, 900+ attendees last year), his two failed startups, and why he just filed paperwork to launch his own venture f...

Sterling Chin stopped thinking of AI as a tool and started treating it like a junior employee. Onboarded it with context, corrected its mistakes, and gave it writing rules.

Forty days later, MARVIN was handling 90% of his workday.

In this episode of Chain of Thought, Sterling (Applied AI Engineer and Senior Developer Advocate at Postman) walks through live demos of MARVIN, his personal AI assistant built on Claude Code. Fro...

Intercom was spending $250K/month on a single summarization task using GPT. Then they replaced it with a fine-tuned 14B parameter Qwen model and saved almost all of it. In this episode, Intercom's Chief AI Officer, Fergal Reid, walks through exactly how they made that call, where their approach has changed over time, and how all of their efforts built their Fin customer service agent.

Fergal breaks down how Fin went from 3...

How do you deploy AI agents to 12,000 employees in just 8 weeks? How do you do it safely? Angie Jones, VP of Engineering for AI Tools and Enablement at Block, joins the show to share exactly how her team pulled it off.

Block (the company behind Square and Cash App) became an early adopter of Model Context Protocol (MCP) and built Goose, their open-source AI agent that's now a reference implementation for the Agentic AI ...

Google DeepMind is reshaping the AI landscape with an unprecedented wave of releases—from Gemini 3 to robotics and even data centers in space.

Paige Bailey, AI Developer Relations Lead at Google DeepMind, joins us to break down the full Google AI ecosystem. From her unique journey as a geophysicist-turned-AI-leader who helped ship GitHub Copilot, to now running developer experience for DeepMind's entire platform, Paige off...

You've heard of evaluations—but eval engineering is the difference between AI that ships and AI that's stuck in prototype.

Most teams still treat evals like unit tests: write them once, check a box, move on. But when you're deploying agents that make real decisions, touch real customers, and cost real money, those one-time tests don't cut it. The companies actually shipping production AI at scale have figured out something ...

AI is destroying the planet—or so we've been told. This week on Chain of Thought, we tackle one of the most persistent and misleading narratives in the AI conversation.

Andy Masley, Director of Effective Altruism DC, joins host Conor Bronsdon to fact-check the absurd AI environmental claims you've heard at parties, in articles, and even in bestselling books. Andy recently went viral for discovering what he calls "the single...

AI is accelerating at a breakneck pace, but model quality isn’t the only constraint we face.. There are major infrastructure requirements, energy needs, security, and data pipelines to run AI at scale. This week on Chain of Thought, Cisco’s President and Chief Product Officer Jeetu Patel joins host Conor Bronsdon to reveal what it actually takes to build the critical foundation for the AI era.

Jeetu breaks down the three bo...

The transformer architecture has dominated AI since 2017, but it’s not the only approach to building LLMs - and new architectures are bringing LLMs to edge devices

Maxime Labonne, Head of Post-Training at Liquid AI and creator of the 67,000+ star LLM Course, joins Conor Bronsdon to challenge the AI architecture status quo. Liquid AI’s hybrid architecture, combining transformers with convolutional layers, delivers faster...

Most AI agents are built backwards, starting with models instead of system architecture.

Aishwarya Srinivasan, Head of AI Developer Relations at Fireworks AI, joins host Conor Bronsdon to explain the shift required to build reliable agents: stop treating them as model problems and start architecting them as complete software systems. Benchmarks alone won't save you. 

Aish breaks down the evolution from prompt engineering to ...

This week, we're doing something special and sharing an episode from another podcast we love: The Humans of AI by our friends at Writer. We're huge fans of their work, and you might remember Writer's CEO, May Habib, from the inaugural episode of our own show.

From The Humans of AI:

Learn how Melisa Russak, lead research scientist at WRITER, stumbled upon fundamental machine learning algorithms, completely unaware of existing...

The incredible velocity of AI coding tools has shifted the critical bottleneck in software development from code generation to code reviews. 

Greg Foster, Co-Founder & CTO of Graphite, joins the conversation to explore this new reality, outlining the three waves of AI that are leading to autonomous agents spawning pull requests in the background. He argues that as AI automates the "inner loop" of writing code, the human...

What’s the first step to building an enterprise-grade AI tool? 

Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel, joins us this week to share Vercel’s playbook for agents, explaining how agents are a new type of software for solving flexible tasks. He shares how Vercel's developer-first ecosystem, including tools like the AI SDK and AI Gateway, is designed to help teams move from a quick proof-of-concept to a trusted, production-ready application.

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The technological moat is eroding in the AI era, what new factors separate a successful startup from the rest?

Aurimas Griciūnas, CEO of SwirlAI, joins the show to break down the realities of building in this new landscape. Startup success now hinges on speed, strong financial backing, or immediate distribution. Aurimas warns against the critical mistake of prioritizing shiny tools over fundamental engineering and the marke...

As we enter the era of the AI engineer, the biggest challenge isn't technical - it's a shift in mindset. Hamel Husain, a leading AI consultant and luminary in the eval space, joins the podcast to explore the skills and processes needed to build reliable AI. 

Hamel explains why many teams relying on vanity dashboards and a "buffet of metrics" experience a false sense of security, which is no substitute for customized evals t...

What if your next competitor is not a startup, but a solo builder on a side project shipping features faster than your entire team?

For Claire Vo, that's not a hypothetical. As the founder of ChatPRD, formerly the Chief Product and Technology Officer at LaunchDarkly, and host of the How I AI podcast, she has a unique vantage point on the driving forces behind a new blueprint for success.

She argues that AI accountability mu...