Building the Internet of Agents with Vijoy Pandey - #737
Today, we're joined by Vijoy Pandey, SVP and general manager at Outshift by Cisco to discuss a foundational challenge for the enterprise: how do we make specialized agents from different vendors collaborate effectively? As companies like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft all develop their own agentic systems, integrating them creates a complex, probabilistic, and noisy environment, a stark contrast to the deterministic APIs of the past. Vijoy introduces Cisco's vision for an "Internet of Agents," a platform to manage this new reality, and its open-source implementation, AGNTCY. We explore the four phases of agent collaboration—discovery, composition, deployment, and evaluation—and dive deep into the communication stack, from syntactic protocols like A2A, ACP, and MCP to the deeper semantic challenges of creating a shared understanding between agents. Vijoy also unveils SLIM (Secure Low-Latency Interactive Messaging), a novel transport layer designed to make agent-to-agent communication quantum-safe, real-time, and efficient for multi-modal workloads.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/737.
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56:13
Building the Internet of Agents with Vijoy Pandey - #737
Today, we're joined by Vijoy Pandey, SVP and general manager at Outshift by Cisco to discuss a foundational challenge for the enterprise: how do we make specialized agents from different vendors collaborate effectively? As companies like Salesforce, Workday, and Microsoft all develop their own agentic systems, integrating them creates a complex, probabilistic, and noisy environment, a stark contrast to the deterministic APIs of the past. Vijoy introduces Cisco's vision for an "Internet of Agents," a platform to manage this new reality, and its open-source implementation, AGNTCY. We explore the four phases of agent collaboration—discovery, composition, deployment, and evaluation—and dive deep into the communication stack, from syntactic protocols like A2A, ACP, and MCP to the deeper semantic challenges of creating a shared understanding between agents. Vijoy also unveils SLIM (Secure Low-Latency Interactive Messaging), a novel transport layer designed to make agent-to-agent communication quantum-safe, real-time, and efficient for multi-modal workloads.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/737.
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56:13
LLMs for Equities Feature Forecasting at Two Sigma with Ben Wellington - #736
Today, we're joined by Ben Wellington, deputy head of feature forecasting at Two Sigma. We dig into the team’s end-to-end approach to leveraging AI in equities feature forecasting, covering how they identify and create features, collect and quantify historical data, and build predictive models to forecast market behavior and asset prices for trading and investment. We explore the firm's platform-centric approach to managing an extensive portfolio of features and models, the impact of multimodal LLMs on accelerating the process of extracting novel features, the importance of strict data timestamping to prevent temporal leakage, and the way they consider build vs. buy decisions in a rapidly evolving landscape. Lastly, Ben also shares insights on leveraging open-source models and the future of agentic AI in quantitative finance.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/736.
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59:31
Zero-Shot Auto-Labeling: The End of Annotation for Computer Vision with Jason Corso - #735
Today, we're joined by Jason Corso, co-founder of Voxel51 and professor at the University of Michigan, to explore automated labeling in computer vision. Jason introduces FiftyOne, an open-source platform for visualizing datasets, analyzing models, and improving data quality. We focus on Voxel51’s recent research report, “Zero-shot auto-labeling rivals human performance,” which demonstrates how zero-shot auto-labeling with foundation models can yield to significant cost and time savings compared to traditional human annotation. Jason explains how auto-labels, despite being "noisier" at lower confidence thresholds, can lead to better downstream model performance. We also cover Voxel51's "verified auto-labeling" approach, which utilizes a "stoplight" QA workflow (green, yellow, red light) to minimize human review. Finally, we discuss the challenges of handling decision boundary uncertainty and out-of-domain classes, the differences between synthetic data generation in vision and language domains, and the potential of agentic labeling.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/735.
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56:45
Grokking, Generalization Collapse, and the Dynamics of Training Deep Neural Networks with Charles Martin - #734
Today, we're joined by Charles Martin, founder of Calculation Consulting, to discuss Weight Watcher, an open-source tool for analyzing and improving Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) based on principles from theoretical physics. We explore the foundations of the Heavy-Tailed Self-Regularization (HTSR) theory that underpins it, which combines random matrix theory and renormalization group ideas to uncover deep insights about model training dynamics. Charles walks us through WeightWatcher’s ability to detect three distinct learning phases—underfitting, grokking, and generalization collapse—and how its signature “layer quality” metric reveals whether individual layers are underfit, overfit, or optimally tuned. Additionally, we dig into the complexities involved in fine-tuning models, the surprising correlation between model optimality and hallucination, the often-underestimated challenges of search relevance, and their implications for RAG. Finally, Charles shares his insights into real-world applications of generative AI and his lessons learned from working in the field.
The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/734.
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