Best Bridges And Bytes Podcasts (2025)

1
The Innovation of Cumulative Cultures and Developer Problem-Solving 1:29:53

4d ago1:29:53

1:29:53

Did you know that crows are better than toddlers at generating novel solutions? It's true! In the earliest days of childhood, around the globe scientists have documented that human cognition struggles to generate novel solutions. But we are adept at imitation, transmitting and teaching the solutions that we see others put into practice. What does t…

1
Brandon Powers on dance, technology, immersive experiences, reframing the role of the audience, working with engineers, and the importance of translation 45:00

5d ago45:00

45:00

A chat with New York-based creative director and choreographer, Brandon Powers. Brandon works with technology to create experiences across physical and virtual spaces. We talked about his early experiences with technology, inter-disciplinary teams, the various ways that technology and virtual spaces can enhance and extend experiences for both artis…

1
The TCO Survival Guide 20:30

6d ago20:30

20:30

In this episode of Power Bytes, we explore why understanding the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is critical for businesses relying on generator sets for prime power. From fuel efficiency and maintenance strategies to predictive technologies and regulatory compliance, we break down hidden costs that impact long-term performance and profitability. Lea…

1
Genie 3: A New Frontier for World Models with Jack Parker-Holder and Shlomi Fruchter - #743 1:01:01

7d ago1:01:01

1:01:01

Today, we're joined by Jack Parker-Holder and Shlomi Fruchter, researchers at Google DeepMind, to discuss the recent release of Genie 3, a model capable of generating “playable” virtual worlds. We dig into the evolution of the Genie project and review the current model’s scaled-up capabilities, including creating real-time, interactive, and high-re…

1
#62 Thirsty datacenters in the heart of Silicon Valley with Masheika Allgood 49:04

8d ago49:04

49:04

A month ago, Google released its 2024 sustainability report. Its overall water consumption increased by 28% in a year. Less publicized than the data center energy boom, water is also pivotal for the Tech industry and data is even scarcer. To better understand this secret but serious love affair between big tech and water, what better location to in…

1
Closing the Loop Between AI Training and Inference with Lin Qiao - #742 1:01:11

14d ago1:01:11

1:01:11

In this episode, we're joined by Lin Qiao, CEO and co-founder of Fireworks AI. Drawing on key lessons from her time building PyTorch, Lin shares her perspective on the modern generative AI development lifecycle. She explains why aligning training and inference systems is essential for creating a seamless, fast-moving production pipeline, preventing…

1
Hazel Weakly - Abstractions as Bridges 1:34:31

15d ago1:34:31

1:34:31

Have you ever wondered about what makes a good abstraction vs a bad one? Do you want to examine potential reasons why efforts to develop abstractions at a company or in a project take hold, and some don't? Or what it takes to develop an abstraction that reaches beyond the technical corner of your company or project and becomes something that helps …

1
Turning Up the Heat: Microgrids & Chilies 18:43

27d ago18:43

18:43

In this episode of the Power Bytes podcast, Neil Smith discusses the significant demand for microgrid solutions, especially for rural electrification, and highlights how these projects can drastically improve quality of life in communities. He also shares insights on the Nagaland project, which aims to help bring sustainable energy to remote areas,…

1
Context Engineering for Productive AI Agents with Filip Kozera - #741 46:01

28d ago46:01

46:01

In this episode, Filip Kozera, founder and CEO of Wordware, explains his approach to building agentic workflows where natural language serves as the new programming interface. Filip breaks down the architecture of these "background agents," explaining how they use a reflection loop and tool-calling to execute complex tasks. He discusses the current…

1
Infrastructure Scaling and Compound AI Systems with Jared Quincy Davis - #740 1:13:02

1M ago1:13:02

1:13:02

In this episode, Jared Quincy Davis, founder and CEO at Foundry, introduces the concept of "compound AI systems," which allows users to create powerful, efficient applications by composing multiple, often diverse, AI models and services. We discuss how these "networks of networks" can push the Pareto frontier, delivering results that are simultaneo…

1
Neil Williams (BFI) on transforming organisations through digital, comparisons between the civil service and the cultural sector, working in the open, and intentionally not empire-building 57:19

1M ago57:19

57:19

A conversation recorded in-person (hurray!) with the BFI's Exec Director of Technology and Digital Transformation, Neil Williams. Neil writes a regular 'fortnight notes' post on his blog, which you can find here neilojwilliams.netBy Digital Works

1
Building Voice AI Agents That Don’t Suck with Kwindla Kramer - #739 1:13:02

1M ago1:13:02

1:13:02

In this episode, Kwindla Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Daily and creator of the open source Pipecat framework, joins us to discuss the architecture and challenges of building real-time, production-ready conversational voice AI. Kwin breaks down the full stack for voice agents—from the models and APIs to the critical orchestration layer that manages…

1
Distilling Transformers and Diffusion Models for Robust Edge Use Cases with Fatih Porikli - #738 1:00:29

2M ago1:00:29

1:00:29

Today, we're joined by Fatih Porikli, senior director of technology at Qualcomm AI Research for an in-depth look at several of Qualcomm's accepted papers and demos featured at this year’s CVPR conference. We start with “DiMA: Distilling Multi-modal Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving,” an end-to-end autonomous driving system that incorpora…

1
#61 Scaling Green Software with Anita Schüttler 49:16

2M ago49:16

49:16

What does it take to go beyond raising awareness in green software? To avoid checking just boxes? What is required to scale green software practices in a company? To discuss these issues, Gaël Duez welcomes Anita Schüttler on this episode “from the trenches”. Anita is a seasoned software engineer and expert on digital sustainability. She works as H…

1
The Power Struggle: Disruptors, Developers, and the Future of Power 19:30

2M ago19:30

19:30

In this episode of the Power Bytes Podcast, host Ryan Karlin sits down with Brandon Lynn, Caterpillar Electric Power’s Global Director of Business Development, to discuss the growing role of distributed generation and how industries are adapting to enhance operational efficiencies and achieve their goals. Email us: [email protected] LinkedIn: http…

1
Building the Internet of Agents with Vijoy Pandey - #737 56:13

2M ago56:13

56:13

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, pr…

1
#60 Why Tech companies should not deprioritize future readiness with Rainer Karcher 49:37

2M ago49:37

49:37

“Climate activist in a suit”. This is how Rainer Karcher describes himself. It is an endless debate between people advocating for the system to change from the outside and those willing to change it from the inside. In this episode Gaël Duez welcomes a strong advocate of moving the corporate world into the right direction from within? Having spent …

1
LLMs for Equities Feature Forecasting at Two Sigma with Ben Wellington - #736 59:31

2M ago59:31

59:31

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 tradin…

1
Zero-Shot Auto-Labeling: The End of Annotation for Computer Vision with Jason Corso - #735 56:45

3M ago56:45

56:45

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 riv…

1
Tash Willcocks (TPX Impact) on navigating uncertainty, intellectual humility, leadership in turbulent times, why zebras don't get ulcers, the importance of structure in enabling agility, how to actually ... 56:03

3M ago56:03

56:03

A wide-ranging chat with Tash Willcocks (Head of Learning Design at TPX Impact) on organisational culture, leadership, and how to deal with change and uncertainty. Tash mentioned a whole load of ideas, articles, books, and thinkers - a few of which I've linked to below: Tash's Medium lives here: https://medium.com/@tash-willcocks This is the first …

1
#59 Debriefing Qcon Sustainability track with Erica Pisani 39:32

3M ago39:32

39:32

How is sustainability covered in main tech conferences? Sure cybersecurity, DevOps, or anything related to SRE, is covered at length. Not to mention AI… But what room is left for the environmental impact of our job ? And what are the main trends which are filtered out from specialized conferences in Green IT such as Green IO, GreenTech Forum or eco…

1
Grokking, Generalization Collapse, and the Dynamics of Training Deep Neural Networks with Charles Martin - #734 1:25:21

3M ago1:25:21

1:25:21

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 matri…

1
Google I/O 2025 Special Edition - #733 26:21

3M ago26:21

26:21

Today, I’m excited to share a special crossover edition of the podcast recorded live from Google I/O 2025! In this episode, I join Shawn Wang aka Swyx from the Latent Space Podcast, to interview Logan Kilpatrick and Shrestha Basu Mallick, PMs at Google DeepMind working on AI Studio and the Gemini API, along with Kwindla Kramer, CEO of Daily and cre…

1
#58b Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 2 39:15

3M ago39:15

39:15

Why is the model of a Nobel prize winner not necessarily good science? What is “good” modelling? Is access to information enough to change a system behavior? This episode is the second part of a long interview with Laetitia Bornes, a Doctor in Human-Computer Interaction, Systems Engineering and Systemic Design who is one of the co-authors of a rese…

1
RAG Risks: Why Retrieval-Augmented LLMs are Not Safer with Sebastian Gehrmann - #732 57:09

3M ago57:09

57:09

Today, we're joined by Sebastian Gehrmann, head of responsible AI in the Office of the CTO at Bloomberg, to discuss AI safety in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems and generative AI in high-stakes domains like financial services. We explore how RAG, contrary to some expectations, can inadvertently degrade model safety. We cover examples o…

1
#58a Avoided emissions thanks to Tech: the Vinted use case with Laetitia Bornes - Part 1 48:03

3M ago48:03

48:03

Can a digital company be “carbon negative”? What should we think of these claims of “tons of carbon avoided” coming from 2nd hand platforms such as Vinted or Back Market? Dr Laetita Bornes conducted research on Vinted claims, investigating its data sources and the methodology used with her colleague David Ekchazer. Their findings were surprising, e…

1
From Prompts to Policies: How RL Builds Better AI Agents with Mahesh Sathiamoorthy - #731 1:01:25

3M ago1:01:25

1:01:25

Today, we're joined by Mahesh Sathiamoorthy, co-founder and CEO of Bespoke Labs, to discuss how reinforcement learning (RL) is reshaping the way we build custom agents on top of foundation models. Mahesh highlights the crucial role of data curation, evaluation, and error analysis in model performance, and explains why RL offers a more robust altern…

1
Beyond Backup: Financing the Future of Data Centers 22:03

4M ago22:03

22:03

In this episode, host Ryan Karlin engages in a compelling conversation with Adam Brown, Senior Manager of Sales at Caterpillar Financial. They delve into the financial intricacies of the data center industry, highlighting key challenges such as extended lead times for grid connectivity and significant capital investments. Email us: [email protected]…

1
How OpenAI Builds AI Agents That Think and Act with Josh Tobin - #730 1:07:27

4M ago1:07:27

1:07:27

Today, we're joined by Josh Tobin, member of technical staff at OpenAI, to discuss the company’s approach to building AI agents. We cover OpenAI's three agentic offerings—Deep Research for comprehensive web research, Operator for website navigation, and Codex CLI for local code execution. We explore OpenAI’s shift from simple LLM workflows to reaso…

1
CTIBench: Evaluating LLMs in Cyber Threat Intelligence with Nidhi Rastogi - #729 56:18

4M ago56:18

56:18

Today, we're joined by Nidhi Rastogi, assistant professor at Rochester Institute of Technology to discuss Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI), focusing on her recent project CTIBench—a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on real-world CTI tasks. Nidhi explains the evolution of AI in cybersecurity, from rule-based systems to LLMs that accelerate analysis by p…

1
#57 Greening Intelligence: Bridging Infrastructure and Governance for a Sustainable AI Future with Pr. PS Lee and Pr. Heng Wang 24:46

4M ago24:46

24:46

Description “It's always a case of fit for purpose, or what we call a proper engineering.” Some down-to-earth facts and analysis were coined by Pr PS Lee, one of the world's top experts in liquid cooling - and Pr. Heng Wang - a renowned expert in digital governance - while cross-analysing Singapore’s main challenges from an infrastructure and gover…

1
Generative Benchmarking with Kelly Hong - #728 54:17

4M ago54:17

54:17

In this episode, Kelly Hong, a researcher at Chroma, joins us to discuss "Generative Benchmarking," a novel approach to evaluating retrieval systems, like RAG applications, using synthetic data. Kelly explains how traditional benchmarks like MTEB fail to represent real-world query patterns and how embedding models that perform well on public benchm…

1
Exploring the Biology of LLMs with Circuit Tracing with Emmanuel Ameisen - #727 1:34:06

4M ago1:34:06

1:34:06

In this episode, Emmanuel Ameisen, a research engineer at Anthropic, returns to discuss two recent papers: "Circuit Tracing: Revealing Language Model Computational Graphs" and "On the Biology of a Large Language Model." Emmanuel explains how his team developed mechanistic interpretability methods to understand the internal workings of Claude by rep…

1
Teaching LLMs to Self-Reflect with Reinforcement Learning with Maohao Shen - #726 51:45

5M ago51:45

51:45

Today, we're joined by Maohao Shen, PhD student at MIT to discuss his paper, “Satori: Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Action-Thought Enhances LLM Reasoning via Autoregressive Search.” We dig into how Satori leverages reinforcement learning to improve language model reasoning—enabling model self-reflection, self-correction, and exploration of a…

1
#56 Building Green Software, the one year anniversary with Sarah Hsu 49:10

5M ago49:10

49:10

A year ago, Building Green Software was released by O’Reilly. Since Tim Frick’s book “Designing for sustainability” (8 years ago!), O’Reilly didn’t publish anything fully focusing on sustainability. So, it’s a fair statement that this book was long awaited. But a year is an eternity in IT. This is why Sarah Hsu, one of its 3 co-authors as well as t…

1
Emma Keith (National Theatre) on NT Live, remote audiences, experimentation, learning, thinking about value, leadership, and the importance of pilots 56:27

5M ago56:27

56:27

A great chat with the National Theatre's outgoing Managing Director - Digital, Emma Keith. We talked about how digital practice has developed at the NT and how that differs from other performing arts organisations. The history of the NT Live programme, and the importance of pilots and testing ideas. The hidden value of digital infrastructure, remot…

1
Waymo's Foundation Model for Autonomous Driving with Drago Anguelov - #725 1:09:07

5M ago1:09:07

1:09:07

Today, we're joined by Drago Anguelov, head of AI foundations at Waymo, for a deep dive into the role of foundation models in autonomous driving. Drago shares how Waymo is leveraging large-scale machine learning, including vision-language models and generative AI techniques to improve perception, planning, and simulation for its self-driving vehicl…

1
#55 Decarbonizing Kubernetes with Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki 44:41

5M ago44:41

44:41

Did containerisation ship away our environmental responsibility? Containers come with the promise of automation, scalability and reliability. The question is how to add sustainability to the list without breaking its other benefits. To talk about these challenges, Gaël Duez welcomes Flavia Paganelli and Niki Manoledaki, 2 experts in Kubernetes who …

1
Dynamic Token Merging for Efficient Byte-level Language Models with Julie Kallini - #724 50:32

5M ago50:32

50:32

Today, we're joined by Julie Kallini, PhD student at Stanford University to discuss her recent papers, “MrT5: Dynamic Token Merging for Efficient Byte-level Language Models” and “Mission: Impossible Language Models.” For the MrT5 paper, we explore the importance and failings of tokenization in large language models—including inefficient compression…

1
Scaling Up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning with Jonas Geiping - #723 58:38

5M ago58:38

58:38

Today, we're joined by Jonas Geiping, research group leader at Ellis Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems to discuss his recent paper, “Scaling up Test-Time Compute with Latent Reasoning: A Recurrent Depth Approach.” This paper proposes a novel language model architecture which uses recurrent depth to enable “thinking in l…

1
# 54 Agility and Sustainability with Joanna Masraff and Joanne Stone 48:44

6M ago48:44

48:44

"We are 100% convinced that IT sustainability matters but we can’t add more non business requirements, we have agile teams." This often heard sentence from product managers or CPOs, led to this dedicated episode on agility and sustainability where host Gaël Duez welcomes 2 seasoned agile coaches: Joanne Stone, the founder of Agilist 4 planet and th…

1
Beks Leary (National Gallery) on the challenges & opportunities of working in larger vs smaller teams, different ways of thinking about audiences, and the value of building meaningful relationships with ... 31:35

6M ago31:35

31:35

A chat with Beks Leary, Senior Social Media and Content Lead at the National Gallery in London. We talked about Beks's career, which has encompassed working at a diverse range of organisations including the Bush Theatre, BBC, and National Theatre before Beks's current role at the National Gallery. Beks explained the opportunities and challenges tha…

1
Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought with Chengzu Li - #722 42:11

6M ago42:11

42:11

Today, we're joined by Chengzu Li, PhD student at the University of Cambridge to discuss his recent paper, “Imagine while Reasoning in Space: Multimodal Visualization-of-Thought.” We explore the motivations behind MVoT, its connection to prior work like TopViewRS, and its relation to cognitive science principles such as dual coding theory. We dig i…

1
Inside s1: An o1-Style Reasoning Model That Cost Under $50 to Train with Niklas Muennighoff - #721 49:29

6M ago49:29

49:29

Today, we're joined by Niklas Muennighoff, a PhD student at Stanford University, to discuss his paper, “S1: Simple Test-Time Scaling.” We explore the motivations behind S1, as well as how it compares to OpenAI's O1 and DeepSeek's R1 models. We dig into the different approaches to test-time scaling, including parallel and sequential scaling, as well…

1
#53 Scaling GreenOps at Back Market with Dawn Baker 37:03

6M ago37:03

37:03

Changing its Cloud provider is never small potatoes, especially when a platform operates up to 40,000 containers and has about 4 million unique visitors a day to its website. Yet Back Market made the move from AWS to Google Cloud Platform motivated primarily by … sustainability concerns! In this episode its CTO, Dawn Backer, chats with Gaël Duez an…

1
Accelerating AI Training and Inference with AWS Trainium2 with Ron Diamant - #720 1:07:05

6M ago1:07:05

1:07:05

Today, we're joined by Ron Diamant, chief architect for Trainium at Amazon Web Services, to discuss hardware acceleration for generative AI and the design and role of the recently released Trainium2 chip. We explore the architectural differences between Trainium and GPUs, highlighting its systolic array-based compute design, and how it balances per…

1
π0: A Foundation Model for Robotics with Sergey Levine - #719 52:30

6M ago52:30

52:30

Today, we're joined by Sergey Levine, associate professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of Physical Intelligence, to discuss π0 (pi-zero), a general-purpose robotic foundation model. We dig into the model architecture, which pairs a vision language model (VLM) with a diffusion-based action expert, and the model training "recipe," emphasizing the ro…

1
#52 Sustainability at WordPress: an update with Csaba Varszegi, Nahuai Badiola, and Nora Ferreiros 47:46

7M ago47:46

47:46

“Today I learned that we have a sustainability team.Thank you for your effort in this area, looking at results of the team so far, and the ROI of time invested, it's probably a good time to officially dissolve the team entirely”. In 3 sentences, almost 3 years of work from the WordPress Sustainability Group vanished and their Slack channel archived…

1
Mike Keating (Art Fund) on the collaborative development of AI policy, balancing the priorities of being both a membership and sector support organisation, and the impact of COVID on Art Fund's digital ... 35:44

7M ago35:44

35:44

A conversation with Art Fund's Associate Director of Digital Experience, Mike Keating. Most of our chat focused on Mike's relatively recent work in developing Art Fund's first AI policy. The collaborative, open, and pragmatic approach that Mike and colleagues took to this work feels like a useful model that other cultural organisations could borrow…

1
AI Trends 2025: AI Agents and Multi-Agent Systems with Victor Dibia - #718 1:44:59

7M ago1:44:59

1:44:59

Today we’re joined by Victor Dibia, principal research software engineer at Microsoft Research, to explore the key trends and advancements in AI agents and multi-agent systems shaping 2025 and beyond. In this episode, we discuss the unique abilities that set AI agents apart from traditional software systems–reasoning, acting, communicating, and ada…

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