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Charity Majors: Observability

Talk Charity Majors

Charity Majors, operations engineer and CEO of Honeycomb, discusses observability as a critical concept for protocol design. The talk explores how observability—the ability to understand system behavior through external outputs—applies to both database engineering and protocol architecture, with connections drawn from Majors' interdisciplinary background in music and mathematics.

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Peter Wang, co-founder of Anaconda and leader of their AI business, discusses AI as an anti-product—arguing against treating AI as a traditional consumer product. Wang explores how AI development infrastructure and scientific computing tools shape the actual practices of AI developers, contrasting the hype around AI products with the unglamorous low-level plumbing that enables them.

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Emmett Shear: Alignment Protocols

Emmett Shear, former CEO of Twitch and interim CEO of OpenAI, argues that alignment between AI agents is a capability enabled by protocol rather than a fixed property of individual agents. He contends that alignment is an ongoing process requiring skill and coordination, and introduces his recently founded company Softmax, which focuses on protocol-based approaches to AI alignment by drawing parallels between community/connection dynamics and agent coordination.

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Emmett Shear