Rethinking Pre-Training for Agentic AI with Aakanksha Chowdhery - #759

Rethinking Pre-Training for Agentic AI with Aakanksha Chowdhery - #759

Author: Sam Charrington December 17, 2025 Duration: 52:54
Today, we're joined by Aakanksha Chowdhery, member of technical staff at Reflection, to explore the fundamental shifts required to build true agentic AI. While the industry has largely focused on post-training techniques to improve reasoning, Aakanksha draws on her experience leading pre-training efforts for Google’s PaLM and early Gemini models to argue that pre-training itself must be rethought to move beyond static benchmarks. We explore the limitations of next-token prediction for multi-step workflows and examine how attention mechanisms, loss objectives, and training data must evolve to support long-form reasoning and planning. Aakanksha shares insights on the difference between context retrieval and actual reasoning, the importance of "trajectory" training data, and why scaling remains essential for discovering emergent agentic capabilities like error recovery and dynamic tool learning. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/759.

Hosted by industry analyst and commentator Sam Charrington, The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence) serves as a vital conduit between cutting-edge research and its real-world implications. This isn't just a series of technical lectures; it's a series of conversations that unpack how AI and machine learning are actively reshaping industries and societal structures. Each episode connects you directly with leading researchers, engineers, and innovative thinkers who are defining the frontiers of the field. The discussions go beyond abstract theory to explore the practical challenges, ethical considerations, and business transformations driven by these technologies. Whether you're a data scientist deep in the code, a tech-savvy leader strategizing implementation, or simply fascinated by the future of intelligent systems, this podcast provides the context and depth needed to stay informed. By focusing on the people behind the algorithms and the ideas powering the platforms, Sam creates a resource that is both intellectually substantive and genuinely engaging, building a thoughtful community around one of the most significant technological shifts of our time.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)
Podcast Episodes
Accelerating Sustainability with AI with Andres Ravinet - #689 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 47:46
Today, we're joined by Andres Ravinet, sustainability global black belt at Microsoft, to discuss the role of AI in sustainability. We explore real-world use cases where AI-driven solutions are leveraged to help tackle en…
Energy Star Ratings for AI Models with Sasha Luccioni - #687 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:26
Today, we're joined by Sasha Luccioni, AI and Climate lead at Hugging Face, to discuss the environmental impact of AI models. We dig into her recent research into the relative energy consumption of general purpose pre-tr…
Language Understanding and LLMs with Christopher Manning - #686 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:10
Today, we're joined by Christopher Manning, the Thomas M. Siebel professor in Machine Learning at Stanford University and a recent recipient of the 2024 IEEE John von Neumann medal. In our conversation with Chris, we dis…