YAAP (Yet Another AI Podcast)

The video course had a good run. Ryan Keenan from DeepLearning.ai thinks it's over. In this episode, recorded live at AI Dev 26 in San Francisco, Yuval sits down with Ryan to talk about what replaces the current online courses - and why the answer isn't another format: it's a conversation. They dig into why Jupyter Notebooks are out, why React is in, how Andrew Ng's voice clone became a teaching a...

Everything you need to know about harness engineering, in less than 30 minutes. In this episode, Yuval sits down with Mike Chambers from AWS to unpack harness engineering - the term that's quietly taken over the AI developer conversation. They dig into what a harness actually is (spoiler: it's everything outside the LLM), how it differs from context engineering and scaffolding, and why getting age...

Chunking is still one of the least-discussed but most decisive parts of RAG. In this episode, we break down why no single chunk size works for all questions, how different queries benefit from different window sizes, and why fixed-window indexing quietly limits retrieval performance. We walk through a multi-window chunking approach, show how rank fusion ties it together, and explain why better age...

Chat was a great prototype. It’s a terrible product.   In this episode, Yuval sits down with CopilotKit co-founder Atai to unpack why most agentic apps stall at “chat + vibes”, and why the real bottleneck in production AI isn’t models or reasoning. It’s UI.   They break down what actually changed in the last year, why agents fundamentally break the request-response paradigm, and how a new generati...

MCP standardized tool calling for agents but breaks down once agents start mutating state. In this episode, Yuval sits with Eran Gat from AI21 to dig into what happens when writing agents run in parallel, why shared environments fall apart, and how workspace isolation becomes a missing execution layer. Using real coding workloads and benchmarks, we walk through the architectural trade-offs behind...

Leaderboards reward “best average score.” Real users reward “answer fast, don’t hallucinate, don’t bankrupt me.”   In this special deep dive episode, AI21’s CTO Barak Lenz walks through four gaps between what models can do and what real AI systems deliver: validation, contextualization (pick the right approach per input), latency (parallelize and stop early), and decomposition (making those choice...

Running multiple agents can improve quality. Doing it right is the hard part. This time we look at the Agent Swarm Fallacy: the idea that throwing more agents at a problem automatically makes systems better. Yuval sits with Or Dagan, AI21 CPO, to explore why this breaks in practice, what happens when agents act instead of just think, and how test-time compute, structured execution, and smart decis...

Tavily built a Deep Research Agent with production in mind. Something they could actually scale. So they did the unsexy work. They went through millions of agent logs, found where tokens were being wasted, and optimized each section of the system. The result surprised them: they cut token consumption by more than half (!), then tested quality and discovered they topped the DeepResearch Bench witho...

You wanted to build an agent. You ended up debugging GPUs, scaling workers, and chasing OOMs. In this episode of YAAP, Yuval sits down with Linda from Anyscale to unpack why Ray exists and how it helps AI teams scale without turning every developer into a distributed systems expert. We trace Ray’s roots in reinforcement learning research, then zoom out to how it’s used today across the AI pipeline...

Banks love GenAI. They just don’t trust it. Yet.   In this episode of YAAP, Yuval talks with Renee Lau from AWS, a financial services industry specialist who works hands on with banks, insurers, and hedge funds as they try to move generative AI from pilots into production. Renee shares what she sees across the market, what actually works, and where teams get stuck.   They explore the two sides of...

Everyone’s building on the same foundation models. So how do you stand out? For Imagen AI, the answer isn’t bigger models, it’s smarter loops. CEO Yotam Gil joins Yuval to unpack how personalization, workflow integration, and continuous feedback turned Imagen’s photo-editing engine into a true moat. But that’s only half the story. The other half is speed: how a two-person Commando Squad at Imagen...

Three years ago, it was just a house full of friends geeking out about AI. Today, it’s where researchers, founders, and engineers collide — and where hackathon demos turn into real startups. In this episode, Yuval sits down with Henry Yin, Co-founder & CTO of AGI House, to unpack how a pandemic project became the Bay Area’s builder epicenter. From fine-tuning meetups to venture funding, they t...

Everyone (and we do mean EVERYONE) needs data, and the web is the largest database humanity has ever built. But tapping into it at scale requires more than technical skills. If your product touches web data, scraping isn't just a backend task, it can be risky and have real consequences. In this episode, Yuval sits down with Rony Shalit, Chief Compliance and Ethics Officer at Bright Data, to talk a...

Your LLM gave a great answer. But who decides what “great” means?   In this episode, Yuval talks with Noam Gat about judge language models — reward models, critic models, and how LLMs can be trained to rate, rank, and critique each other. They dive into the difference between scoring and feedback, how to use judge models during inference, and why most evaluation benchmarks don’t tell the full stor...

Think you know fine-tuning? If your answer is RLHF, you don’t. In this episode, Itay, who leads the Alignment group at AI21, gives a no-fluff crash course on RLVR (Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards), the method powering today’s smartest coding and reasoning models. He explains why RLVR beats RLHF at its own game, how “hard to solve, easy to verify” tasks unlock exploration without cha...

RAG Is Not Solved – Your Evaluation Just Sucks Your RAG pipeline is passing benchmarks, but failing reality. In this episode, Yuval sits down with Niv from AI21 to expose why most RAG evaluation is fundamentally flawed. From overhyped retrieval scores to chunking strategies that collapse under real-world complexity, they break down why your system isn’t as good as you think — and how structured RA...

The Call Is Coming From Inside the Agent (And It Has Your Credentials) You’ve shipped your first agent. It works. It’s useful. It might also be a security liability you don’t even know about. In this episode, Yuval talks to Zenity CTO Michael Bargury about how easy it is to hijack popular agent systems like Copilot and Cursor, what “zero-click” attacks look like in the agent era, and how to monito...

Building production AI systems is hard — especially when you're pioneering entirely new categories. In this episode, Yuval speaks with Guy Becker, Group Product Manager at AI21, to trace the evolution from task-specific models to Agent planning and orchestration systems. Guy shares hard-won lessons from building some of the first RAG-as-a-service offerings when there were literally zero handbooks...

Everyone's talking about AI agents, but most of what we call "agents" are just workflows in disguise. Real autonomous agents require planning. And that, changes everything. In this episode, Yuval speaks with AI21's Algo Tech Lead, Nitzan Cohen about why the popular React framework isn't enough and how planning architecture unlocks true agent capabilities. Key Topics: 1. The difference between work...

Building AI agents that actually work is harder than the hype suggests — and most people are doing it wrong. In this special "YAAP: Unplugged" episode (a live panel from AI Tinkerers meetup at the Hugging Face offices in Paris), Yuval sits down with Aymeric Roucher (Project Lead for Agents at Hugging Face) and Niv Granot (Algorithms Group Lead at AI21 Labs) for an unfiltered discussion about the u...

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is changing how developers connect AI applications to external tools – but what exactly is it, and why should you care? In this episode, Yuval speaks with Etan Grundstein, Technical Product Manager (and formerly Director of Engineering) at AI21, to break down the protocol that’s standardizing AI integrations, moving beyond basic weather APIs and calculators to real-wor...