Latest news with #AIEngineerWorld'sFair
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman says engineers need this one trait to succeed
OpenAI's cofounder and president, Greg Brockman, has one piece of advice for engineers joining his company: Check your ego at the door. The most critical quality for engineers to succeed at OpenAI is "technical humility, Brockman said at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco on June 4. "You're coming in because you have skills that are important," he said in a video recording of the session that was published on AI Engineer's YouTube channel on Monday. "But it's a totally different environment from something like a traditional web startup." That insight, he said, came from watching culture clashes between colleagues from engineering and research backgrounds. He said engineers often think, "We've agreed on an interface, I can implement it however I want." Researchers, by contrast, see the system as a whole, where even a tiny bug can quietly degrade performance. In one early project, Brockman said OpenAI's engineering team ground to a halt debating every line of code. His solution was simple. He'd propose five ideas, a researcher would reject four, and they'd move forward with the one that remained. The key for engineers, Brockman said, is knowing when to trust your instincts and when to leave them behind. "The most important thing is to come in, really listen, and kind of assume that there's something that you're missing until you deeply understand the why," he said. "Then, at that point, great, make the change," he added. Brockman and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. What it takes to succeed at OpenAI Leaders at OpenAI have spoken about what it takes for employees to thrive at the company. "Approaching each scenario from scratch is so important in this space," Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT, told Lenny Rachitsky on his weekly tech podcast on Saturday. "There is no analogy for what we're building. You can't copy an existing thing." He said OpenAI cannot iterate on products or features developed by tech giants like Instagram or Google. "You can learn from everywhere, but you have to do it from scratch. That's why that trait tends to make someone effective at OpenAI, and it's something we test for," he said, referring to an employee's ability to start a project from the ground up. According to OpenAI's interview guide, which is published on its website, the company looks for candidates who can "ramp up quickly in a new domain and produce results." It also values "collaboration, effective communication, openness to feedback, and alignment with our mission and values." Brockman, a software engineer by training, dropped out of MIT to join the payments startup Stripe in 2010, becoming its CTO before leaving in 2015 to cofound OpenAI. He took a three-month leave of absence from the company in August 2024, at which point the company was going through a period of major staffing and leadership upheaval. He returned that November in a new technical leadership role.
Business Insider
30-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Windsurf's head of product engineering says a successful software engineer is proficient in these 3 skill categories
Windsurf's head of product engineering believes proficiency in three key areas makes a successful software engineer — coding, research, and "metalearning." Technical fundamentals are first and foremost, Windsurf's Kevin Hou said in a presentation at the AI Engineer World's Fair in San Francisco. "If we zoom out and think about what makes you all software engineers successful, there are a couple of different categories. The first of which — coding-related. File reads, running terminal commands, seeing your history, even which tabs you have open inside of your editor. This all informs how to generate the correct code." Following that, there's knowing how to seek support from external sources, Hou added. "Things like going onto GitHub and viewing a past history of commits, maybe looking at a PR that is doing something similar to the feature you're about to implement, doing online searches, web searches, looking at documentation," he said. And finally, there's "metalearning," the Windsurf product engineering head said, which he believes separates the veteran coders from the newbies. "It's the idea of what separates a junior engineer from a senior engineer, from a staff engineer," he said. "These are the organizational best practices, the engineering preferences, that all get encoded into what makes good code." Windsurf, which produces AI coding tools for developers and was recently acquired by OpenAI for a reported $3 billion, aims to emulate all the aspects that make up the process of a particularly capable programmer, Hou said. Most of what human engineers do now, he added, the company seeks to automate — eventually making it so people are only responsible for the final approval. "We know it's not enough just to read," he said. "We need to be able to do and write everything. We need to be able to do it all for you. And so the AI has to take action on a wide variety of surfaces beyond just the coding surface, in order to accomplish what a human software engineer would do." Windsurf is ultimately looking to make software engineering "99% agent and 1% human," Hou added. "And as more and more of these timelines and workflows become AI-powered, it becomes possible to have Windsurf working for you at all times," he said. "Not only as you type and use autocomplete and tab, but also in the background — researching when you're working, fully in parallel, only asking you to approve." Windsurf did not respond to a request for additional comment by Business Insider prior to publication. As AI-assisted coding becomes increasingly popular, companies have already begun to hire fewer human employees. Early-career workers in the tech sphere have been hit particularly hard. In an ideal world, though, Hou said Windsurf will help make programming a more accessible process, not one that's devoid of people entirely. "We want to build this future where you can code anytime, you can write software at any time," Hou said.
Business Upturn
04-06-2025
- Business
- Business Upturn
PromptQL Partners with UC Berkeley to Develop New Data Agent Benchmark for Reliability of Enterprise AI Agents
BERKELEY, Calif., June 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — PromptQL , a platform for reliable AI, today announced a strategic research collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley to develop the first comprehensive data agent benchmark for enterprise reliability specifically designed to evaluate general-purpose AI data agents in enterprise environments. A recent McKinsey study revealed that 78% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, however, more than 80% say their organization hasn't seen a tangible impact on enterprise-level Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT). The partnership – led by Aditya Parameswaran, Professor and Co-Director of UC Berkeley's EPIC Data Lab , along with his students – addresses this fundamental challenge organizations face when deploying AI systems in business-critical environments. While existing agentic data benchmarks like GAIA, Spider, and FRAMES test specific AI tasks, they overlook the complexity, reliability demands, and messy, siloed data that define real business environments. The forthcoming data agent benchmark aims to offer a solution by creating a framework that reflects real-world complexities. 'Our customer conversations reveal a clear pattern—they're ready to move from proof-of-concepts to production AI, yet they lack the evaluation tools to make confident deployment decisions,' said Tanmai Gopal, CEO of PromptQL. 'The data agent benchmark changes that by using representative datasets from our work in telecom, healthcare, finance, retail, and anti-money laundering to reflect the real complexity of enterprise AI.' UC Berkeley's EPIC Data Lab brings expertise to this collaboration. Professor Parameswaran is a leading authority on the use of AI for next-gen usable data analysis tools and has received numerous prestigious awards. His research group has created widely-adopted data tools with tens of millions of downloads. 'Current benchmarks suffer from what I call the '1% problem'—they're built for tech giants and ignore the 99% of organizations grappling with real-world data complexity,' Parameswaran said. 'The data agent benchmark marks a shift toward evaluating AI based on the reliability, transparency, and practical value enterprises actually need. This collaboration bridges academic rigor with the production insights PromptQL brings from real deployments.' The data agent benchmark beta will be revealed later this year. Organizations interested in early access or contributing use-cases or datasets can reach out to the research team at [email protected] . PromptQL will be at AI Engineer World's Fair , June 3-6 in San Francisco. Tanmai Gopal, PromptQL's co-founder and CEO, will present a session, 'Al Automation that Actually Works: $100M Impact on Messy Data with Zero Surprises,' on June 4 at 11:15 a.m. PT. To learn more or schedule a demo at the PromptQL booth, visit . About PromptQL PromptQL is a next-generation AI platform from the makers of Hasura, the company behind the pioneering GraphQL Engine. Built for enterprise-grade reliability, PromptQL enables natural language analysis and automation on internal business data — with an industry-first accuracy SLA. By learning the unique language of your business and planning tasks before executing them deterministically, PromptQL brings human-level precision to AI agents. About UC Berkeley EPIC Data Lab The EPIC Data Lab at UC Berkeley develops low-code and no-code interfaces for data work, powered by Gen AI. Co-Led by Professor Aditya Parameswaran, the lab follows Berkeley's tradition of multidisciplinary systems research with emphasis on real-world impact and practical deployment. The lab's tools, including DocETL and other widely-adopted systems, demonstrate Berkeley's leadership in democratizing data science capabilities. Media Contact:Erica Anderson Offleash for PromptQL [email protected]
Yahoo
04-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
PromptQL Partners with UC Berkeley to Develop New Data Agent Benchmark for Reliability of Enterprise AI Agents
New benchmark to address critical gap in evaluating AI systems for mission-critical business operations BERKELEY, Calif., June 04, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- PromptQL, a platform for reliable AI, today announced a strategic research collaboration with the University of California, Berkeley to develop the first comprehensive data agent benchmark for enterprise reliability specifically designed to evaluate general-purpose AI data agents in enterprise environments. A recent McKinsey study revealed that 78% of organizations use AI in at least one business function, however, more than 80% say their organization hasn't seen a tangible impact on enterprise-level Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT). The partnership – led by Aditya Parameswaran, Professor and Co-Director of UC Berkeley's EPIC Data Lab, along with his students – addresses this fundamental challenge organizations face when deploying AI systems in business-critical environments. While existing agentic data benchmarks like GAIA, Spider, and FRAMES test specific AI tasks, they overlook the complexity, reliability demands, and messy, siloed data that define real business environments. The forthcoming data agent benchmark aims to offer a solution by creating a framework that reflects real-world complexities. "Our customer conversations reveal a clear pattern—they're ready to move from proof-of-concepts to production AI, yet they lack the evaluation tools to make confident deployment decisions,' said Tanmai Gopal, CEO of PromptQL. 'The data agent benchmark changes that by using representative datasets from our work in telecom, healthcare, finance, retail, and anti-money laundering to reflect the real complexity of enterprise AI.' UC Berkeley's EPIC Data Lab brings expertise to this collaboration. Professor Parameswaran is a leading authority on the use of AI for next-gen usable data analysis tools and has received numerous prestigious awards. His research group has created widely-adopted data tools with tens of millions of downloads. "Current benchmarks suffer from what I call the '1% problem'—they're built for tech giants and ignore the 99% of organizations grappling with real-world data complexity,' Parameswaran said. 'The data agent benchmark marks a shift toward evaluating AI based on the reliability, transparency, and practical value enterprises actually need. This collaboration bridges academic rigor with the production insights PromptQL brings from real deployments.' The data agent benchmark beta will be revealed later this year. Organizations interested in early access or contributing use-cases or datasets can reach out to the research team at epic-support@ PromptQL will be at AI Engineer World's Fair, June 3-6 in San Francisco. Tanmai Gopal, PromptQL's co-founder and CEO, will present a session, 'Al Automation that Actually Works: $100M Impact on Messy Data with Zero Surprises,' on June 4 at 11:15 a.m. PT. To learn more or schedule a demo at the PromptQL booth, visit About PromptQLPromptQL is a next-generation AI platform from the makers of Hasura, the company behind the pioneering GraphQL Engine. Built for enterprise-grade reliability, PromptQL enables natural language analysis and automation on internal business data — with an industry-first accuracy SLA. By learning the unique language of your business and planning tasks before executing them deterministically, PromptQL brings human-level precision to AI agents. About UC Berkeley EPIC Data LabThe EPIC Data Lab at UC Berkeley develops low-code and no-code interfaces for data work, powered by Gen AI. Co-Led by Professor Aditya Parameswaran, the lab follows Berkeley's tradition of multidisciplinary systems research with emphasis on real-world impact and practical deployment. The lab's tools, including DocETL and other widely-adopted systems, demonstrate Berkeley's leadership in democratizing data science capabilities. Media Contact:Erica Anderson Offleash for PromptQLpromptql@ Research Contact:Professor Aditya ParameswaranUC Berkeley EPIC Data Labepic-support@ in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
