World Model · podcast knowledge graph

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

2025-12-17 · 53 min · episode 759 · 13 entities

Asserted relationships

  • evidence rules-v4
    Rethinking Pre-Training for Agentic AI with Aakanksha Chowdhery - #759
  • → hosted by Sam Charrington person
    0.55
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: Sam Charrington
  • → discusses Science concept
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Science
  • → discusses Technology company
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Technology
  • → discusses News concept
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: News
  • → discusses Tech News concept
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Tech News
  • → hosted by TWIML company
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: TWIML

Entities found in this episode

concepts 5

  • mentioned Science concept
    0.50
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Science
  • mentioned Tech News concept
    0.50
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Tech News
  • discusses Science concept
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Science
  • discusses News concept
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: News
  • discusses Tech News concept
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Tech News

companys 4

  • mentioned TWIML company
    0.70
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: TWIML
  • mentioned Technology company
    0.50
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Technology
  • discusses Technology company
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed category: Technology
  • hosted by TWIML company
    0.40
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: TWIML

persons 3

  • mentioned Aakanksha Chowdhery person
    0.72
    evidence rules-v4
    Rethinking Pre-Training for Agentic AI with Aakanksha Chowdhery - #759
  • mentioned Sam Charrington person
    0.70
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: Sam Charrington
  • hosted by Sam Charrington person
    0.55
    evidence rules-v4
    Feed author/publisher: Sam Charrington

podcasts 1

Episode description as stored
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.