Rethinking Pre-Training for Agentic AI [Aakanksha Chowdhery] - 759
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. 🗒️ For the full list of resources for this episode, visit the show notes page: https://twimlai.com/go/759. 🔔 Subscribe to our channel for more great content just like this: https://youtube.com/twimlai?sub_confirmation=1 🗣️ CONNECT WITH US! =============================== Subscribe to the TWIML AI Podcast: https://twimlai.com/podcast/twimlai/ Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/twimlai Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/twimlai/ Join our Slack Community: https://twimlai.com/community/ Subscribe to our newsletter: https://twimlai.com/newsletter/ Want to get in touch? Send us a message: https://twimlai.com/contact/ 📖 CHAPTERS =============================== 00:00 - Introduction 02:26 - Reflection 04:54 - Limitations of post-training for building agents 07:31 - Rethinking pre-training in agents 10:51 - Scaling 11:27 - Evolving attention mechanisms for agentic capabilities 12:39 - Memory as a tool 14:13 - Loss objectives and training data 15:50 - Fine-tuning loss in agent performance 19:37 - Training data 21:29 - Augmenting dominant training data source 24:11 - Overcoming challenges in training on synthetic data 25:47 - Benchmarks 30:44 - Scaling laws in large models versus small models 33:20 - Long-form versus short-form reasoning 37:57 - Agent’s ability to recover from failure 40:15 - Hallucinations and failure recovery 43:53 - Tool use in agents 46:38 - Coding agents 48:37 - How researchers can contribute to agentic AI 🔗 LINKS & RESOURCES =============================== Reflection AI - https://reflection.ai/ Reflection AI, an A.I. Model Start-Up, Raises $2 Billion - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/09/business/dealbook/reflection-ai-2-billion-funding.html 📸 Camera: https://amzn.to/3TQ3zsg 🎙️Microphone: https://amzn.to/3t5zXeV 🚦Lights: https://amzn.to/3TQlX49 🎛️ Audio Interface: https://amzn.to/3TVFAIq 🎚️ Stream Deck: https://amzn.to/3zzm7F5