This Week in AI with Christina Stathopoulos and Miguel Fierro

Recommendation systems quietly drive some of the most consequential numbers in tech—35% of Amazon's revenue, 75% of what Netflix surfaces, the entire logic of TikTok's feed. But as ex-Microsoft engineer and RecoMind founder Miguel Fierro explained to host Christina Stathopoulos on this week’s episode, most companies are nowhere near the state of the art, and the gap is widening. Miguel broke down the four trends separating leaders from laggards: sequential modeling that treats user behavior like next-token prediction, the convergence of search and retrieval into a single personalized system, the emergence of foundation models for recommendations (Netflix is the only shop known to have one), and the difference between a real sales agent and the conversational agents most companies employ today. As always Christina opened with a rapid-fire news round, covering Anthropic's valuation surge and quiet S-1 filing, recent pleas for responsible AI, Google I/O's multimodality push, and why enterprises are abandoning token leaderboards in favor of what some are calling valuemaxxing. Follow O'Reilly on: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oreilly/ Facebook: http://facebook.com/OReilly Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oreillymedia BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/oreilly.bsky.social TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@oreillymedia