Technical Talks

Building SOTA Search: It's Ranking All the Way Down
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- Lightning Talks
Effective Ranking consists of multi-dimensional functions that encode the full topology of a corpus and its query stream. Relevance is just one axis—others include trustworthiness, recency, diversity, personalization, and even negative constraints like safety or policy override. But how can we collect these various signals and how can we merge them all together at runtime? This talk will walk through what such an architecture looks like (inspired by decades of work on Google Search) and how to build it out in practice. It also covers how increasingly, many emerging AI challenges—prompt optimization, ensemble selection, synthetic data generation, reward modeling—are ultimately Search problems in disguise as they all consist of generating candidates, scoring them across multiple axes, and selecting the optimal ones. Recognizing this reframing allows us to bring the tools and rigor of information retrieval to problems far beyond traditional search.

Co-Founder & CEO
David Karam
Pi Labs
David Karam is the CEO & Co-founder of Pi Labs, Inc., where he develops machine learning, search, and data science toolkits that help companies build sophisticated AI applications. Previously, he served as Director of Product Management at Google, leading AI and Search platforms across multiple product areas. With expertise in Large Language Models, retrieval augmentation, and information retrieval, David bridges the gap between cutting-edge research and practical applications. He holds a Master's in Computational Sciences from the Technical University of Munich.
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