Michel Brok 🎯

Tracking Architects

Tracking Architects empowers eCommerce and funnel website owners to maximize revenue from their marketing efforts through advanced server-side conversion tracking and data analytics.

Eigenaar

Team6

Team6 helps FMCG and retail businesses to improve business performance with data. Our focus is to make strategies work by bringing ways of working, data and technology together.

Founder

A.S. Watson Group

Helping the marketing team to use data to 1) make better decisions in target audiences, offerings and content and 2) increase relevancy and therefore increase customer lifetime value. 

Results:

- Created and implemented the CRM Data Strategy
- Implemented cross-functional CRM data team
- Implemented the CRM data-driven process
- Implemented algorithms for optimizing promos

Data Lead CRM a.i.

Danone

Leading 2nd Digital Transformation wave of the Dutch CBU for all Danone brands (dairy, plant based, medical & baby). Build the data foundation to take better decisions and actions to drive business value for the CBU.  

* Developed the data strategy and roadmap together with senior management
* Build the cross-functional data team overseeing data analytics, data science, architecture and platform
* Managed the local data platform and architecture (Azure) implementation
* Managed the integration of all digital channels in Azure data lake
* Delivered 3 use cases: customer 360 together with CDP, Marketing Mix Modeling & MROI (causal attribution)

Head of Data

Leading the Digital Transformation for the Benelux BU with focus on improved customer experience. 

* Building the digital environment and BU digital capabilities
* Transforming marketing strategy and operating model
* Shape and build the marketing technology stack, integrate within marketing operations
* Delivering and activation of digital products & services
* Leading design, experience, digital product & engineering teams

Head of Digital

E.ON

Responsible for e-commerce and digital marketing for the residential, SME market and large enterprises.

* Development and implementation of the digital transformation roadmap for the Benelux cluster
* Development and execution of the digital marketing & e-commerce strategy to drive brand awareness, customer acquisition, retention and NPS 
* Marketing technology: implementation of the Adobe CMS and migration existing digital platform, implementation of the customer self-service portal and connection between digital platform and SAP
* Management and optimization of traffic channels  SEA, SEO, affiliates, retargeting campaigns, display advertising and online partners
* Management and optimization of webconversion with A/B testing, data analytics and UX-optimization
* Implementation of the E.ON self service portal to increase self service and drive NPS and decrease costs
* Implemented Lean wow and performance driven mindset
* Managing and coaching multi-disciplinary online team (4 fte)
* Operational excellence day-2-day optimization working method

Team Manager Online Marketing

Essent

Responsible for online sales and lead generation for residential and SME market.

	Defined and implemented annual online sales plan, defined targets, budgets and weekly sales forecast
	Accelerated performance based sales & lead generation by optimize traffic sources (display advertising, SEA, SEO, affiliates) and CRO for Essent.nl. Managed referral and price comparison websites
	Implemented marketing campaigns ATL/BTL in online channels in collaboration with marketing and sales department 
	P&L responsible for digital sales

Digital Marketing Manager

Tribal

Helping clients driving business growth with developing and executing online marketing strategy focussed on increasing website traffic and conversion optimization.   

	Development and implementation of new online advertising campaigns to increase numbers of leads and / or sales
	Managed and optimized existing SEA and SEO campaigns
	Aligned projects with usability and web analytics experts 
	Evaluated campaigns by analysis with Google Analytics
	Reporting to customers and team lead

Online Marketing Consultant

Lensvelt Medical

Improving company awareness and developing customer service proposition to support customer acquisition and relationships.


	Development and implementation operational marketing plan
	Coordinated and implemented marketing activities such as product / price promotions, trade fairs, managed and implemented online advertising campaigns, website optimization and e-mail marketing
	development of services products and related concepts and responsible for activation via website, sales channel and fairs

Marketing Specialist

Marketing Automation & Data Expert | Helping retail & CPG to drive customer engagement at scale.

Business & Agency Owners – Listen Up:

The #1 reason your ad campaigns hit a wall?

INACCURATE DATA.

It’s the frustration holding back ambitious advertisers like you — those who are ready to scale but can’t break through.

At this stage, you’re trying to lower ad costs and increase value. But if the data you rely on is off, making the right decisions becomes nearly impossible.

Here’s the real issue:

Inaccurate data doesn’t just impact your decisions — it also sabotages the advertising algorithm.

The better your data, the better the algorithm can identify your best customers.

But getting accurate data and conversion tracking right is easier said than done.

That’s where the Data-Driven Scaling Formula comes in — putting accurate conversion tracking at the core of your strategy.

The Data-Driven Scaling Formula empowers ambitious business owners like you to scale faster by leveraging the right data at the right time.

The formula is made up of three key parts:

	1.	Enhanced Performance Tracking: Best-in-class server-side tracking combined with smart data usage throughout the entire customer journey. This ensures both you and the advertising algorithm are making better decisions and taking smarter actions.

	2.	Precision Algorithm Training: Fueling your advertising algorithm with high-quality data to significantly improve targeting. Now, you’re only spending money on customers who bring real value.

	3.	Transform Data into Growth: Gain control over your business’s growth by understanding what works — and what doesn’t — in both marketing and sales.

Curious about how we’ve helped others scale smarter?

Send me a DM, and let’s chat!

-----

Hi, I’m Michel – The Conversion Tracking Guy.

With over 18 years in Digital Marketing, I’ve witnessed firsthand how advertising platforms and marketing systems are becoming increasingly data-dependent. Yet, proper conversion tracking and data architecture are often overlooked because they seem complex or costly.

I’ve helped over 250 business owners unlock the full potential of their marketing with server-side tracking and analytics. In almost every case, the results were clear: a significant boost in performance.

Let’s talk about how accurate data can transform your business.

Co-Founder

AldrichX is a data-driven marketing agency that helps 6+ figure fashion eCommerce brands to grow their business whilst they can keep focussing on building their brands.

Ecom subscription sellers: 

Stop wasting your Meta Ads budget on returning customers.

Such an easy fix, yet almost nobody does it.

Every major Ecom platform already gives you the parameter you need, you just have to plug it into your tracking setup.

Once you tell Meta who’s new vs returning, everything changes:

- Cleaner attribution
- Less wasted spend
- Better audience signals

More budget going to actual new customers

Meta can’t optimize for what you don’t tell it, give it the right data, and it will find the right people.

Want help setting it up? 

You know where to find me ;)

Michel Brok

I train your ad algorithms to find your best buyers. Accurate conversion tracking + smarter buying signals = higher ROAS.

You’re launching the Black Friday campaign with sweaty palms…
…and your developer just deleted the tracking code 😭

Always check  tracking first before launching  new campaigns:

1. For Meta, use the Meta Pixel helper tool
2. Google Ads, check the Google Tag Assistent

Still not sure if everything is working?

DM me😀

Shopify Analytics sucks.
Tracking breaks.
And “Direct” suddenly looks like your best-performing channel.

But here’s the thing, it’s not Shopify’s fault, it’s Consent Mode.

When a user doesn’t accept cookies, Shopify simply stops tracking.

No pageviews.
No addtocarts.
No purchases.
No channel.

Which means your data becomes… well, kind of useless.

Another place where tracking seems broken 🤯

So what are your options?

1️⃣ GA4 server-side setup with Consent Mode
2️⃣ Triple Whale

Both have their pros and cons, ut they’ll give you a much clearer picture of what’s really happening, even when users don’t consent.

What are you using right now to close this gap?

Helping agencies deliver better client results — with accurate tracking, stronger algorithm signals, and actionable ad dashboards

People don’t want to spend a dime on conversion tracking.
But they’re happy to invest in “algorithm training.”

Most advertisers still think tracking is just a fix.

It’s not, it’s the foundation for growth.

Better tracking doesn’t just lead to better decisions....
it sends better signals to the algorithm about who buys and who doesn’t.

Imagine being able to tell Meta or Google exactly who to target, that’s what accurate tracking really does.

Curious how accurate your tracking really is.
You know where to find me. 😉

Proud that TrackingArchitects is one of Stape’s Top Partners.
And it’s more than just a badge.

Because my clients now know:

> I’ve done more than enough tracking implementations to handle any setup
> They can rely on an extra pair of expert eyes when accuracy matters most
> I follow a structured process to deliver the highest quality

It’s always great to be recognized, 
but even better when it helps my clients scale with confidence.

How’s your tracking going? 👀

70% of your Google Ads leads are spam.
Real problem? You keep feeding Google… spam data.

So Google thinks those fake leads are exactly what you want, it finds you more of them.

Meanwhile, the good leads?
Google has no idea what they look like.

Here’s the fix:

- Mark qualified leads in your CRM
- Setup offline conversion tracking 
- Activate Enhanced Conversions
- Gather data in Google Ads 

Make the switch when everything looks good and feed Google with signals from high quality leads. 

Better signals = better leads

Still getting mad when I see this. 

You're spending 100k monthly on Ads and using a free tracking plugin 🤯 

Audited an e-commerce brand this week.
Meta was their ONLY growth channel.
Big budget. Big ambitions.

But they were only sending 60-70% of their data back to Meta.

Why?

The Facebook app in Shopify was not tracking all data. 

And then they wondered why:

> ROAS was unstable
> Scaling didn’t work
> Meta was “inconsistent”

The algorithm can’t optimize on blind spots (and it's getting worse).

So we fixed it:

+ Implemented a real data layer
+ Added server-side tracking
+ Passed email, phone, location
+ Captured click IDs

Result? 20-30% more conversions. Instantly.

DON’T save on tracking please 🙏

Meta and Google Ads numbers seem off… and you’ve already tried everything:

- Free plugins
- Agency experts
- YouTube tutorials
- Cheap freelancers
- In-house developers
- A fresh Google Tag Manager setup

But still, after 6 months you’re staring at numbers that make zero sense whilst your competitor absolutely crushing it.

Let's end this frustration once and for all.

Hire a tracking expert or agency, ask them:

1. How many times the've done the setup you need
2. How they measure accuracy and how to optimize for
3. If they have a 'second-pair-of-eyes' mechanism
4. What their monitoring process is

Time to stop doubting and start scaling with confidence.

No BS AI/ML Content | ML Engineer with a Plot Twist 🥷30M+ Views 📝

Done-for you Audience Building & Content Writing for AI/ML Founders that frees up 100% of your time, so you can focus entirely on building your company  
  
Is your work too important to ignore? 💌 https://tally.so/r/wk69VJ  (or shoot me a DM) 👉
  
It's 2025 and we're at the peak of the attention economy  
  
Where Authenticity is king, visibility is currency and people wanna buy from people

Not faceless dehumanized brands  
  
So, they told you LinkedIn was "free marketing" you slapped some posts and called it strategy  
  
You've poured hours crafting the 'perfect' post, only to watch it sink without a trace..  
  
Then it dawned on you, your technical brilliance isn't enough to draw a crowd  
  
Hell, maybe you've even tried mimicking influencers, scrambling for any traction..  
  
Your post got 500 f*cking views... from your friends...  
  
Being ignored is soul-crushing  
  
It's not your fault tough  
  
When you started your company, you didn't sign-up for a degree in an Audience Building, Copywriting and LinkedIn strategy 

And here you are, sacrificing yet another late night for your vision  

"Am I just sabotaging my efforts?"  
  
"Is my life-work meaningless?"  
  
Getting traction feels impossible  
  
You hoped hiring some marketer would save your weekends but..  
  
Tech is a code they can't crack  
  
They can only churn out the lame, soul-sucking crap we all ignore on sight  
  
With armies of founders flooding feeds, your voice dissolves into meaningless white noise  
  
But in the process, you've wasted more of your precious time explaining 101 tech concept and rewriting low-quality drafts 

Done being ignored?  
  
Let's make the world listen 
  
I can help you with:  

✒️ No BS AI/ML Content  
⭐ LinkedIn Profile Revamp
🎯 Website Copy Optimization  

I've done it before:

↳ For founders backed by YC, a16z, Sequoia, and Techstars
↳ For bootstrappers in LLMs, ML, Vector DBs, Data Analytics, and Engineering
↳ For AI and Machine Learning leaders at Google, Microsoft, Airbnb, and YouTube

If they could rise above the noise, so can you

Yeah, even if you're an introvert with a "boring" niche

Still with me?  
  
Amazing—You're amazing!  
  
Cheers,  
Paolo

My booking link: 💌 https://tally.so/r/wLW0oz (or shoot me a DM) 👉

Paolo Perrone

NVIDIA just made their best AI models free.

99% of developers have no idea.

While you burn cash on OpenAI credits...
NVIDIA open-sourced Nemotron.
Their entire agentic AI family 🤯

Free Models That Actually Ship:
• Nano: Runs on your laptop
• Super: Single GPU beast
• Ultra: Multi-GPU monster

What They Do:
→ Graduate-level reasoning
→ Math without hallucinations
→ Code that compiles
→ Visual reasoning that works
→ Tool calling. No loops.

The genius part:

They published EVERYTHING.
Models. Datasets. Techniques.
Actually open source.

Game Changers:
• 6x faster on new hardware
• No API limits
• Runs on a Raspberry Pi
• Commercialize it. No strings.

The uncomfortable truth:

You're waiting for GPT-5.
Smart teams ship with Nemotron.

Who's using it:
- Accenture
- CrowdStrike  
- ServiceNow
- Deloitte

The kicker:

Download from Hugging Face. Now.
Deploy tomorrow.
Zero license fees.

Forever.

They built enterprise NIM too.
(That costs money. Models don't.)

Still paying for API credits? 

♻️ Repost before OpenAI charges per thought

No BS AI/ML Content | ML Engineer with a Plot Twist 🥷50M+ Views 📝

I just finished Google's biggest AI Agents course ever.

250+ pages of production insights. 100% free.

Here's everything they released:

DAY 1️⃣ INTRODUCTION TO AI AGENTS (50 pages)

Most agent demos fail in production.
This covers the 5 levels of AI agents, from basic reasoning to self-evolving systems, plus security and architecture patterns that scale.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/gN9JaXgR

DAY 2️⃣ AGENT TOOLS AND MCP (50 pages)

MCP servers can add new tools without your approval.
Your poetry bot suddenly gains purchasing power overnight.
This breaks down tool design, the Model Context Protocol, and hidden security risks.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/gRWDSjBr

DAY 3️⃣ CONTEXT ENGINEERING AND MEMORY (70 pages)

Agents with zero long-term memory treat every session like meeting you for the first time.
Learn how to build memory systems that actively curate context, not just save conversations.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/gbgWJ4kH

DAY 4️⃣ AGENT QUALITY (50 pages)

Traditional QA doesn't work for agents. You can't unit test judgment.
This covers the 4 pillars of agent quality (effectiveness, efficiency, robustness, safety) and how to evaluate reasoning.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/g6DHcZDx

DAY 5️⃣ PROTOTYPE TO PRODUCTION (40 pages)

Building an agent takes 2 weeks.
Trusting it in production takes 6 months.
Learn evaluation gates, circuit breakers, and evolution loops that close the gap.
🔗 https://lnkd.in/gYTakhAK

Huge props to Antonio Gulli and Shubham Saboo for making this happen, and make it 100% free

250+ pages. Zero cost. All production-focused.

♻️ Repost to save a fellow AI engineer 6 months of trial and error

4 math concepts you need to understand LLMs in 10 minutes.

No PhD required.

I spent 6 months confused by AI papers.
Then I found this breakdown by Giles Thomas.
Everything clicked.

Here's the cheat sheet:

1️⃣ Vectors = Direction + Distance in Space

Think GPS coordinates, but in 50,000 dimensions.
Each position represents a different meaning.
"Cat" lives near "dog" in this space.
"Airplane" lives far away.

That's it. That's embeddings.

2️⃣ Matrices = Space Transformers

Remember rotating shapes in geometry class?
Same thing, but with meaning.

A matrix takes your 50,257-dimensional vocab
Projects it down to 768 dimensions
Then back up again.

It's compression without losing the important stuff.

3️⃣ Dot Product = Similarity Score

Multiply matching positions. Add them up.
Big number = similar vectors.
Small number = different vectors.

This is how LLMs know "king - man + woman = queen"

4️⃣ Neural Network Layers = Just Matrix Math

Remove the activation function and what's left?
Matrix multiplication.
A projection from one space to another.

Add activation back = now it can learn patterns.

The GPT-2 Example That Makes It Real:

Input: "The cat sat on the"
1. Convert each word to a one-hot vector (50,257 dimensions)
2. Project down to embeddings (768 dimensions)  
3. Let attention mechanism figure out relationships
4. Project back up to vocab space
5. Pick highest probability: "mat"

That's literally how ChatGPT works.
Just bigger.

Why This Matters:

Everyone's scared of AI math.
But it's high school algebra in a trench coat.

Once you see through the intimidation,
you can actually build stuff.

♻️ Repost to demystify AI for someone else

Sebastian Raschka, PhD just exposed the biggest secret in AI.

After dissecting 9 flagship LLMs, he found something nobody wants to admit:

We haven't invented a new architecture in 7 years.

The evidence is damning:
• DeepSeek V3: 671B parameters, still a transformer
• Kimi K2: 1 TRILLION parameters, still a transformer
• GPT-OSS: OpenAI's latest, still a transformer
• Llama 4: Meta's flagship, still a transformer

Every "breakthrough" model?
Same skeleton. Different makeup.

Here's what's actually happening:

DeepSeek V3/R1: Compressed attention (MLA) + expert routing (MoE)
Gemma 3: Sliding windows to fake longer context
SmolLM3: Removed position embeddings entirely (!)
Kimi K2: Just made DeepSeek bigger

The brutal reality:

• No new architectures since "Attention is All You Need" (2017)
• Every innovation = efficiency hack
• We're polishing, not inventing

671 billion parameters.
1 trillion parameters.
Same. Damn. Architecture.

While everyone's chasing parameter counts, Sebastian mapped the actual mutations:
• MoE: Use 37B of your 671B parameters
• Sliding attention: Pretend you have infinite context
• MLA: Compress your KV cache and pray

This isn't innovation.
It's optimization theater.

The most honest technical analysis you'll read this year.

Read it. Then ask yourself:
If we can't innovate past transformers, what happens when we hit the parameter wall?

♻️ Repost if you appreciate actual technical depth over hype

The best AI engineers master PyTorch. The rest just import it.

Here's how to join the first group:

1️⃣ Master the Foundation
🔸 NumPy arrays → PyTorch tensors: https://lnkd.in/grmapDsK
🔸 Tensor operations that matter: https://lnkd.in/gjk3ErXu

2️⃣ Learn PyTorch Basics (Skip the Fluff)
🔸 60-minute blitz (actually 60 mins): https://lnkd.in/gU86ZGqt
🔸 What torch.nn really does: https://lnkd.in/gEmCGg6R
🔸 Daniel Bourke's 1-day crash course: https://lnkd.in/gCdBG_jc

3️⃣ Understand Autograd (The Magic Behind It All)
🔸 Karpathy's micrograd repo: https://lnkd.in/g_hTUmji
🔸 Karpathy's micrograd video: https://lnkd.in/gxM7h9E9
🔸 See gradients flow in real-time: https://lnkd.in/gKdwgAzz

4️⃣ Build Real Networks
🔸 Aladdin's playlist (underrated gem): https://lnkd.in/gP3k_rNx
🔸 NLP from scratch (no shortcuts): https://lnkd.in/g77inpPa
🔸 Adversarial examples (break things): https://lnkd.in/gFDzkep8

5️⃣ Production PyTorch (Where 90% Fail)
🔸 Distributed training without tears: https://lnkd.in/gdPZDnxB
🔸 Profile before you scale: https://lnkd.in/gfs7JQ6R
🔸 Mixed precision (2x speedup): https://lnkd.in/gikyETYK
🔸 Performance tuning secrets: https://lnkd.in/g8BE7J28

The uncomfortable truth:

Most "PyTorch experts" can't debug a CUDA out-of-memory error.
They copy tutorials. They call high-level APIs.

But when production breaks? Crickets.

Start with micrograd. Build intuition.
Then scale up. One tensor at a time.

What PyTorch concept finally clicked for you?

♻️ Repost to help someone skip the 3am debugging sessions

The AI bubble is 75% of US GDP growth.

Read that again.

I spent the weekend analyzing Deutsche Bank's latest report.
What I found made me cancel my AI startup plans.

The dot-com bubble was 15.6% of GDP when it popped.
AI is already 5x bigger. And growing.

Here's the brutal reality nobody wants to admit:

1️⃣ Every AI Company Is Bleeding Cash
• OpenAI: Losing money on every $200/month subscription
• Break-even price: $2,000/month (10x current)
• 2026 projected loss: $14 billion
• 2029 projected loss: "Hundreds of billions"

2️⃣ AI Infrastructure Is a Money Pit
Data centers need $2 trillion annual revenue to break even.
Actual AI industry revenue: $390 billion.
That's a $1.6 trillion gap. Every. Single. Year.

3️⃣ AI Adoption Is Dead in the Water
• 95% of AI pilots fail (MIT study)
• AI coding tools make devs SLOWER (METR report)
• 77% of workers say AI increased their workload
• Adoption rates missed predictions 2 years running

The uncomfortable truth:

This isn't 1999. When the dot-com bubble popped, e-commerce was real.
It bounced back.

AI profitability is mathematically impossible.
The efficient compute frontier guarantees it.
Floridi's Conjecture proves agentic AI can't exist.

When this pops, there's no bouncing back.

What's keeping it alive? Your 401k.
70% of US venture capital is flowing into AI.
Half the S&P 500's growth is just tech companies building data centers.

Remove AI spending and US growth is already at zero.
We're IN the recession. AI is just hiding it.

♻️ Repost before your retirement fund discovers math

AI agent bootcamps charge $2,000 for this. You're getting it for free.

1️⃣ Design (6+ hours)
→ Langflow docs: docs.langflow.org
→ Travel planning agent template: https://lnkd.in/gmbWX5Mg
→ Agentic design patterns by Andrew Ng: 

2️⃣ Build (22+ hours)
→ LangGraph course: https://lnkd.in/g7raxjpC
→ LangSmith (modules 1-3): smith.langchain.com
→ Evaluation: https://lnkd.in/ghE-8EwA
→ Prompt engineering: 4 Methods of Prompt Engineering

3️⃣ Deploy (35+ hours)
→ LangChain Academy (modules 1-6): academy.langchain.com
→ MLOps specialization: https://lnkd.in/gmeb53UP
→ System design fundamentals: YouTube playlist
→ Distilabel for synthetic data: https://lnkd.in/gd_jJaJE

63 hours. $0.
The $2,000 bootcamp teaches the same stack with better marketing.

💾 Save this. It's the curriculum.
♻️ Repost to save someone $2,000.

Wanna build AI agents? Stop watching random tutorials.

Here's the actual learning path:

1️⃣ Design (6+ hours)
→ Langflow intro: langflow.org
→ Multi-agent workflow patterns
→ Build: Travel planning multi-agent system

2️⃣ Build (22+ hours)
→ LangGraph course: https://lnkd.in/g7raxjpC
→ LangSmith for tracing: smith.langchain.com
→ Evaluation metrics and prompt engineering

3️⃣ Deploy (35+ hours)
→ LangChain Academy: academy.langchain.com
→ MLOps fundamentals
→ LangGraph Cloud deployment

Total: 63 hours. If you follow the order.
6 months if you don't.

💾 Save this.  Start at Phase 1.
♻️ Repost if you've ever jumped straight to deployment and regretted it.

Your AI agent has dementia. LangChain just dropped the cure: 

DeepAgents CLI with actual persistent memory.

This project solves the most infuriating problem in AI development, agents that forget everything the moment you close your terminal. 

It gives your AI assistant an actual memory that persists across sessions. 

Key Features:

✅ True persistent memory
Your agent writes markdown notes to ~/.deepagents/memories/ and reads them before every response. Like a human taking notes.

✅ File operations that work: 
Read, write, and edit files in your project with diff previews and human approval. No more "I can't access your filesystem."

✅ Shell command execution
Run tests, install packages, deploy code - all with your permission. Because we're not insane.

✅ Multi-agent personalities
Create specialized agents (backend-dev, frontend-wizard, devops-guru) each with their own memory and expertise.

Getting started is stupidly simple. 
Just install and run: pip install deepagents-cli && deepagents

Harrison said they built this because copy-pasting context 47 times a day is insanity (we agree).

Check out the code, see the full toolset, and contribute on GitHub!

♻️ Repost if you're done being your AI's memory bank

90,000 AI papers published on Arxiv.

Ilya Sutskever says you only need 27 to understand 90% of what matters.

I just went through his list. Here's what shocked me:

What's NOT on the list:
❌ No RAG papers (everyone's obsessed with retrieval)
❌ No prompt engineering papers (despite the hype)
❌ No LangChain or agent frameworks
❌ Nothing about fine-tuning optimization
❌ Zero papers on "emergent abilities"

What IS on the list:
✅ "Attention is All You Need" (obviously)
✅ "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs" (2015, still matters)
✅ "Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models" (this is the one)
✅ "Kolmogorov Complexity and Algorithmic Randomness" (wait, what?)

The pattern I noticed:

1️⃣ Ilya's not telling you to read papers about using AI.
He's telling you to read papers about how intelligence works.
Three categories dominate his list:
Fundamentals (the architecture breakthroughs)
Attention mechanisms
Residual connections
LSTMs and sequence modeling

2️⃣ Scaling (why bigger actually works)
Scaling laws
Pipeline parallelism
Training dynamics

3️⃣ Compression (the theory underneath)
Minimum description length
Kolmogorov complexity
Information theory

Here's the controversial take:
If you're only reading papers from 2023-2024, you're studying tactics.

Ilya's list is strategy:

"Attention is All You Need" is from 2017.
"Understanding LSTM Networks" is from 2015.
"Deep Residual Learning" is from 2015.
The foundations haven't changed.
We're just scaling them.

The most surprising paper on the list:

"The First Law of Complexodynamics"
It's not even about neural networks.
It's about how complex systems evolve.

This is what separates engineers who use AI from engineers who understand AI.

If you only read 5:

1) Attention is All You Need (transformers)
2) Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (why GPT works)
3) Understanding LSTM Networks (sequence modeling)
4) Deep Residual Learning (why deep networks train)
5) Kolmogorov Complexity (the theory of intelligence)

♻️ Repost to save someone from FOMO-reading 90,000 papers

There's a special hell in AI/ML engineering.

It hits around Year 2.
I call it the "valley of almost useful."

You're past "Hello World" tutorials.
Not good enough for real jobs.
Stuck building demos nobody uses.

The daily torture:

Morning: "Today I'll implement that paper"
Noon: Your embeddings are somehow 7-dimensional
Evening: Stack Overflow has zero answers
Night: "Maybe I should go back to web dev"

The worst part?

You know just enough to be dangerous.
Just not enough to be valuable.

🔥 The 3 Levels of "Almost Useful"

Level 1: The Overengineering Phase
Every problem needs a neural network.
CSV parsing? Better use GPT-4.
Your hello world has 17 dependencies.

Level 2: The Imposter Syndrome Pit
Everyone else seems to ship AI products daily.
Your Twitter feed is pure pain.
"Just deployed my 5th AI startup this week!"
Meanwhile, you can't get embeddings to work.

Level 3: The Clarity Moment
You realize 90% of "AI Engineers" are just prompt engineers.
Most production AI is boring Python scripts.
The magic isn't in the model - it's in the problem.

Here's what got me through the valley:

1️⃣ Ship broken things
My first production model had 67% accuracy.
Still saved the company $200K/year.
Perfect is the enemy of deployed.

2️⃣ Join a startup, not FAANG
Startups let you touch everything.
Break things. Learn fast. Ship faster.
Big tech will teach you one tiny slice.

3️⃣ Build boring solutions
Stop chasing cutting-edge.
Most businesses need basic classification.
Not your 12-layer transformer architecture.

4️⃣ Document everything
Future you will thank present you.
Especially when debugging at 3 AM.
"Why did I set embedding_dim=7?"

5️⃣ Find your valley friends
The loneliest part is thinking you're alone.
You're not. We all went through this.
Some of us just hide it better.

The uncomfortable truth:

The valley of almost useful is necessary.
It's where you learn that AI isn't magic.
It's engineering.

And engineering is mostly debugging.
And crying.
But mostly debugging.

Still in the valley?
Good. That's where real engineers are made.

Not in bootcamps.
Not in courses.
In the trenches, shipping broken code that somehow works.

Welcome to the club.

P.S. That senior engineer who seems to know everything? They googled it 5 minutes before the meeting. We're all just better at pretending now.

♻️ Repost to help someone realize they're not alone in the valley

Just watched an ML engineer at a fintech startup build a production fraud detection model in 2 hours.

From raw data to deployed.
No feature engineering. No pipeline code.
She just typed what she needed in plain English.

I was skeptical. Had to see it myself.

She opened Plexe, typed "fraud detection for card transactions" and pointed it at their Postgres db.
That's it.

2 hours later: deployed model with 0.89 AUC on 3M transactions.
Here's what actually happens: 

1️⃣ Describe your problem in plain English
"Product embedding model for search"
"Customer lifetime value predictor"
"Fraud detection system"
No templates. No configuration files.

2️⃣ Point it at your data
Postgres, Snowflake, S3, whatever you're using
It analyzes your schema automatically
No manual feature mapping

3️⃣ It handles what AutoML skips
• Engineers features from raw data (AutoML just uses columns as-is)
• Generates comprehensive evaluation reports with failure analysis
• Shows exactly where and why your model breaks
• Gives prioritized improvement recommendations
• Deploys with monitoring

The critical difference:
❌ AutoML: "Here's a model with 0.87 accuracy. Good luck."
✅ Plexe: "Here's why it works on these patterns, why it fails on those edge cases, and the three changes that will improve it most."

This is what changes:
You stop being a data plumber.
You start being a problem solver again.

Best part? 

Open-source core (Apache 2.0): https://lnkd.in/gEx42Q9b
Try it with $20 free credits: https://console.plexe.ai
Use code: LAUNCHDAY20

What ML model have you been putting off because wrestling with pandas makes you want to scream?

♻️ Repost to save someone 3 months of pipeline work

I pushed every agent framework until it broke. Most broke fast.

CrewAI vs LangGraph vs Agno vs PydanticAI vs Atomic Agents...
Plus SmolAgents, Mastra, and AutoGen.

The brutal truth:

Most devs hate the popular ones.

CrewAI and AutoGen? "Tricky to debug"
LangGraph? "Overly complicated abstractions"
SmolAgents' CodeAgent? "Cool idea, doesn't always work"

What actually matters:

🎯 Control vs Agency
Some frameworks let LLMs run wild (AutoGen)
Others keep them on a tight leash (Atomic Agents)
Guess which ones actually ship to production?

🛠️ Abstraction Level
High abstraction = Quick start, debugging nightmare
Low abstraction = More code, but you know what broke
Pick your poison.

💀 The Learning Curve
LangGraph: Steep as hell, but scales
CrewAI: Easy start, hits a wall
PydanticAI: Write everything yourself

The uncomfortable truth:
"AI agent frameworks are some of the worst forms of abstraction"

But here's what actually works:
• Agno for developer experience
• LangGraph for multi-agent at scale
• PydanticAI when you need control
• CrewAI if you're just prototyping

Half these frameworks won't exist in 2 years.
The winners? Whoever makes debugging possible.

Saved you 2 weeks of testing. You're welcome.
♻️ Repost if you've been burned by agent framework promises

a16z just published their AI coding report.

The math blew my mind:

AI coding costs $10k/year per developer.
But creates $100k+ in value.
That's $3 trillion in new GDP.

The entire economy of France. From a few Silicon Valley startups.

Here's what nobody's talking about:

Software development just shifted from pure people cost to people + compute cost.

Your junior developer in Bangalore?
Now competing with Claude at $10k/year.

The uncomfortable truth:

We're watching the end of cost-based outsourcing.

Not because AI replaces developers.
But because location doesn't matter when compute costs dominate.

I tested the numbers myself:

• 100k context window filled
• Claude Opus 4.1 reasoning mode
• 10k output tokens
• 3 queries/hour, 7 hours/day

= $10,500 annually

That's more than many offshore developers.

But here's the kicker:

The companies winning aren't cutting developers.
They're hiring MORE.

Why?

Because when productivity doubles, the math changes:
• 1 developer + AI = 2x output
• Cost per feature drops 50%
• Suddenly every project has positive ROI

The report shows clear winners already:

Cursor: $500M ARR in 15 months
Windsurf: $2.4B Google acquisition
Claude Code: Started a war with its own distribution channel

The pattern is obvious:

Lower barriers → More projects → More complexity → More developers needed

AWS didn't kill sysadmins.
WordPress didn't kill web developers.
AI won't kill software engineers.

It just changes what they do.

University CS programs?
Already obsolete.

Teaching algorithms when AI writes them faster?
Teaching syntax when AI handles implementation?
Teaching debugging when AI prevents most bugs?

That's like teaching calligraphy in the age of keyboards.

The real skill now:

Knowing when the AI is hallucinating.
Dragging it out of architectural holes.
Translating business needs into prompts.

The $3 trillion opportunity isn't in replacing developers.

It's in making every developer 10x more valuable.

While universities update their curriculums,
smart developers are already adapting.

Are you?

♻️ Repost if you think CS education needs a complete overhaul

Plexe is a Python library that turns "I need to predict customer churn" into a working ML model.

No feature engineering. No pipeline code. Just natural language intent and your data.

It integrates with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ray, making it easier to build sentiment analysis, fraud detection, and forecasting models in minutes instead of weeks.

Plexe doesn't just build the model - it generates a thorough evaluation report showing exactly where and why it performs well (or doesn't).

A powerful tool for anyone working at the intersection of product development and machine learning.

♻️ Repost if you've ever deployed a model and just hoped it worked.

🎁 Launch special: Get $20 free credits → https://console.plexe.ai
Code: LAUNCHDAY20

The most underrated AI agents video on YouTube has 155K views.

It should have 15 millions.

Dexter breaks down why coding agents actually fail in production.
Not theory. What broke when they shipped real agent systems to real software teams.

The line that changed how I think about agents:
"Everything is context engineering."

He shows:

→ Why naive back-and-forth prompting doesn't scale (and what does)
→ Spec-first development that keeps agents on track
→ Context compaction strategies for long-running workflows
→ How subagents handle complexity without exploding

No demo theater. Just hard-won lessons from production.

If you're building agents that need to work beyond the prototype, this is required watching.

Watch it: https://lnkd.in/e99smz5g

♻️ Repost if you've hit the "context limit exceeded" wall

I just watched Sebastian Raschka build the entire attention mechanism from scratch in 2 hours.

No abstractions. No "just use torch.nn.MultiHeadAttention."

Line-by-line Python until it clicks.

This is 's breakdown of how LLMs actually work.

Step 1️⃣ Basic self-attention (no weights) 
Shows you the raw math: how a model decides which words matter.
You see why "bank" in "river bank" gets different attention than "bank" in "savings bank."

Step 2️⃣ Add learnable parameters 
Now the model can learn what to pay attention to.
This is where it stops being a simple lookup and becomes intelligence.

Step 3️⃣ Causal masking 
The trick that makes GPT work: tokens can only attend to previous tokens.
Without this, the model cheats during training.

Step 4️⃣ Multi-head attention 
The breakthrough: run 8 attention mechanisms in parallel.
One head learns syntax. Another learns semantics. Another learns long-range dependencies.
This is why transformers work.

👉 What makes this different:

Most tutorials either:
Show you the math (incomprehensible)
Show you the PyTorch API (you learn nothing)

Sebastian does both.

You see the math implemented in code, step by step.

By the end, you understand why attention_weights = softmax(Q @ K.T / sqrt(d_k)) isn't magic.

It's just weighted averaging with learnable weights.

💡The moment it clicked for me:

Attention isn't complicated.
It's just "which words should influence this word's representation?"
Then you do that for every word.
Then you stack it 96 times (GPT-4).

That's it.

The Lovable for Data Analysis Just Dropped

Upload a file → Ask a question → Get your answer.

No Python, no SQL, no notebooks required.

Compare that to what you’re doing now: 

❎ Write SQL queries or Python scripts 
❎ Debug when they break
❎ Switch between notebooks, terminals, dashboards 
❎ Wait for a data scientist to help you

This agent actually understands your data:

✅ Sees your structure, knows how to query it 
✅ Maintains context across your workflow 
✅ Fixes its own errors
✅ Generates insights, not code you need to interpret

This is a big deal for anyone doing real data analysis work. 

You get the power of a data science team without needing to become one.

The best part?

I've got $15 in free credits for you to test it (no expiration date).

♻️ Repost + comment "GIVE ME MY WEEKENDS BACK 😭" and I'll send you the link

Traditional RAG: retrieve → generate → pray

Agentic RAG: retrieve → validate → retry → succeed

One is a pipeline. The other is a feedback loop.

I just built this Agentic RAG system with LangGraph + Milvus

It knows when it's wrong, and fixes itself

Here’s how:

Router: "Can I answer without retrieval?" 
✅ Yes: Skip to generation 
❌ No: Retrieve from Milvus

Grader: "Are these chunks actually relevant?" 
✅ Good: Generate answer 
❌ Bad: Rewrite query, loop back

Validator: "Does this answer match the sources?" 
 ✅ Yes: Return to user 
❌ No: Retry with different approach

It's a graph with feedback loops, not a one-shot pipeline.

The difference:
Traditional RAG commits to one path. No second chances.
Agentic RAG loops back, validates, catches mistakes, and retries until it's right.

You get a system that debugs itself before you see the output.

Why this stack:
LangGraph = control flow primitives (routing, looping, branching) 
Milvus, created by Zilliz = production-grade vector search at scale
Together: RAG that thinks instead of guesses.

Full implementation 👇

This is the RAG architecture pattern that will become standard.
♻️ Repost to save a fellow engineer from another week of RAG debugging

BFCM isn't won by the brand with the best products.

It's won by the brand that sees what's breaking first.

Most operators spend BFCM like this: 

9 AM: Campaign's crushing it, scale to $10K/day
11 AM: ROAS drops 40%, nobody knows why
2 PM: Still diagnosing
5 PM: $6K burned on a broken campaign

The strategy wasn't wrong. 

You just couldn't see the problem fast enough. 

Diagnosing "why is ROAS dropping?" right now: 

→ Open Meta Ads Manager
→ Check Shopify analytics
→ Pull GA4
→ Cross-reference Klaviyo
→ Export to spreadsheet
→ Try to connect the dots

20 minutes later you've burned $3K.

Triple Whale + Moby give you real-time answers from your complete data stack. 

👉 https://lnkd.in/gtgB8GJw

Moby has real-time access to all of it. 

Ask Moby: "Why did ROAS drop?"

Get: "iOS campaign CTR crashed 67% after creative refresh. Top SKU went out of stock an hour ago. Traffic's converting to lower-margin backup products."

Not a guess. The actual answer.

One brand caught this: 

The campaign was showing 187% ROAS. 
Moby a flagged 41% return rate. 
Actual ROAS after was returns: 73%. 

They were about to scale into a loss.

During BFCM, 20 minutes to diagnose = thousands in wasted spend. 

The brands that win can see problems in seconds, not hours. 

And yes, I am a Triple Whale partner.

👉 https://lnkd.in/gtgB8GJw

♻️ Repost if you've burned budget figuring out what went wrong

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