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Header image for RAG Isn't Dead, You Just Need a Better Starting Point

RAG Isn't Dead, You Just Need a Better Starting Point

by Corey in Conferences tags: RAG, AI_Engineer_Europe, open_source, retrieval, agents

Phil Nash (X, LinkedIn), a developer relations engineer at IBM, opened his AI Engineer Europe talk by taking aim at the "RAG is dead" discourse. His counter is simple: if every business had less than a million tokens of data, maybe. But they don't, and not everyone wants to pay …

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Header image for Build the Gym, Not the Dataset

Build the Gym, Not the Dataset

by Corey in Conferences tags: reinforcement_learning, LLMs, open_source, small_language_models, AI_Engineer_Europe

Stefano Fiorucci (X, LinkedIn, GitHub) is an AI/Software Engineer at deepset, where he contributes to the open-source LLM framework Haystack. At AI Engineer Europe 2026, he made a case that the next leap for open-source language models isn't better datasets -- it's better environments. The kind where models can act …

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