Aakanksha Chowdhery
The TWIML AI Podcast (formerly This Week in Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence)
Rethinking Pre-Training for Agentic AI with Aakanksha Chowdhery
- Published
- December 17, 2025
- Duration
- 52:54
- Summary source
- description
- Last updated
- Apr 21, 2026
Discusses google-ai, agents.
Summary
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 …
Show notes
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
Themes
- google-ai
- agents