Dolly

Google Photos Magic Editor: GenAI Under the Hood of a Billion-User App - Kelvin Ma, Google Photos

Jul 19, 2025 · 20:28

Kelvin Ma, an engineer on Google Photos' editing team, explains how the billion-user app built the Magic Editor by integrating generative AI with on-device computational photography. He traces the evolution from earlier ML features like post-capture segmentation (UNet model, 10 MB) and Magic Eraser (a system of models) to the new server-side generative AI experience, which handles tasks like relocating objects and reimagining backgrounds. Key challenges include managing model size (now hundreds of MB), client-server latency, ambiguous problem scoping (e.g., moving from 5% to 80% reliability), and trust and safety. Ma advocates using evals, reducing ambiguity through product-research collaboration, and iterating from large general models to smaller, faster ones for production. He also highlights that Google Photos serves 1.5 billion monthly active users and processes hundreds of millions of edits per month, and the editor is being rebuilt as AI-first.

Trust, but Verify: Knowledge Agents for Finance Workflows - Mike Conover

Apr 9, 2025 · 21:10

Mike Conover, CEO of Brightwave, explains how his company builds knowledge agents for financial workflows, digesting thousands of pages of content for due diligence and research. He argues that non-reasoning models perform only local search, so winning systems must use end-to-end reinforcement learning over tool-use calls to achieve globally optimal outputs. Conover describes design patterns like decomposing research into sub-themes, using secondary calls for error correction, and avoiding the latency trap of long feedback loops. He emphasizes that synthesis—weaving facts across documents—remains a hard problem due to limited recombinative reasoning in training data. Brightwave's product reveals its thought process through interactive citations and structured findings, allowing analysts to drill into any passage. The episode also notes the company is hiring, offering a $10,000 referral bonus.