O'Reilly Media

10/08/2026

AI can give you an answer that sounds right. Turning it into a decision you can act on takes more. O’Reilly CTO Andrew Odewahn and his team have been exploring how to combine an organization’s specific context with proven expert frameworks and human judgment. On October 15, Andrew will join Tim O'Reilly to discuss how the system works, what his team learned building it, and how organizations can develop their own intelligence layer. They’ll explore MCP, agent skills, stakeholder review, and how ongoing human-AI conversations can help organizations build and refine knowledge over time.

Register to save your spot: https://bit.ly/4chZk4H

10/08/2026

AI systems change constantly, but can we still understand the decisions they made months later?

“Reconstructability asks whether the conditions of the original ex*****on can still be identified, even when repeating that ex*****on would not produce an identical result. This distinction matters when a consequential AI ex*****on completes successfully today and is challenged six months later.”

Check out today’s article by Monika Dvorackova to explore why historical reconstructability needs to be designed into AI systems from the start:

Artificial intelligence systems are difficult to reproduce because their behavior depends on nondeterministic models and on data, configurations, policies, and

10/08/2026

Generative AI reached 53% population adoption in just three years, spreading faster than mobile phones or the internet ever did. Vicki Reyzelman is most concerned about the 80% of students who now use AI for schoolwork without the foundational knowledge to recognize when it's giving them bad information. Adopting a technology this quickly, without understanding its limitations, creates risks that are hard to spot until they're already embedded.

10/08/2026

Global data centers consumed 448 terawatts of electricity last year, and a UN University report puts that figure at 945 terawatts by 2030. Vicki Reyzelman points out that AI infrastructure, including cooling and energy systems, hasn't kept pace with the models it supports. That gap is creating real competition for energy between data centers and everyday needs like air conditioning and lights.

10/08/2026

Join host Chester Ismay, Ph.D. every other Monday (taking a brief pause for the holidays) throughout the 2026 football season for The Monday Morning Agent, where you’ll use real-life data to settle some enduring football debates while gradually building an AI data analyst capable of doing that on its own.

Each one of eight episodes introduces another capability required for a trustworthy data agent: transparent queries, durable memory in the form of shared data definitions, consistent visualizations, independent fact-checking, operational boundaries, request triage, self-directed analysis, and scheduled autonomy. By the finale, the agent will run the desk unattended, and we’ll examine not only what it decided to investigate, but what it correctly refused to answer.

You’ll leave with a practical understanding of how reliable data agents are built, tested, governed, and gradually trusted with more responsibility.

Save your spot: https://bit.ly/4yGtZ4n

10/07/2026

Engineering managers often piece together technical context from scattered sources, but Emma Bostian believes AI can consolidate all of that in one place, especially when connected to internal databases via an MCP. Beyond gathering context faster, she sees AI as a tool for evaluating technical trade-offs, spotting cascading effects across connected systems, and challenging your own strategy to find the holes before other people do.

10/07/2026

Learn more about our Expert Intelligence, an organization-wide suite of tools that grounds enterprise AI in O’Reilly’s deep repository of practitioner knowledge and calls on job-specific agent skills to generate actionable guidance for real-world work, verified through citations from named authors. We are now publicly accepting founding members, offering 12 months of company-wide access to Expert Intelligence for a flat fee. More details in today's press release:

O’Reilly Expert Intelligence grounds AI tools in job-specific knowledge from O’Reilly’s community of experts, delivering guidance contextualized to an organization’s particular business context BOSTON—October 7, 2026—O’Reilly, a knowledge company delivering the expertise that drives bu...

10/07/2026

The anxiety around AI and job security is real, especially for engineers and engineering managers navigating the fourth Industrial Revolution. Emma Bostian is firm that these roles won't become obsolete, because building trust, coaching engineers through growth and performance issues, and making trade-offs when there's no clear right answer are things AI isn't good at and may never be.

10/07/2026

What does it take to turn a base LLM into a genuinely useful assistant?

“But no amount of tooling fixes bad data or a reward model that scores the wrong things highly.”

In this final installment of her post-training series, Sharon Zhou, PhD walks through building the full pipeline: supervised fine-tuning, reward model training, and PPO.

Check out her article to learn more: https://bit.ly/3Vwwc3G

Implement the key pieces of the ChatGPT pipeline: SFT, reward model training, and PPO.

10/06/2026

That’s a wrap on six weeks of our Software Architecture cohort!

From architectural characteristics and logical architecture to distributed systems, patterns, evolutionary architecture, and Architecture as Code, participants have spent the past six weeks learning and applying what it takes to think like a software architect.

A big thank you to our instructors, Neal Ford and Mark Richards, for guiding participants through the experience!

But don’t just take our word for it, here’s what one of our attendees had to say about their experience:

I now feel more confident leading architectural conversations with stakeholders, thanks to the theoretical knowledge I’ve gained and the practical experience of collaborating with my teammates throughout the cohort.

Missed out this time? Sign up to be among the first to hear about future opportunities to learn with us: https://bit.ly/4ym4WDQ

Learn software architecture directly from top experts with O'Reilly's immersive six-week cohort.