Jerry Tian

Uber blew through its entire 2026 IT budget on AI in 4 months. The State of FinOps Report now lists "FinOps for AI" as the number one priority for 2026 — surpassing traditional cloud cost optimization for the first time. And in typical fighting-an-AI-problem-with-more-AI fashion, Google announced a FinOps Explainability agent at Cloud Next '26 whose entire job is to autonomously investigate why your other AI is costing so much.

Airports once symbolized freedom; they are gateways to opportunity, mobility, and the promise of international connection. But in 2026, the face of this symbolism is shifting. In the U.S., entry increasingly feels like scrutiny. In China, it is increasingly becoming an invitation, which is surprisingly aligned with the very ideals this symbolism once embodied in the U.S. In recent months, the U.S. has doubled down on restrictive immigration enforcement.

Welcome to the wild world of attention mechanisms and the Transformer architecture, where we'll embark on a linguistic adventure through their workings, history, and applications. We'll even pit two attention-loving Transformers, GPT and BERT, against each other in a friendly showdown, and dive into how ChatGPT, a chatbot that leverages the GPT model, makes our conversations with AI feel more natural and engaging.