This Week in Startups

SO MANY THINGS need to go right just so you can watch a TikTok! | E2215

46 snips
Nov 26, 2025
Gou Rao, CEO of Neubird, reveals the incredible layers involved in delivering a simple TikTok video and how their AI, Hawkeye, acts as an agentic system to streamline IT operations. He highlights the complexities engineers face and the efficiency gains from AI-driven diagnostics. Meanwhile, Michael Vilardo, CEO of Subject AI, discusses how gamification in educational tech engages students and personalizes learning, along with AI tools that ease teachers' workloads. It's a fascinating dive into the intersection of AI with tech and education!
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INSIGHT

The Hidden Complexity Behind Simple Video Plays

  • Delivering a single TikTok video requires many interacting layers: storage, quality control, distribution, and edge caching.
  • Gou Rao highlights that this complexity explains why keeping the internet working is a constant engineering feat.
INSIGHT

Agentic AI As First-Responder For IT Ops

  • Agentic systems apply generative AI to a specific problem domain like IT ops to reason over logs, metrics, traces, and alerts.
  • Newbird's Hawkeye uses LLM reasoning to diagnose IT incidents faster than humans can.
ADVICE

Reduce LLM Costs With Context Engineering

  • Use context engineering to narrow the problem before invoking large language models and avoid high inference costs and hallucinations.
  • Isolate the relevant logs, metrics and alerts so the LLM reasons on precise context rather than bulk data.
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