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Slides: What Lies Beneath the API — Benjamin Cowen, Modal

Source Video

What Lies Beneath the API — Benjamin Cowen, Modal

Relationship To World's Fair 2026

These slides are extracted from a public AI Engineer YouTube video connected to World's Fair 2026. Speaker-matched clips are supporting context unless later confirmed as exact session recordings; official livestream recordings are day-level/event-level source material.

Related Scheduled Sessions

• No individual scheduled session mapping has been assigned yet; treat this as an event livestream deck.

Extracted Slides

• Recreated text/layout view: open HTML recreation
• AI slide classifier: title_card confidence 0.98
• Text source: agent_vision.

Slide text:

What Lies Beneath the API:

When you should fine-tune your own model

Benjamin Cowen, PhD

• Recreated text/layout view: open HTML recreation
• AI slide classifier: content_slide confidence 0.97
• Text source: agent_vision.
• OCR decision: ready — dense multi-column slide with small labels and diagram text

Slide text:

Modal 101

• Recreated text/layout view: open HTML recreation
• AI slide classifier: content_slide confidence 0.98
• Text source: agent_vision.

Slide text:

Use a frontier API

Move fast. Ship something.

Works for

Get started fast

No infrastructure overhead

Very good models!

When you might want to shift

You need performance control at scale

Cost, throughput, latency, custom metric

You need model differentiation

You're hitting rate limits

• Recreated text/layout view: open HTML recreation
• AI slide classifier: content_slide confidence 0.98
• Text source: agent_vision.
• OCR decision: ready — dense code screenshot with small text and compact layout

Slide text:

SFT in 300 lines of code

• Recreated text/layout view: open HTML recreation
• AI slide classifier: content_slide confidence 0.98
• Text source: agent_vision.
• OCR decision: ready — dense code screenshot with small text and compact layout

Slide text:

GRPO (RL) in 300 lines of code.

Hidden Non-Slide Evidence

• `slide-001.jpg` — speaker_stage confidence 0.99; speaker on stage with audience; no readable slide content
• `slide-004.jpg` — speaker_stage confidence 0.98; speaker on stage with a blank projected screen; no readable slide content

Classification audit: raw/sources/slide-ai-classification/slides/HvZXAOZ3iv8/audit.json

Slide-Derived Subjects To Review

Subject extraction uses video title, related session titles/descriptions, transcript context, and OCR text when available. OCR is best-effort and should be reviewed against the embedded slide images.