Warsaw IT Days - From RAG to AI Agent & LLMs That Think: Demystifying Reasoning Models

Announcement. For "From RAG to AI Agent": recording, Colab Notebook, archive folder. For "LLMs That Think": recording, slides, archive folder.

At the Warsaw IT Days I gave two talks.

In the first, "From RAG to AI Agent", I show how you can take your RAG pipeline and, step by step, convert it into an AI agent. The talk is based on an earlier blog article and goes through this Colab notebook where in under half a hour we build from scratch a chatbot, a RAG pipeline, and then we progressively upgrade it to an AI Agent. Every step of the way is hand-on and you can take the notebook and adapt it to your stack for a more realistic example.

In the second, "LLMs that Think: Demystifying Reasoning Models", I talk about reasoning LLMs: what they are, what they aren't, how they work and when to use them. Is GPT-5 AGI? Is it an AI Agent? Or is it just a glorified chain-of-thought prompt under the hood? To answer these questions, I classify LLMs into a small "taxonomy" based on the post-training steps they go through, in order to highlight how reasoning models differ qualitatively from their predecessors just like instruction-tuned models were not simple text-completion models with a better prompt. I also cover the effect of increasing the reasoning effort of the model, clarifying when it's useful and when it can lead to overthinking.