{"podcast":{"title":"Data Science With Sam","slug":"data-science-with-sam-4345646","podcast_index_feed_id":4345646,"rss_url":"https://media.rss.com/data-science-with-sam/feed.xml","website_url":"https://datasciencewithsam-hub.replit.app/","image_url":"https://media.rss.com/data-science-with-sam/podcast_cover_20260727_001627_afba4f0b63c3e761e747d1e7aaa0930f.png","author":"Soumava Dey","episode_count":46,"summary":"This is an educational podcast focused on bringing academia and industry experts together in a common forum and initiate discussion geared towards data science, artificial intelligence, actuarial science and scientific research. DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the host(s) or guest(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of any organization. The podcast is intended to provide general educational information and entertainment purposes only. RSSVERIFY","last_synced_at":"2026-07-27T06:21:57.269474+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/data-science-with-sam-4345646"},"episode":{"title":"EP 41: The Reward Signal: The Missing Ingredient in Every AI System You’ve Built","slug":"ep-41-the-reward-signal-the-missing-ingredient-in-every-ai-system-you-ve-built","published_at":"2026-05-26T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/data-science-with-sam-4345646/ep-41-the-reward-signal-the-missing-ingredient-in-every-ai-system-you-ve-built","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/data-science-with-sam-4345646","url":"https://rss.com/podcasts/data-science-with-sam/3006407","audio_url":"https://content.rss.com/episodes/395137/3006407/data-science-with-sam/2026_07_20_13_47_17_e5b84db3-faaa-453f-bd34-54e584e8e465.mp3","summary":"74% of organizations hope to grow revenue through AI. Only 20% are actually doing it. That gap isn't a technology gap — it's a design gap. And today's guest has a name for what's missing: the reward signal. Alexander Liss is a Data and AI Scientist based in Denver, Colorado, with a 30-year career across analytics, strategy, data science, machine learning, and AI. He's built systems that solve established problems in novel ways, and the long-term problem on his radar is ensuring AI tools provide responsible augmentation of human ability. His research includes Attention Fine Tuning (AFT) - a method for training language models without human annotation labels - and the Experience Orchestrator, a control theory-based governance framework for multi-agent AI. IN THIS EPISODE: ▪ Why 95% of AI pilots fail - MIT research shows businesses bolt AI onto existing processes without tying it to real outcomes ▪ The biology analogy: hunger isn't a goal, it's a continuous feedback signal - and the same principle should govern how AI systems behave ▪ ServiceNow dynamics blindness: LLMs are stateless - they can't consider cumulative impact, and you can't prompt-engineer your way out of that architecture problem ▪ Contextual bandits in marketing: how a reward signal anchored to real conversions creates a self-learning personalisation system that adapts in real time ▪ Knowledge graphs and agent memory: why RAG retrieves answers while a reward-signal system asks what the user needs to do differently ▪ Attention Fine Tuning (AFT): a three-component reward signal (coverage, focus, repeat penalty) that trained a T5-large model to outperform a supervised fine-tuning baseline by 9% — with better multi-turn recall, and no human labels ▪ The Experience Orchestrator: aerospace control theory applied…","meta_description":"74% of organizations hope to grow revenue through AI. Only 20% are actually doing it. That gap isn't a technology gap — it's a design gap. And today's gue…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2684,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/data-science-with-sam-4345646/episodes/ep-41-the-reward-signal-the-missing-ingredient-in-every-ai-system-you-ve-built/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/data-science-with-sam-4345646/ep-41-the-reward-signal-the-missing-ingredient-in-every-ai-system-you-ve-built.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}