Bojie Li
2025-09-08
It was my great honor, at the invitation of Professor Jiaxing Zhang, to give an academic talk titled “Two Clouds over Agents: Real-time Interaction with the Environment and Learning from Experience” at the Lion Rock Artificial Intelligence Laboratory on September 4. Today I’m sharing the slides and video of this talk for your reference and discussion.
Talk materials
- 🎬 Talk video
- 📖 Slides (English)
- 📖 Slides (Chinese)
Talk summary
In 1900, Lord Kelvin said in a lecture: “The building of physics is almost complete; there are only two small clouds…” Those two small clouds later triggered the revolutions of relativity and quantum mechanics. Today, the AI agent field faces similar “two clouds.”
The first cloud: the challenge of real-time interaction
Current AI agents face severe latency when interacting with the environment in real time:
The dilemma of voice interaction
- Serial processing vs real-time needs: must wait for the user to finish speaking to think, and finish thinking to speak
- Fast vs slow thinking dilemma: deep reasoning takes 10+ seconds (users lose patience), quick responses are error-prone
- Technical bottlenecks: waiting at every step (VAD detection, ASR recognition, LLM thinking, TTS synthesis)
The “last mile” challenge in GUI operation
- Agents operate a computer 3–5× slower than humans
- Every click requires a fresh screenshot and thinking (3–4 s latency)
- Moravec’s paradox: the model “knows” what to do but “can’t do it”
2025-08-18
【This article is compiled from the first livestream of the Turing Community AI Agent Bootcamp, Slides link】
Turing Community “AI Agent Bootcamp” purchase link
Start here to develop an AI Agent of your own. This article not only systematically introduces the foundational technical path to building a general-purpose AI Agent from scratch (such as context engineering, RAG systems, tool use, multimodal interaction, etc.), but also covers advanced techniques like fast/slow thinking and multi-Agent collaboration. Through 9 weeks of hands-on projects, you will gradually master the full lifecycle of Agent development and key advanced capabilities.
This course had its first livestream preview on August 18 and will officially start on September 11. Each weekly session is about 2 hours and covers all the foundational and advanced content below. Of course, just 2 hours of lectures per week won’t be enough—you’ll also need to spend time coding and practicing.
Bootcamp Core Objectives
Start here to build an AI Agent of your own
🎯 Master core architecture and engineering skills
- Deeply understand Agent architecture: Systematically master the core design paradigm of
LLM + context + tools
. - Excel at context engineering: Master multi-level context management techniques, from conversation history and user long-term memory to external knowledge bases (RAG) and file systems.
- Master dynamic tool use: Reliably integrate Agents with external APIs and MCP servers, and enable self-improvement via code generation.
- Build advanced Agent patterns: Design and implement complex collaboration patterns such as slow/fast thinking (Mixture-of-Thoughts) and Orchestration.
💡 Build a systematic understanding of development and deployment
- Understand the evolution path: See the progression from basic RAG to Agents that can autonomously develop tools.
- Master the Agent lifecycle: Be able to independently complete the closed loop of Agent project design, development, evaluation with LLM as a Judge, and deployment.
- Build domain knowledge: Accumulate cross-domain Agent development experience through hands-on projects in law, academia, programming, and more.
- Consolidate a knowledge system: Co-create the book “AI Agents, Explained” to systematize fragmented knowledge.
9-Week Hands-on Plan Overview
Week | Topic | Content Overview | Hands-on Case |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Agent Basics | Agent structure and taxonomy; workflow-based vs autonomous | Build an Agent that can search the web |
2 | Context Design | Prompt templates; conversation history; user long-term memory | Add persona and long-term memory to your Agent |
3 | RAG and Knowledge Bases | Document structuring; retrieval strategies; incremental updates | Build a legal Q&A Agent |
4 | Tool Use and MCP | Tool wrapping and MCP integration; external API calls | Connect to an MCP server to build a deep-research Agent |
5 | Programming and Code Execution | Codebase understanding; reliable code edits; consistent execution environments | Build an Agent that can develop Agents |
6 | Model Evaluation and Selection | Model capability evaluation; LLM as a Judge; safety guardrails | Build a benchmark and auto-evaluate Agents with LLM as a Judge |
7 | Multimodal and Real-time Interaction | Real-time voice Agents; operating PCs and phones | Implement a voice-call Agent & integrate browser-use for computer control |
8 | Multi-Agent Collaboration | A2A communication protocol; Agent team roles and collaboration | Design a multi-Agent system to “make calls while operating a computer” |
9 | Project Integration and Demo | Final assembly and demo; polishing the final deliverable | Showcase your unique general-purpose Agent |
9-Week Advanced Topics
Week | Topic | Advanced Content Overview | Advanced Hands-on Case |
---|---|---|---|
1 | Agent Basics | The importance of context | Explore the impact of missing context on Agent behavior |
2 | Context Design | Organizing user memory | Build a personal knowledge management Agent for long-text summarization |
3 | RAG and Knowledge Bases | Long-context compression | Build an academic paper analysis Agent to summarize core contributions |
4 | Tool Use and MCP | Learning from experience | Enhance the deep-research Agent’s expertise (sub-agents and domain experience) |
5 | Programming and Code Execution | Agent self-evolution | Build an Agent that autonomously leverages open-source software to solve unknown problems |
6 | Model Evaluation and Selection | Parallel sampling and sequential revision | Add parallelism and revision to the deep-research Agent |
7 | Multimodal and Real-time Interaction | Combining fast and slow thinking | Implement a real-time voice Agent that combines fast and slow thinking |
8 | Multi-Agent Collaboration | Orchestration Agent | Use an Orchestration Agent to dynamically coordinate calling and computer operation |
9 | Project Integration and Demo | Comparing Agent learning methods | Compare four ways Agents learn from experience |
2025-08-03
Following “Solving LLM Constrained Sampling Interview Question with Vibe Coding”, I’m sharing another Vibe Coding interview question from our company (Pine AI) about the fundamental principles of LLM.
Many people misunderstand Vibe Coding, thinking it’s just about constantly asking AI, “How do you do this? How do you implement that?” This approach is doomed to fail. True Vibe Coding requires you to be the architect and product manager, guiding the AI like a teacher instructing a student, not the other way around.
This interview question assesses candidates’ understanding of the basic principles of Transformers and their engineering ability to quickly implement vibe coding. This is the kind of person we need: someone who understands models and has strong engineering skills.
The Challenge: Attention-Based LLM Hallucination Detector
1. Background & Problem Statement
In many applications, large language models (LLMs) need to answer questions or extract information based on a given context, a process often referred to as “In-Context Learning.” However, LLMs have a known, serious security flaw: when asked about information not present in the context, they may “hallucinate” a correctly formatted but factually incorrect answer instead of admitting the lack of information.
2025-07-30
[This article is based on a presentation at the Turing Community’s Large Model Technology Learning Camp, Slides Link]
Explore the design philosophy and practical strategies of AI Agents in depth. From the conversational mode of Chatbots to the action mode of Agents, systematically design and manage the information environment of Agents to build efficient and reliable AI Agent systems.
Table of Contents
- Part 1: Paradigm Shift - From Chatbot to Agent
- Part 2: Core Analysis of Agents
- Part 3: Context Engineering
- Part 4: Memory and Knowledge Systems
Part 1: Paradigm Shift - From Chatbot to Agent
From Chatbot to Agent: A Fundamental Paradigm Shift
We are experiencing a fundamental shift in AI interaction modes:
Chatbot Era
- 🗣️ Conversational Interaction: User asks → AI answers → Repetitive Q&A cycle
- 📚 Knowledgeable Advisor: Can only “speak” but not “act,” passively responding to user needs
- 🛠️ Typical Products: ChatGPT, Claude Chat
Agent Era
- 🎯 Autonomous Action Mode: User sets goals → Agent executes → Autonomous planning and decision-making
- 💪 Capable Assistant: Can both “think” and “act,” proactively discovering and solving problems
- 🚀 Typical Products: Claude Code, Cursor, Manus
2025-07-25
In AI application development, choosing the right LLM API service is crucial. Whether you are building an intelligent dialogue system, developing an AI Agent, or participating in an AI Hackathon, this article will provide you with a comprehensive API usage guide, covering mainstream services such as OpenRouter, Anthropic API, Volcano Engine, and Siliconflow.
Why Do You Need Multiple API Services?
Different LLM models have their own advantages, especially when developing AI Agents, where you need to choose the right model based on specific scenarios:
- Claude (Anthropic): Excels in complex reasoning, programming, and Agent tasks, particularly suitable for scenarios requiring deep thinking
- Gemini (Google): Performs well in long text processing and multimodal understanding, suitable for handling multimedia content such as images and videos
- GPT (OpenAI): Strong in image understanding and mathematical reasoning, excellent for everyday conversation experiences
- Doubao (ByteDance): Fast access speed in China, good voice dialogue experience, especially suitable for real-time interaction scenarios
- Open Source Models: Low cost, highly customizable, suitable for large-scale deployment
2025-07-21
(This article is automatically generated based on my one-hour voice chat with Gemini 2.5 Pro)
The human pursuit of freedom is a profound dialogue with the biological instincts deep within us. Before we embark on this dialogue, we must first understand the two core aspects of “freedom,” as articulated by philosopher Isaiah Berlin:
- The first is “freedom from”, which is negative freedom. It aims to rid us of external constraints, coercion, and interference. This is about delineating a sacred, inviolable “space” in our lives, with its ultimate form being financial freedom—where you are free from the compulsion to sell your labor for a living.
- The second is “freedom to”, which is positive freedom. It seeks to make us masters of our own will, possessing enough ability and resources to realize our self-worth. This endows us with the “power” to act, with its ultimate form being creative freedom—where you can turn imagination into reality.
Understanding this pair of concepts allows us to uncover a deeper secret, revealed by Richard Sutton, the 2025 Turing Award winner and father of reinforcement learning, in his classic textbook “Reinforcement Learning”: what drives our happiness is not the static “reward” itself, but the dynamic “reward prediction error.” What truly makes our brains secrete dopamine and feel joy is the positive gap between “actual gain” and “prior expectation.”
A completely predictable, surprise-free world, no matter how affluent, has a reward prediction error approaching zero. This biologically explains why pure “Freedom From”—a comfortable, worry-free but unchanging haven—can ultimately lead to emptiness. In contrast, “Freedom To,” filled with challenges, exploration, and creation, is a powerful engine that continuously generates positive prediction errors.
Today, the rise of AI is handing the keys to this engine to each of us in unprecedented ways.
2025-07-18
(Thanks to Koutian Wu for thoroughly debugging and deploying, and for pointing out several technical issues in the original article, which have been corrected in this version)
As access to tools like Cursor and Claude Code becomes restricted in China, traditional HTTP/SOCKS proxies can no longer meet daily needs. These tools not only impose regional restrictions on the server side but may also employ multi-layered techniques to detect the user’s true geographical location (currently only partially implemented, but may be upgraded in the future):
- Basic IP Database Matching: Traditional GeoIP database queries
- Timezone Consistency Check: Obtaining the client’s timezone via JavaScript and cross-verifying with the IP’s geographical location
- DNS Resolution Check: Using Geo DNS resolution results to check the real location
- WebRTC IP Leak Detection: Obtaining the user’s real IP address via WebRTC
- CloudFlare Source Address Retrieval: Obtaining the real source address through CloudFlare’s HTTP headers
Most current HTTP/SOCKS proxies can only handle basic detection methods, while more complex multi-dimensional detection often leaves them powerless. A three-layer tunnel, working at the network layer, can more thoroughly hide the user’s real network environment.
Besides bypassing geographical restrictions, a three-layer tunnel is also suitable for the following scenarios:
- Server Access Control: Avoid exposing the SSH access port of company servers on the public internet
- Development and Testing Environment: Avoid exposing the company’s test servers, internal APIs, etc., on the public internet
- Secure Network Environment: Ensure communication security in untrusted public WiFi environments
While solutions like WireGuard and OpenVPN are stable and efficient, they require installing dedicated clients, which can be cumbersome in multi-device usage scenarios.
IKEv2, as a modern VPN standard, not only offers excellent performance and stability but, more importantly, is natively integrated into mainstream operating systems like macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android, eliminating the need to install any third-party clients.
This article will build on the architecture idea from “Skillfully Using Hong Kong as a Relay to Build a Smooth and Stable China-US Three-Layer Tunnel“ to construct a China -> Hong Kong -> USA
IKEv2 tunnel three-hop solution.
2025-07-15
This is an interview question from our company.
Some say our Vibe Coding programming questions are too difficult, but actually, our company’s 2-hour Vibe Coding interview questions basically don’t require you to write code yourself. Just input the question into the prompt, continuously interact with the LLM to propose requirements and improvement directions, and the AI will complete it for you.
Why is it called Vibe Coding? It’s about minimizing direct code writing. The division of labor between humans and AI becomes very clear: humans are responsible for direction control, problem definition, and result review, while AI is responsible for specific implementation. Something like Claude Code is an extreme example, where humans are not allowed to touch the code, only the LLM can.
Below, I will demonstrate how Vibe Coding works through the complete experience of this interview question. This entire exploration process was not smooth sailing; the AI’s initial solution had serious flaws. It was through my continuous review and direction correction that we finally arrived at a usable solution. This is not only about solving a technical problem but also a deep exploration of the future software development model.
It is worth mentioning that this article itself was also automatically generated by Gemini 2.5 Pro in Cursor based on my work log (including all my conversations with AI and the evolution of the code). From the moment I first posed the question to Cursor, to completing the final usable program, and then generating this illustrated blog post, the entire process took only 1.5 hours.
The Challenge: LLM Constrained Sampling
A software for learning English needs to ensure that all words output by its built-in LLM must be within a 3000-word vocabulary.
Requirements:
Use the Constrained Sampling method of large language models (LLM) to modify the token sampling algorithm in the inference framework (such as
transformers
) to ensure that all content output by the LLM is within this given 3000-word vocabulary.Of course, punctuation, spaces, line breaks, etc., are allowed, but special characters, Chinese, French, emojis, etc., are not allowed.
Case transformations of words in the vocabulary are considered valid words, for example, if the word
apple
is in the vocabulary, thenapple
,Apple
,APPLE
are all considered valid outputs.The 3000-word vocabulary can be any common English word list found online.
The performance of the constrained sampling algorithm should be as good as possible.
2025-07-12
In the previous article, “Building a Three-Layer Tunnel with Full US IP and No Manual Proxy Settings,” we addressed many network issues encountered when accessing global services through the architecture of Domestic Server -> US Server
. However, a new performance bottleneck has gradually emerged: the public connection between the domestic server and the US server experiences high latency and severe packet loss during peak hours.
This results in issues like SSH operation lag, online meeting disconnections, and API request timeouts, even when using a tunnel. The root cause lies in the international internet link between China and the US, which is like a highway during holidays—congestion is the norm.
Faced with this problem, a counterintuitive solution emerges: If the direct route is blocked, would taking a detour be faster?