MLWhiz | AI Unwrapped

3 Modern Approaches to Solving Cold Start in RecSys

Contextual bandits, meta-learning, and LLMs — how Spotify, TikTok, and YouTube handle new users and items. The practitioner's guide to cold start.

Mar 25 • Rahul Agarwal

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MLWhiz Weekly AI/ML Newsletter # 2

Here is what happened this week.

Mar 23 • Rahul Agarwal

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From Candidates to Clicks: The Engineering Anatomy of Ranking

How modern recommendation systems go from 1,000 candidates to the one item you actually tap

Mar 14 • Rahul Agarwal

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MLWhiz Weekly AI/ML Newsletter # 1

Here is what happened this week.

Mar 11 • Rahul Agarwal

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February 2026

Vector Search at Scale: The Production Engineer's Guide

IVF partitions space. PQ compresses memory. Together they make 100M vector search actually possible

Feb 3 • Rahul Agarwal

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January 2026

How YouTube Finds Your Next Video in Milliseconds

A deep dive into two-tower retrieval, in-batch negatives, and the tricks that make it work

Jan 26 • Rahul Agarwal

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The 3-Stage Funnel Behind Every Modern Recommender System

Two-Tower models, vector databases, cross-encoders—and how they work together at scale

Jan 20 • Rahul Agarwal

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October 2025

How Recommendation Systems Learned to Think

Recsys Series Part 2: From collaborative filtering breakthroughs to generative AI agents that can chat about your preferences and explain their…

Oct 4, 2025 • Rahul Agarwal

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September 2025

RecSys Fundamentals: The Art and Science of Digital Matchmaking

Recsys Series Part 1: Master the three core approaches that power every modern recommendation engine

Sep 27, 2025 • Rahul Agarwal

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What Production Deployments Taught Me About ReAct vs Function Calling

From Prototype to Production: Hard-Won Lessons for AI Agent Development

Sep 21, 2025 • Rahul Agarwal

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July 2025

The 5 Principles That Turn ML Projects Into Business Impact

Why 70% of machine learning projects fail to deliver value, and the engineering-first approach that ensures yours won't be one of them

Jul 18, 2025 • Rahul Agarwal

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The #1 Reason Your GenAI Project Will Fail in Production (and the 4 Pillars to Prevent It)

A Technical Guide to Overcoming Operational Nightmares and Exploding Costs in LLM Deployments

Jul 9, 2025 • Rahul Agarwal

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