Agent Factory Recap: Cracking Open an Open Model

Welcome back to The Agent Factory! In this episode, we’re joined by Ravin Kumar, a Research Engineer at DeepMind, to tackle one of the biggest topics in AI right now: building and training open-source agentic models. We wanted to go beyond just using agents and understand what it takes to build the entire factory line—from gathering data and supervised fine-tuning to reinforcement learning and evaluations.

This post guides you through the key ideas from our conversation. Use it to quickly recap topics or dive deeper into specific segments with links and timestamps.

The Agent Industry Pulse

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Before diving into the deep research, we looked at the latest developments in the fast-moving world of AI agents.

• Gemini 2.5 Computer Use: Google's new model can act as a virtual user, interacting with computer screens, clicking buttons, typing in forms, and scrolling. It’s a shift ...