The AI Fundamentalists
The AI Fundamentalists
Dr. Andrew Clark & Dr. Sid Mangalik
Why validity beats scale when building multi‑step AI systems
40 minutes Posted Jan 6, 2026 at 6:00 am.
What Agentic AI really means
Hype, limits, and multi‑step promises
Tool use and real‑world stakeholders
Systems engineering enters the chat
The vending machine experiment with agents
Validity as "The North Star"
Governance as principal–agent alignment
Tasks, roles, and long‑term memory
Mechanism design for enterprises
Research over raw scale
Requirements engineering comes first
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Show notes
In this episode, Dr. Sebastian (Seb) Benthall joins us to discuss research from his and Andrew's paper entitled “Validity Is What You Need” for agentic AI that actually works in the real world. Our discussion connects systems engineering, mechanism design, and requirements to multi‑step AI that creates enterprise impact to achieve measurable outcomes. Defining agentic AI beyond LLM hypeLimits of scale and the need for multi‑step controlTool use, compounding errors, and guardrailsSystems...