William Barber
Currently a search relevance engineer at turbopuffer. Former technical lead for the search and recommendation team at Guidepoint.
Session
05-07
11:00
45min
LLMs as Rerankers: A Case Study on Hybrid Email Search
William Barber, Agustín Bernardo
Purpose-built rerankers are faster and cheaper, but are they better? We argue LLM rerankers win on what matters most in production: instruction-following and iteration speed, with more-than-acceptable tradeoffs on cost and latency. Our discussion is backed by a case study from Superhuman's production hybrid email search system.
Main Stage