William Barber
Currently a search relevance engineer at turbopuffer. Former technical lead for the search and recommendation team at Guidepoint.
Sessions
LLMs as Rerankers: A Case Study on Hybrid Email Search
Talk
7. May 2026, 11:00 - 11:45
Main Stage
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.