Practical AI

At the recent ODSC East conference, Daniel got a chance to sit down with Erin Mikail Staples to discuss the process of gathering human feedback and creating an instruction tuned Large Language Models (LLM). They also chatted about the importance of open data and practical tooling for data annotation and fine-tuning. Do you want to create your own custom generative AI models? This is the episode for you!Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Erin Mikail Staples – Mastodon, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Label StudioSlides from Erin’s recent PyData talk on RLHFUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

There are a ton of problems around building LLM apps in production and the last mile of that problem. Travis Fischer, builder of open AI projects like @ChatGPTBot, joins us to talk through these problems (and how to overcome them). He helps us understand the hierarchy of complexity from simple prompting to augmentation, agents, and fine-tuning. Along the way we discuss the frontend developer community that is rapidly adopting AI technology via Typescript (not Python).Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Travis Fischer – GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:ChatGPT Hacker CommunityChatGPTBotUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Model sizes are crazy these days with billions and billions of parameters. As Mark Kurtz explains in this episode, this makes inference slow and expensive despite the fact that up to 90%+ of the parameters don’t influence the outputs at all.Mark helps us understand all of the practicalities and progress that is being made in model optimization and CPU inference, including the increasing opportunities to run LLMs and other Generative AI models on commodity hardware.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Mark Kurtz – LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Neural MagicSparseMLSparseZooNeural Magic Scales up MLPerf™ Inference v3.0 Performance With Demonstrated Power Efficiency; No GPUs NeededDeploy Optimized Hugging Face Models With DeepSparse and SparseZooSparseGPT: Remove 100 Billion Parameters for FreeUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

With all the LLM hype, it’s worth remembering that enterprise stakeholders want answers to “why” questions. Enter causal inference. Paul Hünermund has been doing research and writing on this topic for some time and joins us to introduce the topic. He also shares some relevant trends and some tips for getting started with methods including double machine learning, experimentation, difference-in-difference, and more.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. Featuring:Paul Hünermund – Website, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:How Can Causal Machine Learning Improve Business Decisions?Causal Inference is More than Fitting the Data WellCausal Data Science in PracticeCausal DiscoveryDoWhy GithubThe Book of WhyCausal Data Science MeetingPaul’s study on causal ML adoption in industry (incl. an overview of useful software packages in Table 3)Causal Data Science MOOC on UdemyUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities have reached new heights and are nothing short of mind-blowing! However, with so many advancements happening at once, it can be overwhelming to keep up with all the latest developments. To help us navigate through this complex terrain, we’ve invited Raj - one of the most adept at explaining State-of-the-Art (SOTA) AI in practical terms - to join us on the podcast.Raj discusses several intriguing topics such as in-context learning, reasoning, LLM options, and related tooling. But that’s not all! We also hear from Raj about the rapidly growing data science and AI community on TikTok.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Rajiv Shah – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Solving AI Tasks with ChatGPT and its Friends in HuggingFace | GitHubGenerative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human BehaviorWolfram ChatGPTComparing LLMsLangChainLearn about LLMs: Emergence and reasoning in large language models (Jason Wei)Sparks of Artificial General IntelligenceLearning PromptingGetting Started with Transformers: Transformers course (free)Tasks at Hugging FaceTraining your own LLM Models: Efficient Large Language Model training with LoRA and Hugging FacePEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning)Dolly blog postIllustrating Reinforcement Learning from Human FeedbackUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

What can art historians and computer scientists learn from one another? Actually, a lot! Amanda Wasielewski joins us to talk about how she discovered that computer scientists working on computer vision were actually acting like rogue art historians and how art historians have found machine learning to be a valuable tool for research, fraud detection, and cataloguing. We also discuss the rise of generative AI and how we this technology might cause us to ask new questions like: “What makes a photograph a photograph?”Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Amanda Wasielewski – Website, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Computational Formalism Art History and Machine LearningUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Daniel and Chris explore the intersection of Kaggle and real-world data science in this illuminating conversation with Christof Henkel, Senior Deep Learning Data Scientist at NVIDIA and Kaggle Grandmaster. Christof offers a very lucid explanation into how participation in Kaggle can positively impact a data scientist’s skill and career aspirations. He also shared some of his insights and approach to maximizing AI productivity uses GPU-accelerated tools like RAPIDS and DALI.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this! Featuring:Christof Henkel – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Christof Henkel | KaggleNVIDIA Kaggle GrandmastersKaggleNVIDIA RAPIDSNVIDIA Data Loading Library (DALI)Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

We are seeing an explosion of AI apps that are (at their core) a thin UI on top of calls to OpenAI generative models. What risks are associated with this sort of approach to AI integration, and is explainability and accountability something that can be achieved in chat-based assistants?Beth Rudden of Bast.ai has been thinking about this topic for some time and has developed an ontological approach to creating conversational AI. We hear more about that approach and related work in this episode.Sponsors:Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comTypesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Beth Rudden – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Bast.aiUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Neural search and chat-based search are all the rage right now. However, You.com has been innovating in these topics long before ChatGPT. In this episode, Bryan McCann from You.com shares insights related to our mental model of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions and practical tips related to integrating LLMs into production systems.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Bryan McCann – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:You.comOpen Platform for developersJoin the You.com Discord serverUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

We’ve all experienced pain moving from local development, to testing, and then on to production. This cycle can be long and tedious, especially as AI models and datasets are integrated. Modal is trying to make this loop of development as seamless as possible for AI practitioners, and their platform is pretty incredible!Erik from Modal joins us in this episode to help us understand how we can run or deploy machine learning models, massively parallel compute jobs, task queues, web apps, and much more, without our own infrastructure.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Erik Bernhardsson – Website, GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:ModalEpisode 142 discussing Erik’s “building a data team” articleUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

With the recent proliferation of generative AI models (from OpenAI, co:here, Anthropic, etc.), practitioners are racing to come up with best practices around prompting, grounding, and control of outputs.Chris and Daniel take a deep dive into the kinds of behavior we are seeing with this latest wave of models (both good and bad) and what leads to that behavior. They also dig into some prompting and integration tips.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this! Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Generative AI model behavior in the news:Microsoft’s AI chatbot is going off the railsA Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply UnsettledSydney’s gaslightingChatGPT political biasStable Diffusion amplification of stereotypesUseful guides related to prompt engineering:co:here prompt engineering guidePrompt engineering overview from Elvis Savaria10 Amazing Resources For Prompt Engineering, ChatGPT, and GPT-3Image generation prompt engineering guides: see here and hereUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

We’re super excited to welcome Jay Alammar to the show. Jay is a well-known AI educator, applied NLP practitioner at co:here, and author of the popular blog, “The Illustrated Transformer.” In this episode, he shares his ideas on creating applied NLP solutions, working with large language models, and creating educational resources for state-of-the-art AI.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Jay Alammar – Website, GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Jay’s popular blog (with posts including “The Illustrated Transformer”)co:hereTopically sandbox - topic modelingco:here’s prompt engineering guideUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

We’ve been hearing about “serverless” CPUs for some time, but it’s taken a while to get to serverless GPUs. In this episode, Erik from Banana explains why its taken so long, and he helps us understand how these new workflows are unlocking state-of-the-art AI for application developers. Forget about servers, but don’t forget to listen to this one!Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this! Featuring:Erik Dunteman – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Banana - Scale your machine learning inference and training on serverless GPUs.Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Worlds are colliding! This week we join forces with the hosts of the MLOps.Community podcast to discuss all things machine learning operations. We talk about how the recent explosion of foundation models and generative models is influencing the world of MLOps, and we discuss related tooling, workflows, perceptions, etc.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this! Featuring:Demetrios Brinkmann – XMihail Eric – Website, GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:MLOps.CommunityUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

What’s the current reality and practical implications of using 3D environments for simulation and synthetic data creation? In this episode, we cut right through the hype of the Metaverse, Multiverse, Omniverse, and all the “verses” to understand how 3D assets and tooling are actually helping AI developers develop industrial robots, autonomous vehicles, and more. Beau Perschall is at the center of these innovations in his work with NVIDIA, and there is no one better to help us explore the topic!Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Beau Perschall – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:NVIDIA’s OmniverseBeau’s GTC 2023 session around how to build simulation-ready USD 3D assetsTech blog around Omniverse and SimReady assetsUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Creating and sharing reproducible development environments for AI experiments and production systems is a huge pain. You have all sorts of weird dependencies, and then you have to deal with GPUs and NVIDIA drivers on top of all that! brev.dev is attempting to mitigate this pain and create delightful GPU dev environments. Now that sounds practical!Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Featuring:Nader Khalil – XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:brev.devDISCOUNT for our listeners 🔥:Use coupon code “practical-ai-2023” for 5 hours of free GPU compute!brev.dev doesn’t offer credits often, so the credit redemption button is hidden by default. Go to this link to expose the button.Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Why is ML is so poorly adopted in small organizations (hint: it’s not because they don’t have enough data)? In this episode, Kirsten Lum from Storytellers shares the patterns she has seen in small orgs that lead to a successful ML practice. We discuss how the job of a ML Engineer/Data Scientist is different in that environment and how end-to-end project management is key to adoption.Sponsors:The Changelog – Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of the software world Featuring:Kirsten Lum – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:storytellers.aiTrelloUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is the first LLM to enjoy direct mass adoption by folks outside the AI world. They discuss how it works, its effect on the world, ramifications of its adoption, and what we may expect in the future as these types of models continue to evolve.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:ChatGPTOpenAI Blog: ChatGPTIllustrating Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF)Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data scarcity, non-Latin scripts, rich morphology, etc. You don’t want to miss this one!Featuring:Just Zwennicker – LinkedInAndiswa Bukula – XRooweither Mabuya – XBonaventure Dossou – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:EMNLP 2022 papers from the guests:Towards a general purpose machine translation system for SranantongoMasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity RecognitionAfroLM: A Self-Active Learning-based Multilingual Pretrained Language Model for 23 African LanguagesOther links relevant to the discussion:MasakhaneLanfricaThe South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR)Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

José and Ricardo joined Daniel at EMNLP 2022 to discuss state-of-the-art machine translation, the WMT shared tasks, and quality estimation. Among other things, they talk about Unbabel’s innovations in quality estimation including COMET, a neural framework for training multilingual machine translation (MT) evaluation models.Featuring:Ricardo Rei – XJosé Souza – XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:UnbabelCOMETThe WMT workshop/ conferenceEMNLPUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this special episode, we interview some of the sponsors and teams from a recent case competition organized by Purdue University, Microsoft, INFORMS, and SIL International. 170+ teams from across the US and Canada participated in the competition, which challenged students to create AI-driven systems to caption images in three languages (Thai, Kyrgyz, and Hausa).Featuring:Matthew Lanham – Website, XMark Tabladillo – LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Purdue University’s Krannert School of BusinessMaster the basics of Azure: AI FundamentalsAzure Architecture CenterSIL InternationalThe bloom-captioning datasetBooks“Applied Machine Learning and AI for Engineers” by Jeff ProsiseUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

There are some big AI-related controversies swirling, and it’s time we talk about them. A lawsuit has been filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI related to Copilot code suggestions, and many people have been disturbed by the output of Meta AI’s Galactica model. Does Copilot violate open source licenses? Does Galactica output dangerous science-related content? In this episode, we dive into the controversies and risks, and we discuss the benefits of these technologies.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Related to Copilot:Article - “GitHub Copilot Isn’t Worth the Risk”TabnineBig Code ProjectRelated to Galactica:Model websiteArticle: “Galactica: the AI knowledge base that makes stuff up”Books“Interpretable Machine Learning” by Christoph Molnar“Modeling Mindsets” by Christoph MolnarUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Online platforms and their users are susceptible to a barrage of threats – from disinformation to extremism to terror. Daniel and Chris chat with Matar Haller, VP of Data at ActiveFence, a leader in identifying online harm – is using a combination of AI technology and leading subject matter experts to provide Trust & Safety teams with precise, real-time data, in-depth intelligence, and automated tools to protect users and ensure safe online experiences.Featuring:Matar Haller – GitHub, LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:ActiveFenceUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

It’s been a while since we’ve touched on quantum computing. It’s time for an update! This week we talk with Yonatan from Quantum Machines about real progress being made in the practical construction of hybrid computing centers with a mix of classical processors, GPUs, and quantum processors. Quantum Machines is building both hardware and software to help control, program, and integrate quantum processors within a hybrid computing environment.Featuring:Yonatan Cohen – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Quantum MachinesUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Recently Chris and Daniel briefly discussed the Open RAIL-M licensing and model releases on Hugging Face. In this episode, Daniel follows up on this topic based on some recent practical experience. Also included is a discussion about graph neural networks, message passing, and tweaking synthesized voices!Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Daniel’s team license from recent workGraph Neural Network courses from Zak JostCoqui voice studioUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

This panel discussion was recorded at a recent event hosted by a company, Aryballe, that we previously featured on the podcast (#120). We got a chance to discuss the AI-driven technology transforming the order/fragrance industries, and we went down the rabbit hole discussing how this technology is being adopted at large, well-established companies.Featuring:Mary Fischer-Mullins – LinkedInYanis Caritu – LinkedInDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:AryballeCox AutomotivePrevious episode with AryballeUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

People are starting to wake up to the fact that they have control and ownership over their data, and governments are moving quickly to legislate these rights. John K. Thompson has written a new book on the topic that is a must read! We talk about the new book in this episode along with how practitioners should be thinking about data exchanges, privacy, trust, and synthetic data.Featuring:John K. Thompson – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Use the code podpracticalAI19 for 40% off of Data for All, along with all Manning products in all formats!!!Books“Data for All” by John K. ThompsonJohn’s other books: “Building Analytics Teams” by John K. Thompson“Analytics” by John Thompson and Shawn RogersUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Chris sits down with Ankur Goyal to talk about DocQuery, Impira’s new open source ML model. DocQuery lets you ask questions about semi-structured data (like invoices) and unstructured documents (like contracts) using Large Language Models (LLMs). Ankur illustrates many of the ways DocQuery can help people tame documents, and references Chris’s real life tasks as a non-profit director to demonstrate that DocQuery is indeed practical AI.Featuring:Ankur Goyal – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XShow Notes:DocQueryDocQuery AnnouncementDocQuery Blog AnnouncementDocQuery | GitHubImpiraUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

It’s one thing to gather some labels for your data. It’s another thing to integrate data labeling into your workflows and infrastructure in a scalable, secure, and useful way. Mark from Xelex joins us to talk through some of what he has learned after helping companies scale their data annotation efforts. We get into workflow management, labeling instructions, team dynamics, and quality assessment. This is a super practical episode!Featuring:Mark Christensen – Website, LinkedInDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Xelex.aiUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

WeightWatcher, created by Charles Martin, is an open source diagnostic tool for analyzing Neural Networks without training or even test data! Charles joins us in this episode to discuss the tool and how it fills certain gaps in current model evaluation workflows. Along the way, we discuss statistical methods from physics and a variety of practical ways to modify your training runs.Featuring:Charles Martin – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:WeightWatcherTalk from the Silicon Valley ACM meetupA deep dive into the theory behind WeightWatcher (a talk from ENS)Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

The new stable diffusion model is everywhere! Of course you can use this model to quickly and easily create amazing, dream-like images to post on twitter, reddit, discord, etc., but this technology is also poised to be used in very pragmatic ways across industry. In this episode, Chris and Daniel take a deep dive into all things stable diffusion. They discuss the motivations for the work, the model architecture, and the differences between this model and other related releases (e.g., DALL·E 2). (Image from stability.ai)Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Announcement blog postStable diffusion paperBlog post about the model from Marc PäpperStable Diffusion on Hugging FaceHugging Face Diffusers libraryUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

AI is increasingly being applied in creative and artistic ways, especially with recent tools integrating models like Stable Diffusion. This is making some artists mad. How should we be thinking about these trends more generally, and how can we as practitioners release and license models anticipating human impacts? We explore this along with other topics (like AI models detecting swimming pools 😊) in this fully connected episode.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Automation and creativityGoodbye, humans: Call centers ‘could save $80b’ switching to AIDALL-E can now use AI to extend images as a human artist might -An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are PissedNation states and AIUndeclared pools in France uncovered by AI technologyFrance reveals hidden swimming pools with AI, taxes themNvidia says U.S. government allows A.I. chip development in ChinaForeign Affairs: Spirals of Delusion - How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More DangerousResourcesOpen RAIL LicensesNormConfUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris discuss concerns of privacy in the face of ever-improving AI / ML technologies. Evaluating AI’s impact on privacy from various angles, they note that ethical AI practitioners and data scientists have an enormous burden, given that much of the general population may not understand the implications of the data privacy decisions of everyday life.This intentionally thought-provoking conversation advocates consideration and action from each listener when it comes to evaluating how their own activities either protect or violate the privacy of those whom they impact.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Google’s Responsible AI Practices - PrivacyWhat is Data De-identification and Why is It Important?Hugging Face - Stable Diffusion Demofloret: lightweight, robust word vectorsUsing oneAPI with Intel® FPGAs WorkshopUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Differentiating between what is real versus what is fake on the internet can be challenging. Historically, AI deepfakes have only added to the confusion and chaos, but when labeled and intended for good, deepfakes can be extremely helpful. But with all of the misinformation surrounding deepfakes, it can be hard to see the benefits they bring. Lior Hakim, CTO at Hour One, joins Chris and Daniel to shed some light on the practical uses of deepfakes. He addresses the AI technology behind deepfakes, how to make positive use of deep fakes such as breaking down communications barriers, and shares how Hour One specializes in the development of virtual humans for use in professional video communications.Featuring:Lior Hakim – Website, LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Hour OneUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Daniel and Chris cover the AI news of the day in this wide-ranging discussion. They start with Truss from Baseten while addressing how to categorize AI infrastructure and tools. Then they move on to transformers (again!), and somehow arrive at an AI pilot model from CMU that can navigate crowded airspace (much to Chris’s delight).Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Truss on GitHubCMU: AI Pilot Can Navigate Crowded AirspaceEmbarrassingly Parallel Training of Expert Language ModelsToucan: Learn español without even trying3D Vision with Transformers: A SurveySphere: Natural Language Processing with TransformersSkyJack on GitHubNVIDIA AI DemosUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment, and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology. Daniel and Chris delve into protein folding, and explore the implications of this revolutionary and hugely impactful application of AI.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:AlphaFoldAlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universeAlphaFold: Timeline of a breakthroughAlphaFold Protein Structure DatabaseGitHub: deepmind / alphafoldOxford Protein Informatics Group: AlphaFold 2 is here: what’s behind the structure prediction miracleNature: How AlphaFold can realize AI’s full potential in structural biologyNature: ‘The entire protein universe’: AI predicts shape of nearly every known proteinNature: Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFoldUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Every year Mozilla releases an Internet Health Report that combines research and stories exploring what it means for the internet to be healthy. This year’s report is focused on AI. In this episode, Solana and Bridget from Mozilla join us to discuss the power dynamics of AI and the current state of AI worldwide. They highlight concerning trends in the application of this transformational technology along with positive signs of change.Featuring:Solana Larsen – LinkedIn, XBridget Todd – XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:The Internet Health Report 2022Facts of the AI Power ImbalanceUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this Fully-Connected episode, Chris and Daniel explore the geopolitics, economics, and power-brokering of artificial intelligence. What does control of AI mean for nations, corporations, and universities? What does control or access to AI mean for conflict and autonomy? The world is changing rapidly, and the rate of change is accelerating. Daniel and Chris look behind the curtain in the halls of power.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Source articles for our conversationThe Geopolitics Of Artificial IntelligenceGeopolitical implications of AI and digital surveillance adoptionArtificial intelligence is already upending geopoliticsHuge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progressLearning ResourceNational Artificial Intelligence InitiativeUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore DALL-E 2, the amazing new model from Open AI that generates incredibly detailed novel images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language. Along the way, they acknowledge that some folks in the larger AI community are suggesting that sophisticated models may be approaching sentience, but together they pour cold water on that notion. But they can’t seem to get away from DALL-E’s images of raccoons in space, and of course, who would want to?Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:DALL·E: Creating Images from TextHow DALL-E 2 Actually WorksGoogle - Raccoons in Space!On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Coqui is a speech technology startup that making huge waves in terms of their contributions to open source speech technology, open access models and data, and compelling voice cloning functionality. Josh Meyer from Coqui joins us in this episode to discuss cloning voices that have emotion, fostering open source, and how creators are using AI tech.Featuring:Josh Meyer – GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:CoquiBibleTTS - Data and models for African langaugesCoqui TTS Hugging Face SpaceCoqui on GithubJoshua’s previous Practical AI episode about Common VoiceUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Drausin Wulsin, Director of ML at Immunai, joins Daniel & Chris to talk about the role of AI in immunotherapy, and why it is proving to be the foremost approach in fighting cancer, autoimmune disease, and infectious diseases.The large amount of high dimensional biological data that is available today, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, creates unique opportunities to push the boundaries of what is possible in biology.To that end, Immunai has built the largest immune database called AMICA that contains tens of millions of cells. The company uses cutting-edge transfer learning techniques to transfer knowledge across different cell types, studies, and even species.Featuring:Drausin Wulsin – LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:ImmunaiImmunai Fact SheetDrausin Wulsin | LinkedInDrausin Wulsin | Google ScholarUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

While scaling up machine learning at Instacart, Montana Low and Lev Kokotov discovered just how much you can do with the Postgres database. They are building on that work with PostgresML, an extension to the database that lets you train and deploy models to make online predictions using only SQL. This is super practical discussion that you don’t want to miss!Featuring:Montana Low – GitHub, LinkedIn, XLev Kokotov – GitHub, LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:PostgresML websitePostgresML on GitHubUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Could we create a digital human that processes data in a variety of modalities and detects emotions? Well, that’s exactly what NTT DATA Services is trying to do, and, in this episode, Theresa Kushner joins us to talk about their motivations, use cases, current systems, progress, and related ethical issues.Featuring:Theresa Kushner – LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Digital Humans videos:Kia ShowroomLearning AssistantTelco RetailKia, in carJapan ConciergeVirtual Learning Buddy teaching kids to read:Related blog postMore information about NTT DATA’s work with MIT Media LabUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this “fully connected” episode of the podcast, we catch up on some recent developments in the AI world, including a new model from DeepMind called Gato. This generalist model can play video games, caption images, respond to chat messages, control robot arms, and much more. We also discuss the use of AI in the entertainment industry (e.g., in new Top Gun movie).Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:DeepMind’s Gato:DeepMind articleTNW articleIceman’s voice in Top Gun:Variety articleSonantic - the company behind the synthetic voiceResponsible AI review processes: From a developer’s point of viewUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Hugging Face is increasingly becomes the “hub” of AI innovation. In this episode, Merve Noyan joins us to dive into this hub in more detail. We discuss automation around model cards, reproducibility, and the new community features. If you are wanting to engage with the wider AI community, this is the show for you!Featuring:Merve Noyan – GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:The Hugging Face hubNew Hugging Face community featuresUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Don’t all AI methods need a bunch of data to work? How could AI help document and revitalize endangered languages with “human-in-the-loop” or “active learning” methods? Sarah Moeller from the University of Florida joins us to discuss those and other related questions. She also shares many of her personal experiences working with languages in low resource settings.Featuring:Sarah Moeller – Website, GitHub, LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Sarah’s academic websiteAn article about Sarah’s journey into this workUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

AI is discovering new drugs. Sound like science fiction? Not at Absci! Sean and Joshua join us to discuss their AI-driven pipeline for drug discovery. We discuss the tech along with how it might change how we think about healthcare at the most fundamental level.Sponsors:Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this! Featuring:Sean McClain – LinkedIn, XJoshua Meier – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:View Absci’s AI Lead Scientist Joshua Meier’s presentation at NVIDIA GTC 2022Learn more about Absci’s machine learning breakthroughs presented at GTCLearn more about Absci AI Research (AAIR) LabView career opportunities at AbsciAbsci AI drug discovery technologyWatch the Truist AI Symposium Podcast to get help demystifying the use of AI in drug discoveryAbsci websiteUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

We all hear a lot about MLOps these days, but where does MLOps end and DevOps begin? Our friend Luis from OctoML joins us in this episode to discuss treating AI/ML models as regular software components (once they are trained and ready for deployment). We get into topics including optimization on various kinds of hardware and deployment of models at the edge.Sponsors:Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this! Ship It! – A podcast about getting your best ideas into the world and seeing what happens. Listen to an episode that interests you and subscribe today. Featuring:Luis Ceze – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:OctoMLUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In the fourth “AI in Africa” spotlight episode, we welcome Leonida Mutuku and Godliver Owomugisha, two experts in applying advanced technology in agriculture. We had a great discussion about ending poverty, hunger, and inequality in Africa via AI innovation. The discussion touches on open data, relevant models, ethics, and more.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comChangelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! Featuring:Leo Mutuku – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XGodliver Owomugisha – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XJoyce Nabende – XShow Notes:Godliver’s Google Scholar pageGodliver’s academic homepageLocal Development Research Institute (LDRI)CropSpecOpen for Good AllianceUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Abubakar Abid joins Daniel and Chris for a tour of Gradio and tells them about the project joining Hugging Face. What’s Gradio? The fastest way to demo your machine learning model with a friendly web interface, allowing non-technical users to access, use, and give feedback on models.Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comChangelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! Featuring:Abubakar Abid – GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Gradio | We are joining Hugging Face!Gradio | GithubUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!