Practical AI

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!

This last week has been a big week for AI news. BigScience is training a huge language model (while the world watches), and NVIDIA announced their latest “Hopper” GPUs. Chris and Daniel discuss these and other topics on this fully connected episode!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:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:BigScience Language Model TrainingModel DetailsLive model logs and training curvesH100 from NVIDIA[White paper](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/h100/ https://cf-store.widencdn.net/nvdam/8/4/a/84ae26c1-6774-4083-a41d-4f3d82a6a449.pdf)Omniverse platformEarth-2 SupercomputerStanford’s AI Index 2022Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

The term “foundation” model has been around since about the middle of last year when a research group at Stanford published the comprehensive report On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. The naming of these models created some strong reactions, both good and bad. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the ideas behind the report.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:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Report: “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models”Follow up Blog post: “Reflections on Foundation Models”Upcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

What happens when your data operations grow to Internet-scale? How do thousands or millions of data producers and consumers efficiently, effectively, and productively interact with each other? How are varying formats, protocols, security levels, performance criteria, and use-case specific characteristics meshed into one unified data fabric? Chris and Daniel explore these questions in this illuminating and Fully-Connected discussion that brings this new data technology into the light.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:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Learning ResourcesGo.Dev - a great programming language for data fabric developmentBooks“Python Data Science Handbook” by Jake VanderPlasUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Daniel and Chris talk with Lukas Egger, Head of Innovation Office and Strategic Projects at SAP Business Process Intelligence. Lukas describes what it takes to bring a culture of innovation into an organization, and how to infuse product development with that innovation culture. He also offers suggestions for how to mitigate challenges and blockers.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:Lukas Egger – Website, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:SAP BPIPioneers, Settlers, Town PlannersMore with LeSSThe Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning OrganizationKaizen | WikipediaStratecheryUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

Alon from Greeneye and Moses from ClearML blew us away when they said that they are training 1000’s of models a year that get deployed to Kubernetes clusters on tractors. Yes… we said tractors, as in farming! This is a super cool discussion about MLOps solutions at scale for interesting use cases in agriculture.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:Alon Klein Orback – XMoses Guttmann – Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:GreeneyeGreeneye BlogClearMLUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

From MIT researchers who have an AI system that rapidly predicts how two proteins will attach, to Facebook’s first high-performance self-supervised algorithm that works for speech, vision, and text, Daniel and Chris survey the AI landscape for notable milestones in the application of AI in industry and research.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:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:The first high-performance self-supervised algorithm that works for speech, vision, and textDeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmerArtificial intelligence system rapidly predicts how two proteins will attachSeeing TheoryBooks“The Art of Doing Science and Engineering” by Richard W. Hamming“Patterns, Predictions, and Actions” by Moritz Hardt and Benjamin RechtUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In the third of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome Kathleen Siminyu, who is building Kiswahili voice tools at Mozilla. We had a great discussion with Kathleen about creating more diverse voice and language datasets, involving local language communities in NLP work, and expanding grassroots ML/AI efforts across Africa.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:Kathleen Siminyu – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XJoyce Nabende – XShow Notes:“Introducing myself” from KathleenMasakhaneCommon VoiceOpen for Good AllianceUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Hugging Face, Thomas Simonini is building next-gen AI in games that can talk and have smart interactions with the player using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also created a Deep Reinforcement Learning course that takes a DRL beginner to from zero to hero. Natalie and Chris explore what’s involved, and what the implications are, with a focus on the development path of the new AI data scientist.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:Thomas Simonini – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XNatalie Pistunovich – GitHub, XShow Notes:Thomas Simonini | Hugging FaceDeep Reinforcement Learning courseUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.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:Bonaventure Dossou – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XNatalie Pistunovich – GitHub, XShow Notes:Bonaventure Dossou | Instagram2020 — ongoing: My Year of Fame and how I joined the world of ResearchUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

You might know about MLPerf, a benchmark from MLCommons that measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. However, MLCommons is working on so much more! David Kanter joins us in this episode to discuss two new speech datasets that are democratizing machine learning for speech via data scale and language/speaker diversity.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 no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! The Brave Browser – Browse the web up to 8x faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default, and reward your favorite creators with the built-in Basic Attention Token. Download Brave for free and give tipping a try right here on changelog.com. 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.comFeaturing:David Kanter – GitHub, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Press Release about MLCommons datasets: MLCommons™ Association Unveils Open Datasets and Tools to Drive Democratization of Machine LearningNeurIPS Papers: People’s Speech DatasetMultilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC)Gradient article: New Datasets to Democratize Speech Recognition TechnologyBlog posts for more insight: People’s SpeechMultilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC)Downloads: People’s SpeechMultilingual Spoken Words CorpusUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

We have all seen how AI models fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. Yaron Singer joins us in this episode to discuss model vulnerabilities and automatic prevention of bad outcomes. By separating concerns and creating a “firewall” around your AI models, it’s possible to secure your AI workflows and prevent model failure.Sponsors:Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI. 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 no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this! Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion! LaunchDarkly – Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece. Featuring:Yaron Singer – XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Robust IntelligenceRobust Intelligence BlogUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

In the second of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome guests from Radiant Earth to talk about machine learning for earth observation. They give us a glimpse into their amazing data and tooling for working with satellite imagery, and they talk about use cases including crop identification and tropical storm wind speed estimation.Sponsors:Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI. Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion! LaunchDarkly – Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece. Featuring:Hamed Alemohammad – XAbba Barde – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XJoyce Nabende – XShow Notes:Radiant EarthML for Earth Observation online course“Spot the crop” challengeOpen for Good AllianceUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!

The time has come! OpenAI’s API is now available with no waitlist. Chris and Daniel dig into the API and playground during this episode, and they also discuss some of the latest tool from Hugging Face (including new reinforcement learning environments). Finally, Daniel gives an update on how he is building out infrastructure for a new AI team.Sponsors:RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative. Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:OpenAI’s API Now Available with No WaitlistHugging Face SnowballFight betaHugging Face Data Measurements ToolPandas TutorClearMLUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!