Emad Mostaque is CEO and co-founder of Stability AI, a startup and network of decentralized developer communities building open AI tools. Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, the well-known, open source, text-to-image generation model. Emad shares the story and mission behind Stability AI (unlocking humanity's potential with open AI technology), and explains how Stability's role as a community catalyst and compute provider might evolve as the company grows. Then, Emad and Lukas d...
Nov 15, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Jehan Wickramasuriya is the Vice President of AI, Platform & Data Services at Motorola Solutions, a global leader in public safety and enterprise security. In this episode, Jehan discusses how Motorola Solutions uses AI to simplify data streams to help maximize human potential in high-stress situations. He also shares his thoughts on augmenting synthetic data with real data and the challenges posed in partnering with startups. Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-jehan-wickr...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr
Will Falcon is the CEO and co-founder of Lightning AI, a platform that enables users to quickly build and publish ML models. In this episode, Will explains how Lightning addresses the challenges of a fragmented AI ecosystem and reveals which framework PyTorch Lightning was originally built upon (hint: not PyTorch!) He also shares lessons he took from his experience serving in the military and offers a recommendation to veterans who want to work in tech. Show notes (transcript and links): http://...
Sep 15, 2022•45 min
Aaron Colak is the Leader of Core Machine Learning at Qualtrics, an experiment management company that takes large language models and applies them to real-world, B2B use cases. In this episode, Aaron describes mixing classical linguistic analysis with deep learning models and how Qualtrics organized their machine learning organizations and model to leverage the best of these techniques. He also explains how advances in NLP have invited new opportunities in low-resource languages. Show notes (tr...
Aug 26, 2022•50 min
Jordan Fisher is the CEO and co-founder of Standard AI, an autonomous checkout company that’s pushing the boundaries of computer vision. In this episode, Jordan discusses “the Wild West” of the MLOps stack and tells Lukas why Rust beats Python. He also explains why AutoML shouldn't be overlooked and uses a bag of chips to help explain the Manifold Hypothesis. Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-jordan-fisher --- ⏳ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:40 The origins of Standard AI 08:30 G...
Aug 04, 2022•58 min
Drago Anguelov is a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo, an autonomous driving technology company and subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. We begin by discussing Drago's work on the original Inception architecture, winner of the 2014 ImageNet challenge and introduction of the inception module. Then, we explore milestones and current trends in autonomous driving, from Waymo's release of the Open Dataset to the trade-offs between modular and end-to-end systems. Drago also shares his thoug...
Jul 14, 2022•1 hr 9 min
James Cham is a co-founder and partner at Bloomberg Beta, an early-stage venture firm that invests in machine learning and the future of work, the intersection between business and technology. James explains how his approach to investing in AI has developed over the last decade, which signals of success he looks for in the ever-adapting world of venture startups (tip: look for the "gradient of admiration"), and why it's so important to demystify ML for executives and decision-makers. Lukas and J...
Jul 07, 2022•1 hr 6 min
Check out this report by Boris about DALL-E mini: https://wandb.ai/dalle-mini/dalle-mini/reports/DALL-E-mini-Generate-images-from-any-text-prompt--VmlldzoyMDE4NDAy https://wandb.ai/_scott/wandb_example/reports/Collaboration-in-ML-made-easy-with-W-B-Teams--VmlldzoxMjcwMDU5 https://twitter.com/weirddalle Connect with Boris: 📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/borisdayma --- 💬 Host: Lukas Biewald 📹 Producers: Cayla Sharp, Angelica Pan, Sanyam Bhutani, Lavanya Shukla --- Subscribe and listen to our po...
Jun 17, 2022•36 min
Tristan Handy is CEO and founder of dbt Labs. dbt (data build tool) simplifies the data transformation workflow and helps organizations make better decisions. Lukas and Tristan dive into the history of the modern data stack and the subsequent challenges that dbt was created to address; communities of identity and product-led growth; and thoughts on why SQL has survived and thrived for so long. Tristan also shares his hopes for the future of BI tools and the data stack. Show notes (transcript and...
Jun 09, 2022•1 hr 1 min
Johannes Otterbach is VP of Machine Learning Research at Merantix Momentum, an ML consulting studio that helps their clients build AI solutions. Johannes and Lukas talk about Johannes' background in physics and applications of ML to quantum computing, why Merantix is investing in creating a cloud-agnostic tech stack, and the unique challenges of developing and deploying models for different customers. They also discuss some of Johannes' articles on the impact of NLP models and the future of AI r...
May 12, 2022•45 min
Mircea Neagovici is VP, AI and Research at UiPath, where his team works on task mining and other ways of combining robotic process automation (RPA) with machine learning for their B2B products. Mircea and Lukas talk about the challenges of allowing customers to fine-tune their models, the trade-offs between traditional ML and more complex deep learning models, and how Mircea transitioned from a more traditional software engineering role to running a machine learning organization. Show notes (tra...
Apr 21, 2022•46 min
Jensen Huang is founder and CEO of NVIDIA, whose GPUs sit at the heart of the majority of machine learning models today. Jensen shares the story behind NVIDIA's expansion from gaming to deep learning acceleration, leadership lessons that he's learned over the last few decades, and why we need a virtual world that obeys the laws of physics (aka the Omniverse) in order to take AI to the next era. Jensen and Lukas also talk about the singularity, the slow-but-steady approach to building a new marke...
Mar 03, 2022•49 min
Peter Welinder is VP of Product & Partnerships at OpenAI, where he runs product and commercialization efforts of GPT-3, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and more. Boris Dayma is Machine Learning Engineer at Weights & Biases, and works on integrations and large model training. Peter, Boris, and Lukas dive into the world of GPT-3: - How people are applying GPT-3 to translation, copywriting, and other commercial tasks - The performance benefits of fine-tuning GPT-3- - Developing an API on top of GPT-...
Feb 10, 2022•44 min
Ion Stoica is co-creator of the distributed computing frameworks Spark and Ray, and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. He is also a Professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Principal Investigator of RISELab, a five-year research lab that develops technology for low-latency, intelligent decisions. Ion and Lukas chat about the challenges of making a simple (but good!) distributed framework, the similarities and differences between developing Spark and Ray, and ho...
Jan 20, 2022•54 min
Stephan Fabel is Senior Director of Infrastructure Systems & Software at NVIDIA, where he works on Base Command, a software platform to coordinate access to NVIDIA's DGX SuperPOD infrastructure. Lukas and Stephan talk about why having a supercomputer is one thing but using it effectively is another, why a deeper understanding of hardware on the practitioner level is becoming more advantageous, and which areas of the ML tech stack NVIDIA is looking to expand into. The complete show notes (tra...
Jan 06, 2022•52 min
Chris Padwick is Director of Computer Vision Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere. Their core product, See & Spray, is a weeding robot that identifies crops and weeds in order to spray only the weeds with herbicide. Chris and Lukas dive into the challenges of bringing See & Spray to life, from the hard computer vision problem of classifying weeds from crops, to the engineering feat of building and updating embedded systems that can survive on a farming ma...
Dec 23, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Kathryn Hume is Vice President Digital Investments Technology at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). At the time of recording, she was Interim Head of Borealis AI, RBC's research institute for machine learning. Kathryn and Lukas talk about ML applications in finance, from building a personal finance forecasting model to applying reinforcement learning to trade execution, and take a philosophical detour into the 17th century as they speculate on what Newton and Descartes would have thought about mach...
Dec 16, 2021•52 min
Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development. Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absci started investing so heavily in ML research (it all comes back to the data), what it'll take to build the GPT-3 of DNA, and where the future of pharma is headed. Sean and Greg also share some of the challenges of building cross-functional teams and combining two highly special...
Dec 02, 2021•55 min
You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform! In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business. Chris reveals the W&B server architecture (tl;dr - React + GraphQL), Shawn shares his favorite product feature ...
Nov 05, 2021•49 min
Pete is the Technical Lead of the TensorFlow Micro team, which works on deep learning for mobile and embedded devices. Lukas and Pete talk about hacking a Raspberry Pi to run AlexNet, the power and size constraints of embedded devices, and techniques to reduce model size. Pete also explains real world applications of TensorFlow Lite Micro and shares what it's been like to work on TensorFlow from the beginning. The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-p...
Oct 21, 2021•53 min
Pieter is the Chief Scientist and Co-founder at Covariant, where his team is building universal AI for robotic manipulation. Pieter also hosts The Robot Brains Podcast, in which he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots. Lukas and Pieter explore the state of affairs of robotics in 2021, the challenges of achieving consistency and reliability, and what it'll take to make robotics more ubiquitous. Pieter also shares so...
Oct 07, 2021•57 min
In this episode we're joined by Chris Albon, Director of Machine Learning at the Wikimedia Foundation. Lukas and Chris talk about Wikimedia's approach to content moderation, what it's like to work in a place so transparent that even internal chats are public, how Wikimedia uses machine learning (spoiler: they do a lot of models to help editors), and why they're switching to Kubeflow and Docker. Chris also shares how his focus on outcomes has shaped his career and his approach to technical interv...
Sep 23, 2021•56 min
In this episode, Emily and Lukas dive into the problems with bigger and bigger language models, the difference between form and meaning, the limits of benchmarks, and why it's important to name the languages we study. Show notes (links to papers and transcript): http://wandb.me/gd-emily-m-bender --- Emily M. Bender is a Professor of Linguistics at and Faculty Director of the Master's Program in Computational Linguistics at University of Washington. Her research areas include multilingual grammar...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Jeff talks about building Facebook's early data team, founding Cloudera, and transitioning into biomedicine with Hammer Lab and Related Sciences. (Read more: http://wandb.me/gd-jeff-hammerbacher) --- Jeff Hammerbacher is a scientist, software developer, entrepreneur, and investor. Jeff's current work focuses on drug discovery at Related Sciences, a biotech venture creation firm that he co-founded in 2020. Prior to his work at Related Sciences, Jeff was the Principal Investigator of Hammer Lab, a...
Aug 26, 2021•57 min
Josh explains how astronomy and machine learning have informed each other, their current limitations, and where their intersection goes from here. ( Read more: http://wandb.me/gd-josh-bloom ) --- Josh is a Professor of Astronomy and Chair of the Astronomy Department at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the intersection of machine learning and physics, time-domain transients events, artificial intelligence, and optical/infared instrumentation. --- Follow Gradient Dissent on Twitter: htt...
Aug 20, 2021•1 hr 8 min
Xavier shares his experience deploying healthcare models, augmenting primary care with AI, the challenges of "ground truth" in medicine, and robustness in ML. --- Xavier Amatriain is co-founder and CTO of Curai, an ML-based primary care chat system. Previously, he was VP of Engineering at Quora, and Research/Engineering Director at Neflix, where he started and led the Algorithms team responsible for Netflix's recommendation systems. --- ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 Sneak peak, intro 0:49 What is Curai? 5:...
Jul 30, 2021•50 min
Spence shares his experience creating a product around human-in-the-loop machine translation, and explains how machine translation has evolved over the years. --- Spence Green is co-founder and CEO of Lilt, an AI-powered language translation platform. Lilt combines human translators and machine translation in order to produce high-quality translations more efficiently. --- 🌟 Show notes: - http://wandb.me/gd-spence-green - Transcription of the episode - Links to papers, projects, and people ⏳ Ti...
Jul 16, 2021•44 min
Roger and DJ share some of the history behind data science as we know it today, and reflect on their experiences working on California's COVID-19 response. --- Roger Magoulas is Senior Director of Data Strategy at Astronomer, where he works on data infrastructure, analytics, and community development. Previously, he was VP of Research at O'Reilly and co-chair of O'Reilly's Strata Data and AI Conference. DJ Patil is a board member and former CTO of Devoted Health, a healthcare company for seniors...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 5 min
Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production. --- Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team is responsible for the production system that serves models to listeners. Filip Korzeniowski is a Senior Scientist at Pandora working on recommender systems. Before that, he was a PhD student working on deep neural networks for acoustic and language modeling applied to musical a...
Jul 01, 2021•41 min
From Apache TVM to OctoML, Luis gives direct insight into the world of ML hardware optimization, and where systems optimization is heading. --- Luis Ceze is co-founder and CEO of OctoML, co-author of the Apache TVM Project, and Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. His research focuses on the intersection of computer architecture, programming languages, machine learning, and molecular biology. Connect with Luis: 📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/luisceze 📍...
Jun 24, 2021•48 min
