Practical AI - podcast cover

Practical AI

Practical AI LLCpracticalai.fm
Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more). The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!

Episodes

Orchestrating agents, APIs, and MCP servers

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Pavel Veller, EPAM’s Chief Technologist, to explore the practical challenges of orchestrating many AI agents and managing connections to disparate systems/tools. Pavel shares insights from his hands-on work with agentic architectures and internal tools like "DIAL". Pavel also helps us understand things like MCP servers and why connecting assistants via APIs is easy—but making them useful is hard. Featuring: Pavel Veller – LinkedIn , X Daniel Whitenack – Web...

Apr 14, 202543 minEp. 309

Software and hardware acceleration with Groq

How do you enable AI acceleration (at both the hardware and software layers) that stays ahead of rapid industry shifts? In this episode, Dhananjay Singh from Groq dives into the evolving landscape of AI inference and acceleration. We explore how Groq optimizes the serving layer, adapts to industry shifts, and supports emerging model architectures. Featuring: Dhananjay Singh – LinkedIn , X Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , X Links: Groq Sponsors:...

Apr 02, 202543 minEp. 308

AI-assisted coding with GitHub's COO

Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, joins the hosts to discuss the evolving role of AI in software development, GitHub Copilot’s impact, and the challenges of AI-assisted coding. The conversation covers licensing concerns, ethical considerations, and how developers can navigate these complexities. Kyle also shares his vision for ambient AI, which seamlessly integrates into workflows to enhance productivity and innovation, shaping the future of developer tools. Featuring: Kyle Daigle – LinkedIn Chris Ben...

Mar 21, 202550 minEp. 307

Optimizing for efficiency with IBM’s Granite

We often judge AI models by leaderboard scores, but what if efficiency matters more? Kate Soule from IBM joins us to discuss how Granite AI is rethinking AI at the edge—breaking tasks into smaller, efficient components and co-designing models with hardware. She also shares why AI should prioritize efficiency frontiers over incremental benchmark gains and how seamless model routing can optimize performance. Featuring: Kate Soule – LinkedIn Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whi...

Mar 14, 202544 minEp. 306

Build a workspace of AI agents

How can every single person build a personal AI protégé and then accumulate (and share) a host of other assistants? In this episode, we dive into the world of no-code AI with Scott Meyer from Chipp.ai. We discuss AI tooling for people that can't code, the cultural shift that needs to happen for widespread AI adoption in businesses, and the predicted growth trajectory of AI assistant that you can own. Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whitenack – Website , GitHub , ...

Mar 08, 202548 minEp. 305

GenAI hot takes and bad use cases

It seems like all we hear about are the great use cases for GenAI, but where should you NOT be using the technology? On this episode Chris and Daniel share their hot takes and bad use cases. Some may surprise you! Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy ...

Feb 24, 202531 minEp. 304

Tool calling and agents

It seems like everyone is uses the term “agent” differently these days. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details of tool calling and its connection to agents. They help clarify how LLMs can “talk to” and “interact with” other systems like databases, APIs, web apps, etc. Along the way they share related learning resources. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Notion – Notion is a place where...

Feb 14, 202545 minEp. 303

Deep-dive into DeepSeek

There is crazy hype and a lot of confusion related to DeepSeek’s latest model DeepSeek R1. The products provided by DeepSeek (their version of a ChatGPT-like app) has exploded in popularity. However, ties to China have raised privacy and geopolitical concerns. In this episode, Chris and Daniel cut through the hype to talk about the model, privacy implications, running DeepSeek models securely, and what this signals for open models in 2025. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 5 minutes o...

Jan 31, 202551 minEp. 302

Video generation with realistic motion

We seem to be experiencing a surge of video generation tools, models, and applications. However, video generation models generally struggle with some basic physics, like realistic walking motion. This leaves some generated videos lacking true motion with disappointing, simplistic panning camera views. Genmo is focused on the motion side of video generation and has released some of the best open models. Paras joins us to discuss video generation and their journey at Genmo. Join the discussion Cha...

Jan 23, 202545 minEp. 301

Mozart to Megadeth at CHRP

Daniel and Chris groove with Jeff Smith, Founder and CEO at CHRP.ai. Jeff describes how CHRP anonymously analyzes emotional wellness data, derived from employees’ music preferences, giving HR leaders actionable insights to improve productivity, retention, and overall morale. By monitoring key trends and identifying shifts in emotional health across teams, CHRP.ai enables proactive decisions to ensure employees feel supported and engaged. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on ...

Dec 19, 202454 minEp. 300

Sidekick is an AI Shopify expert

Today, Chris explores Shopify Magic and other AI offerings with Mike Tamir, Distinguished ML Engineer and Head of Machine Learning, and Matt Colyer, Director of Product Management for Sidekick. They talk about how Shopify uses generative AI and LLMs to enhance their products, and they take a deeper dive into Sidekick, a first-of-its-kind, AI-enabled commerce assistant that understands a merchant’s business (products, orders, customers) and has been trained to know all about Shopify. Join the dis...

Dec 11, 202452 minEp. 299

Full-duplex, real-time dialogue with Kyutai

Kyutai, an open science research lab, made headlines over the summer when they released their real-time speech-to-speech AI assistant (beating OpenAI to market with their teased GPT-driven speech-to-speech functionality). Alex from Kyutai joins us in this episode to discuss the research lab, their recent Moshi models, and what might be coming next from the lab. Along the way we discuss small models and the AI ecosystem in France. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this ep...

Dec 04, 202450 minEp. 298

Clones, commerce & campaigns

Chris and Daniel dive into what Trump’s impending second term could mean for AI companies, model developers, and regulators, unpacking the potential shifts in policy and innovation. Next, they discuss the latest models, like Qwen, that blur the performance gap between open and closed systems. Finally, they explore new AI tools for meeting clones and AI-driven commerce, sparking a conversation about the balance between digital convenience and fostering genuine human connections. Join the discussi...

Nov 29, 202453 minEp. 297

scikit-learn & data science you own

We are at GenAI saturation, so let’s talk about scikit-learn, a long time favorite for data scientists building classifiers, time series analyzers, dimensionality reducers, and more! Scikit-learn is deployed across industry and driving a significant portion of the “AI” that is actually in production. :probabl is a new kind of company that is stewarding this project along with a variety of other open source projects. Yann Lechelle and Guillaume Lemaitre share some of the vision behind the company...

Nov 19, 202452 minEp. 296

Creating tested, reliable AI applications

It can be frustrating to get an AI application working amazingly well 80% of the time and failing miserably the other 20%. How can you close the gap and create something that you rely on? Chris and Daniel talk through this process, behavior testing, and the flow from prototype to production in this episode. They also talk a bit about the apparent slow down in the release of frontier models. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappea...

Nov 13, 202450 minEp. 295

AI is changing the cybersecurity threat landscape

This week, Chris is joined by Gregory Richardson, Vice President and Global Advisory CISO at BlackBerry, and Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President of Threat Research & Intelligence at BlackBerry. They address how AI is changing the threat landscape, why human defenders remain a key part of our cyber defenses, and the explain the AI standoff between cyber threat actors and cyber defenders. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear....

Nov 05, 202455 minEp. 294

The path towards trustworthy AI

Elham Tabassi, the Chief AI Advisor at the U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), joins Chris for an enlightening discussion about the path towards trustworthy AI. Together they explore NIST’s ‘AI Risk Management Framework’ (AI RMF) within the context of the White House’s ‘Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence’. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 10 minutes on this episode because they made the ads dis...

Oct 29, 202452 minEp. 293

Big data is dead, analytics is alive

We are on the other side of “big data” hype, but what is the future of analytics and how does AI fit in? Till and Adithya from MotherDuck join us to discuss why DuckDB is taking the analytics and AI world by storm. We dive into what makes DuckDB, a free, in-process SQL OLAP database management system, unique including its ability to execute lighting fast analytics queries against a variety of data sources, even on your laptop! Along the way we dig into the intersections with AI, such as text-to-...

Oct 24, 202450 minEp. 292

Practical workflow orchestration

Workflow orchestration has always been a pain for data scientists, but this is exacerbated in these AI hype days by agentic workflows executing arbitrary (not pre-defined) workflows with a variety of failure modes. Adam from Prefect joins us to talk through their open source Python library for orchestration and visibility into python-based pipelines. Along the way, he introduces us to things like Marvin, their AI engineering framework, and ControlFlow, their agent workflow system. Join the discu...

Oct 15, 202458 minEp. 291

Towards high-quality (maybe synthetic) datasets

As Argilla puts it: “Data quality is what makes or breaks AI.” However, what exactly does this mean and how can AI team probably collaborate with domain experts towards improved data quality? David Berenstein & Ben Burtenshaw, who are building Argilla & Distilabel at Hugging Face, join us to dig into these topics along with synthetic data generation & AI-generated labeling / feedback. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 11 minutes on this episode because they made the ads di...

Oct 09, 202457 minEp. 290

Understanding what's possible, doable & scalable

We are constantly hearing about disillusionment as it relates to AI. Some of that is probably valid, but Mike Lewis, an AI architect from Cincinnati, has proven that he can consistently get LLM and GenAI apps to the point of real enterprise value (even with the Big Cos of the world). In this episode, Mike joins us to share some stories from the AI trenches & highlight what it takes (practically) to show what is possible, doable & scalable with AI. Join the discussion Changelog++ members ...

Oct 03, 20241 hr 2 minEp. 289

GraphRAG (beyond the hype)

Seems like we are hearing a lot about GraphRAG these days, but there are lots of questions: what is it, is it hype, what is practical? One of our all time favorite podcast friends, Prashanth Rao, joins us to dig into this topic beyond the hype. Prashanth gives us a bit of background and practical use cases for GraphRAG and graph data. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 8 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fly.io – The home of Changelog.co...

Sep 25, 202455 minEp. 288

Pausing to think about scikit-learn & OpenAI o1

Recently the company stewarding the open source library scikit-learn announced their seed funding. Also, OpenAI released “o1” with new behavior in which it pauses to “think” about complex tasks. Chris and Daniel take some time to do their own thinking about o1 and the contrast to the scikit-learn ecosystem, which has the goal to promote “data science that you own.” Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: As...

Sep 17, 202450 minEp. 287

Cybersecurity in the GenAI age

Dinis Cruz drops by to chat about cybersecurity for generative AI and large language models. In addition to discussing The Cyber Boardroom, Dinis also delves into cybersecurity efforts at OWASP and that organization’s Top 10 for LLMs and Generative AI Apps. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 7 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Speakeasy – Production-ready, enterprise-resilient, best-in-class SDKs crafted in minutes. Speakeasy takes care ...

Sep 11, 202452 minEp. 286

AI is more than GenAI

GenAI is often what people think of when someone mentions AI. However, AI is much more. In this episode, Daniel breaks down a history of developments in data science, machine learning, AI, and GenAI in this episode to give listeners a better mental model. Don’t miss this one if you are wanting to understand the AI ecosystem holistically and how models, embeddings, data, prompts, etc. all fit together. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ad...

Sep 05, 202440 minEp. 285

Metrics Driven Development

How do you systematically measure, optimize, and improve the performance of LLM applications (like those powered by RAG or tool use)? Ragas is an open source effort that has been trying to answer this question comprehensively, and they are promoting a “Metrics Driven Development” approach. Shahul from Ragas joins us to discuss Ragas in this episode, and we dig into specific metrics, the difference between benchmarking models and evaluating LLM apps, generating synthetic test data and more. Join ...

Aug 29, 202442 minEp. 284

Threat modeling LLM apps

If you have questions at the intersection of Cybersecurity and AI, you need to know Donato at WithSecure! Donato has been threat modeling AI applications and seriously applying those models in his day-to-day work. He joins us in this episode to discuss his LLM application security canvas, prompt injections, alignment, and more. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 9 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Assembly AI – Turn voice data into summa...

Aug 22, 202455 minEp. 283

Only as good as the data

You might have heard that “AI is only as good as the data.” What does that mean and what data are we talking about? Chris and Daniel dig into that topic in the episode exploring the categories of data that you might encounter working in AI (for training, testing, fine-tuning, benchmarks, etc.). They also discuss the latest developments in AI regulation with the EU’s AI Act coming into force. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappea...

Aug 14, 202446 minEp. 282

Gaudi processors & Intel's AI portfolio

There is an increasing desire for and effort towards GPU alternatives for AI workloads and an ability to run GenAI models on CPUs. Ben and Greg from Intel join us in this episode to help us understand Intel’s strategy as it related to AI along with related projects, hardware, and developer communities. We dig into Intel’s Gaudi processors, open source collaborations with Hugging Face, and AI on CPU/Xeon processors. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because th...

Aug 07, 202446 minEp. 281

Broccoli AI at its best 🥦

We discussed “🥦 Broccoli AI” a couple weeks ago, which is the kind of AI that is actually good/healthy for a real world business. Bengsoon Chuah, a data scientist working in the energy sector, joins us to discuss developing and deploying NLP pipelines in that environment. We talk about good/healthy ways of introducing AI in a company that uses on-prem infrastructure, has few data science professionals, and operates in high risk environments. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 5 minute...

Jul 31, 202443 minEp. 280