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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

The last mile of AI app development

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). Join the discussion Changel...

May 11, 202339 minEp. 222

Large models on CPUs

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. Join the discussion Changelog...

May 02, 202338 minEp. 221

Causal inference

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because th...

Apr 25, 202342 minEp. 220

Capabilities of LLMs 🤯

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, ...

Apr 19, 202338 minEp. 219

Computer scientists as rogue art historians

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 photo...

Apr 12, 202343 minEp. 218

Accelerated data science with a Kaggle grandmaster

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. Join the discussion C...

Apr 04, 202344 minEp. 217

Explainable AI that is accessible for all humans

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. ...

Mar 28, 202346 minEp. 216

AI search at You.com

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth part...

Mar 15, 202342 minEp. 215

End-to-end cloud compute for AI/ML

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 ...

Mar 07, 202344 minEp. 214

Success (and failure) in prompting

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because t...

Feb 28, 202344 minEp. 213

Applied NLP solutions & AI education

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fastly – O...

Feb 22, 202338 minEp. 212

Serverless GPUs

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! Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidt...

Feb 14, 202339 minEp. 211

MLOps is alive and well

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fa...

Feb 07, 202357 minEp. 210

3D assets & simulation at NVIDIA

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! ...

Jan 31, 202343 minEp. 209

GPU dev environments that just work

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! Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Sponsors: Fastly – Our band...

Jan 24, 202340 minEp. 208

Machine learning at small organizations

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members save 2 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join ...

Jan 17, 202350 minEp. 207

ChatGPT goes prime time!

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel Whitenac...

Jan 10, 202345 minEp. 206

NLP research by & for local communities

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 ...

Jan 03, 202337 minEp. 205

SOTA machine translation at Unbabel

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring: Ricardo Rei – X José Souza – X Daniel Wh...

Dec 13, 202230 minEp. 204

AI competitions & cloud resources

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). Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring:...

Dec 07, 202234 minEp. 203

Copilot lawsuits & Galactica "science"

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. Join the discussion Ch...

Nov 29, 202244 minEp. 202

Protecting us with the Database of Evil

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ member...

Nov 16, 202248 minEp. 201

Hybrid computing with quantum processors

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our w...

Nov 08, 202244 minEp. 200

The practicalities of releasing models

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! Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring: Chris Benson – Website , GitHub , LinkedIn , X Daniel White...

Nov 01, 202237 minEp. 199

AI adoption in large, well-established companies

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today! Featuring: Mary Fischer-...

Oct 26, 202233 minEp. 198

Data for All

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join to...

Oct 18, 202249 minEp. 197

What's up, DocQuery?

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, g...

Oct 12, 202242 minEp. 196

Production data labeling workflows

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! Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get cl...

Sep 27, 202232 minEp. 195

Evaluating models without test data

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. Join the discussion Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join...

Sep 20, 202245 minEp. 194

Stable Diffusion

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). ...

Sep 13, 202244 minEp. 193
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