There’s a lot of hype about AI agents right now, but developing robust agents isn’t yet a reality in general. Imbue is leading the way towards more robust agents by taking a full-stack approach; from hardware innovations through to user interface. In this episode, Josh, Imbue’s CTO, tell us more about their approach and some of what they have learned along the way. Sponsors: Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifyin...
May 15, 2024•47 min•Ep. 269
Yep, you heard that right. Autonomous fighter jets are in the news. Chris and Daniel discuss a modified F-16 known as the X-62A VISTA and autonomous vehicles/ systems more generally. They also comment on the Linux Foundation’s new Open Platform for Enterprise AI. Sponsors: Ladder Life Insurance – 100% digital — no doctors, no needles, no paperwork. Don’t put it off until the very last minute to get term coverage life insurance through Ladder. Find out if you’re instantly approved. They’re rated ...
May 08, 2024•41 min•Ep. 268
We recently gathered some Practical AI listeners for a live webinar with Danny from LibreChat to discuss the future of private, open source chat UIs. During the discussion we hear about the motivations behind LibreChat, why enterprise users are hosting their own chat UIs, and how Danny (and the LibreChat community) is creating amazing features (like RAG and plugins). Sponsors: Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Rub...
Apr 30, 2024•38 min•Ep. 267
First there was Mamba… now there is Jamba from AI21. This is a model that combines the best non-transformer goodness of Mamba with good ‘ol attention layers. This results in a highly performant and efficient model that AI21 has open sourced! We hear all about it (along with a variety of other LLM things) from AI21’s co-founder Yoav. Sponsors: Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixi...
Apr 24, 2024•41 min•Ep. 266
2024 promises to be the year of multi-modal AI, and we are already seeing some amazing things. In this “fully connected” episode, Chris and Daniel explore the new Udio product/service for generating music. Then they dig into the differences between recent multi-modal efforts and more “traditional” ways of combining data modalities. Sponsors: Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir...
Apr 16, 2024•39 min•Ep. 265
Daniel & Chris delight in conversation with “the funniest guy in AI”, Demetrios Brinkmann. Together they explore the results of the MLOps Community’s latest survey. They also preview the upcoming AI Quality Conference . Sponsors: The Hacker Mindset – “The Hacker Mindset” written by Garrett Gee, a seasoned white hat hacker with over 20 years of experience, is available for pre-order now. This book reveals the secrets of white hat hacking and how you can apply them to overcome obstacles and ac...
Apr 10, 2024•48 min•Ep. 264
In this fully connected episode, Daniel & Chris discuss NVIDIA GTC keynote comments from CEO Jensen Huang about teaching kids to code. Then they dive into the notion of “community” in the AI world, before discussing challenges in the adoption of generative AI by non-technical people. They finish by addressing the evolving balance between generative AI interfaces and search engines. Sponsors: Ladder Life Insurance – 100% digital — no doctors, no needles, no paperwork. Don’t put it off until t...
Apr 02, 2024•39 min•Ep. 263
Daniel and Chris are out this week, so we’re bringing you conversations all about AI’s complicated relationship to software developers from other Changelog pods: JS Party, Go Time & The Changelog. Sponsors: Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like suppl...
Mar 26, 2024•57 min•Ep. 262
Daniel & Chris explore the state of the art in prompt engineering with Jared Zoneraich, the founder of PromptLayer. PromptLayer is the first platform built specifically for prompt engineering. It can visually manage prompts, evaluate models, log LLM requests, search usage history, and help your organization collaborate as a team. Jared provides expert guidance in how to be implement prompt engineering, but also illustrates how we got here, and where we’re likely to go next. Sponsors: Shopify...
Mar 20, 2024•46 min•Ep. 261
Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did. Sponsors: Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifyi...
Mar 12, 2024•42 min•Ep. 260
While everyone is super hyped about generative AI, computer vision researchers have been working in the background on significant advancements in deep learning architectures. YOLOv9 was just released with some noteworthy advancements relevant to parameter efficient models. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details and also discuss advancements in parameter efficient LLMs, such as Microsofts 1-Bit LLMs and Qualcomm’s new AI Hub. Sponsors: Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo t...
Mar 06, 2024•43 min•Ep. 259
Recently, we briefly mentioned the concept of “Activation Hacking” in the episode with Karan from Nous Research. In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the details of this model control mechanism, also called “representation engineering”. Of course, they also take time to discuss the new Sora model from OpenAI. Sponsors: Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop as...
Feb 28, 2024•44 min•Ep. 258
Chris & Daniel explore AI in national security with Lt. General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.). The conversation reflects Jack’s unique background as the only senior U.S. military officer responsible for standing up and leading two organizations in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated to fielding artificial intelligence capabilities: Project Maven and the DoD Joint AI Center (JAIC). Together, Jack, Daniel & Chris dive into the fascinating details of Jack’s recent written t...
Feb 20, 2024•52 min•Ep. 257
Google has been releasing a ton of new GenAI functionality under the name “Gemini”, and they’ve officially rebranded Bard as Gemini. We take some time to talk through Gemini compared with offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, etc. We also discuss the recent FCC decision to ban the use of AI voices in robocalls and what the decision might mean for government involvement in AI in 2024. Sponsors: Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your ...
Feb 14, 2024•43 min•Ep. 256
Nous Research has been pumping out some of the best open access LLMs using SOTA data synthesis techniques. Their Hermes family of models is incredibly popular! In this episode, Karan from Nous talks about the origins of Nous as a distributed collective of LLM researchers. We also get into fine-tuning strategies and why data synthesis works so well. Sponsors: Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon—explores one...
Feb 06, 2024•47 min•Ep. 255
Recently the release of the rabbit r1 device resulted in huge interest in both the device and “Large Action Models” (or LAMs). What is an LAM? Is this something new? Did these models come out of nowhere, or are they related to other things we are already using? Chris and Daniel dig into LAMs in this episode and discuss neuro-symbolic AI, AI tool usage, multimodal models, and more. Sponsors: Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and ...
Jan 30, 2024•48 min•Ep. 254
Small changes in prompts can create large changes in the output behavior of generative AI models. Add to that the confusion around proper evaluation of LLM applications, and you have a recipe for confusion and frustration. Raza and the Humanloop team have been diving into these problems, and, in this episode, Raza helps us understand how non-technical prompt engineers can productively collaborate with technical software engineers while building AI-driven apps. Sponsors: Read Write Own – Read, Wr...
Jan 23, 2024•46 min•Ep. 253
Recently, Intel’s Liftoff program for startups and Prediction Guard hosted the first ever “Advent of GenAI” hackathon. 2,000 people from all around the world participated in Generate AI related challenges over 7 days. In this episode, we discuss the hackathon, some of the creative solutions, the idea behind it, and more. Sponsors: Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon—explores one possible solution to the in...
Jan 17, 2024•48 min•Ep. 252
We scoured the internet to find all the AI related predictions for 2024 (at least from people that might know what they are talking about), and, in this episode, we talk about some of the common themes. We also take a moment to look back at 2023 commenting with some distance on a crazy AI year. Sponsors: Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today . Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your ...
Jan 10, 2024•45 min•Ep. 251
Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234 . Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk through the specifics of their open source, on-disk, embedded vector search offering. We talk about how their unique columnar database structure enables serverless deployments and drastic savings (without performance hits) at scale. This one is super practical, so don’t miss it! Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers ...
Dec 19, 2023•42 min•Ep. 250
The new open source AI book from PremAI starts with “As a data scientist/ML engineer/developer with a 9 to 5 job, it’s difficult to keep track of all the innovations.” We couldn’t agree more, and we are so happy that this week’s guest Casper (among other contributors) have created this resource for practitioners. During the episode, we cover the key categories to think about as you try to navigate the open source AI ecosystem, and Casper gives his thoughts on fine-tuning, vector DBs & more. ...
Dec 12, 2023•43 min•Ep. 249
In this enlightening episode, we delve deeper than the usual buzz surrounding AI’s perils, focusing instead on the tangible problems emerging from the use of machine learning algorithms across Europe. We explore “suspicion machines” — systems that assign scores to welfare program participants, estimating their likelihood of committing fraud. Join us as Justin and Gabriel share insights from their thorough investigation, which involved gaining access to one of these models and meticulously analyz...
Dec 05, 2023•47 min•Ep. 248
Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry. Sponsors: Traceroute – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fast...
Nov 29, 2023•47 min•Ep. 247
Shopify recently released a Hugging Face space demonstrating very impressive results for replacing background scenes in product imagery. In this episode, we hear the backstory technical details about this work from Shopify’s Russ Maschmeyer. Along the way we discuss how to come up with clever AI solutions (without training your own model). Sponsors: Advent of GenAI Hackathon – Join us for a 7-day journey into the world of Generative AI with the Advent of GenAI Hackathon. Learn more here ! Tracer...
Nov 21, 2023•50 min•Ep. 246
According to Solana Larsen: “Too often, it feels like we have lost control of the internet to the interests of Big Tech, Big Data — and now Big AI.” In the latest season of Mozilla’s IRL podcast (edited by Solana), a number of stories are featured to highlight the trailblazers who are reclaiming power over AI to put people first. We discuss some of those stories along with the issues that they surface. Sponsors: Traceroute Podcast – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on...
Nov 14, 2023•48 min•Ep. 245
On Monday, October 30, 2023, the U.S. White House issued its Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence . Two days later, a policy paper was issued by the U.K. government entitled The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023 . It was signed by 29 countries, including the United States and China, the global leaders in AI research. In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris parse the details...
Nov 07, 2023•45 min•Ep. 244
We’re excited to have Tuhin join us on the show once again to talk about self-hosting open access models. Tuhin’s company Baseten specializes in model deployment and monitoring at any scale, and it was a privilege to talk with him about the trends he is seeing in both tooling and usage of open access models. We were able to touch on the common use cases for integrating self-hosted models and how the boom in generative AI has influenced that ecosystem. Sponsors: Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fa...
Oct 31, 2023•41 min•Ep. 243
It seems like everyone is interested in Rust these days. Even the most popular Python linter, Ruff, isn’t written in Python! It’s written in Rust. But what is the state of training or inferencing deep learning models in Rust? In this episode, we are joined by Nathaniel Simard, the creator burn. We discuss Rust in general, the need to have support for AI in multiple languages, and the current state of doing “AI things” in Rust. Sponsors: Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October! Fastly – Our bandw...
Oct 24, 2023•41 min•Ep. 242
Chris & Daniel are out this week, so we’re bringing you a panel discussion from All Things Open 2023 moderated by Jerod Santo (Practical AI producer and co-host of The Changelog) and featuring keynoters Emily Freeman and James Q Quick. Sponsors: Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October! 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.com Fly.io – ...
Oct 20, 2023•48 min•Ep. 241
What is the model lifecycle like for experimenting with and then deploying generative AI models? Although there are some similarities, this lifecycle differs somewhat from previous data science practices in that models are typically not trained from scratch (or even fine-tuned). Chris and Daniel give a high level overview in this effort and discuss model optimization and serving. Sponsors: Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October! Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and sc...
Oct 03, 2023•49 min•Ep. 240
