Chris Benson Avatar

Chris Benson

Chris Benson is Principal Artificial Intelligence Strategist at Lockheed Martin. He came to Lockheed Martin from Honeywell SPS, where he was Chief Scientist for Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning. Chris built and operationalized Honeywell’s first dedicated AI team from the ground up. Before that he was on the AI Team at Accenture.

As a strategist and thought leader, Chris is among the world’s most in-demand professional keynote speakers on artificial intelligence, machine learning, emerging technologies, and visionary futurism. His inspirational keynotes are known for their passion, energy, and clarity. He is a seasoned storyteller who delights in captivating his audiences with inspiring narratives and insightful analysis at conferences, broadcasts, interviews, forums, and corporate events around the world.

Chris is an innovative hands-on solutions architect for artificial intelligence and machine learning - and the emerging technologies they intersect - robotics, IoT, augmented reality, blockchain, mobile, edge, and cloud.

He is Co-Host of the Practical AI podcast, which reaches thousands of AI enthusiasts each week, and is also the Founder & Organizer of the Atlanta Deep Learning Meetup - one of the largest AI communities in the world.

Chris and his family are committed animal advocates who are active in animal rescue, and strive to make strategic improvements on specific animal welfare issues through advocacy for non-partisan, no-kill, and vegan legislation and regulation.

Chris Benson’s opinions are his own.

https://chrisbenson.com

Atlanta · Twitter · GitHub · LinkedIn · Website
262 episodes

Practical AI Practical AI #290

Towards high-quality (maybe synthetic) datasets

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2024-10-09T13:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 17,542

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #288

GraphRAG (beyond the hype)

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2024-09-25T18:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 25,658

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #287

Pausing to think about scikit-learn & OpenAI o1

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2024-09-17T19:00:00Z #ai +1 🎧 25,893

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.”

Practical AI Practical AI #282

Only as good as the data

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2024-08-14T21:15:00Z #ai +1 🎧 29,790

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #281

Gaudi processors & Intel's AI portfolio

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2024-08-07T13:45:00Z #ai 🎧 29,054

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #278

The first real-time voice assistant

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2024-07-18T12:45:00Z #ai +1 🎧 26,044

In the midst of the demos & discussion about OpenAI’s GPT-4o voice assistant, Kyutai swooped in to release the first real-time AI voice assistant model and a pretty slick demo (Moshi). Chris & Daniel discuss what this more open approach to a voice assistant might catalyze. They also discuss recent changes to Gartner’s ranking of GenAI on their hype cycle.

Practical AI Practical AI #277

Vectoring in on Pinecone

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2024-07-10T17:30:00Z #ai +2 🎧 25,450

Daniel & Chris explore the advantages of vector databases with Roie Schwaber-Cohen of Pinecone. Roie starts with a very lucid explanation of why you need a vector database in your machine learning pipeline, and then goes on to discuss Pinecone’s vector database, designed to facilitate efficient storage, retrieval, and management of vector data.

Practical AI Practical AI #274

The perplexities of information retrieval

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2024-06-19T16:30:00Z #ai +2 🎧 26,470

Daniel & Chris sit down with Denis Yarats, Co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, to discuss Perplexity’s sophisticated AI-driven answer engine. Denis outlines some of the deficiencies in search engines, and how Perplexity’s approach to information retrieval improves on traditional search engine systems, with a focus on accuracy and validation of the information provided.

Practical AI Practical AI #272

Rise of the AI PC & local LLMs

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2024-06-04T18:45:00Z #ai +2 🎧 33,690

We’ve seen a rise in interest recently and a number of major announcements related to local LLMs and AI PCs. NVIDIA, Apple, and Intel are getting into this along with models like the Phi family from Microsoft. In this episode, we dig into local AI tooling, frameworks, and optimizations to help you navigate this AI niche, and we talk about how this might impact AI adoption in the longer term.

Practical AI Practical AI #271

AI in the U.S. Congress

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2024-05-29T14:30:00Z #ai +2 🎧 24,836

At the age of 72, U.S. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia enrolled at GMU to pursue a Master’s degree in C.S. with a concentration in Machine Learning.

Rep. Beyer is Vice Chair of the bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Caucus & Vice Chair of the NDC’s AI Working Group. He is the author of the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act & a lead cosponsor of the CREATE AI Act, the Federal Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Act & the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act.

We hope you tune into this inspiring, nonpartisan conversation with Rep. Beyer about his decision to dive into the deep end of the AI pool & his leadership in bringing that expertise to Capitol Hill.

Practical AI Practical AI #269

Full-stack approach for effective AI agents

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2024-05-15T14:00:00Z #ai 🎧 27,005

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #267

Private, open source chat UIs

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2024-04-30T20:45:00Z #ai +2 🎧 26,417

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).

Practical AI Practical AI #266

Mamba & Jamba

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2024-04-24T15:45:00Z #ai +1 🎧 23,965

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #265

Udio & the age of multi-modal AI

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2024-04-16T18:20:00Z #ai +2 🎧 26,167

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.

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