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
241 episodes

Practical AI Practical AI #213

Success (and failure) in prompting

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2023-02-28T21:15:00Z #ai +1 🎧 26,246

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #212

Applied NLP solutions & AI education

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2023-02-22T15:15:00Z #ai +2 🎧 24,208

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #211

Serverless GPUs

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2023-02-14T21:30:00Z #ai +2 🎧 23,599

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!

Practical AI Practical AI #210

MLOps is alive and well

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2023-02-07T21:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 22,821

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #209

3D assets & simulation at NVIDIA

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2023-01-31T20:00:00Z #nvidia +1
🎧 21,505

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!

Practical AI Practical AI #208

GPU dev environments that just work

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2023-01-24T21:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 21,167

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!

Practical AI Practical AI #207

Machine learning at small organizations

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2023-01-17T20:15:00Z #ai +1 🎧 26,616

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #202

Copilot lawsuits & Galactica "science"

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2022-11-29T20:45:00Z #fully-connected +2 🎧 19,802

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #201

Protecting us with the Database of Evil

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2022-11-16T17:20:00Z #ai +3 🎧 20,453

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #200

Hybrid computing with quantum processors

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2022-11-08T21:00:00Z #qc +2 🎧 19,622

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #197

Data for All

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2022-10-18T14:05:00Z #datascience +1 🎧 20,507

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #196

What's up, DocQuery?

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2022-10-12T15:00:00Z #ai +3 🎧 19,356

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #194

Evaluating models without test data

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2022-09-20T19:20:00Z #ai +2 🎧 20,020

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #193

Stable Diffusion

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2022-09-13T22:20:00Z #ai +1 🎧 22,901

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).

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(Image from stability.ai)

Practical AI Practical AI #192

Licensing & automating creativity

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2022-09-06T21:45:00Z #fully-connected +2 🎧 18,213

AI is increasingly being applied in creative and artistic ways, especially with recent tools integrating models like Stable Diffusion. This is making some artists mad. How should we be thinking about these trends more generally, and how can we as practitioners release and license models anticipating human impacts? We explore this along with other topics (like AI models detecting swimming pools 😊) in this fully connected episode.

Practical AI Practical AI #191

Privacy in the age of AI

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris discuss concerns of privacy in the face of ever-improving AI / ML technologies. Evaluating AI’s impact on privacy from various angles, they note that ethical AI practitioners and data scientists have an enormous burden, given that much of the general population may not understand the implications of the data privacy decisions of everyday life.

This intentionally thought-provoking conversation advocates consideration and action from each listener when it comes to evaluating how their own activities either protect or violate the privacy of those whom they impact.

Practical AI Practical AI #190

Practical, positive uses for deep fakes

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2022-08-24T15:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 18,298

Differentiating between what is real versus what is fake on the internet can be challenging. Historically, AI deepfakes have only added to the confusion and chaos, but when labeled and intended for good, deepfakes can be extremely helpful. But with all of the misinformation surrounding deepfakes, it can be hard to see the benefits they bring. Lior Hakim, CTO at Hour One, joins Chris and Daniel to shed some light on the practical uses of deepfakes. He addresses the AI technology behind deepfakes, how to make positive use of deep fakes such as breaking down communications barriers, and shares how Hour One specializes in the development of virtual humans for use in professional video communications.

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