While scaling up machine learning at Instacart, Montana Low and Lev Kokotov discovered just how much you can do with the Postgres database. They are building on that work with PostgresML, an extension to the database that lets you train and deploy models to make online predictions using only SQL. This is super practical discussion that you don’t want to miss!

In this “fully connected” episode of the podcast, we catch up on some recent developments in the AI world, including a new model from DeepMind called Gato. This generalist model can play video games, caption images, respond to chat messages, control robot arms, and much more. We also discuss the use of AI in the entertainment industry (e.g., in new Top Gun movie).

Hugging Face is increasingly becomes the “hub” of AI innovation. In this episode, Merve Noyan joins us to dive into this hub in more detail. We discuss automation around model cards, reproducibility, and the new community features. If you are wanting to engage with the wider AI community, this is the show for you!

Don’t all AI methods need a bunch of data to work? How could AI help document and revitalize endangered languages with “human-in-the-loop” or “active learning” methods? Sarah Moeller from the University of Florida joins us to discuss those and other related questions. She also shares many of her personal experiences working with languages in low resource settings.

AI is discovering new drugs. Sound like science fiction? Not at Absci! Sean and Joshua join us to discuss their AI-driven pipeline for drug discovery. We discuss the tech along with how it might change how we think about healthcare at the most fundamental level.

We all hear a lot about MLOps these days, but where does MLOps end and DevOps begin? Our friend Luis from OctoML joins us in this episode to discuss treating AI/ML models as regular software components (once they are trained and ready for deployment). We get into topics including optimization on various kinds of hardware and deployment of models at the edge.

In the fourth “AI in Africa” spotlight episode, we welcome Leonida Mutuku and Godliver Owomugisha, two experts in applying advanced technology in agriculture. We had a great discussion about ending poverty, hunger, and inequality in Africa via AI innovation. The discussion touches on open data, relevant models, ethics, and more.

Abubakar Abid joins Daniel and Chris for a tour of Gradio and tells them about the project joining Hugging Face. What’s Gradio? The fastest way to demo your machine learning model with a friendly web interface, allowing non-technical users to access, use, and give feedback on models.

This last week has been a big week for AI news. BigScience is training a huge language model (while the world watches), and NVIDIA announced their latest “Hopper” GPUs. Chris and Daniel discuss these and other topics on this fully connected episode!

The term “foundation” model has been around since about the middle of last year when a research group at Stanford published the comprehensive report On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models. The naming of these models created some strong reactions, both good and bad. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the ideas behind the report.

What happens when your data operations grow to Internet-scale? How do thousands or millions of data producers and consumers efficiently, effectively, and productively interact with each other? How are varying formats, protocols, security levels, performance criteria, and use-case specific characteristics meshed into one unified data fabric? Chris and Daniel explore these questions in this illuminating and Fully-Connected discussion that brings this new data technology into the light.

Daniel and Chris talk with Lukas Egger, Head of Innovation Office and Strategic Projects at SAP Business Process Intelligence. Lukas describes what it takes to bring a culture of innovation into an organization, and how to infuse product development with that innovation culture. He also offers suggestions for how to mitigate challenges and blockers.

Alon from Greeneye and Moses from ClearML blew us away when they said that they are training 1000’s of models a year that get deployed to Kubernetes clusters on tractors. Yes… we said tractors, as in farming! This is a super cool discussion about MLOps solutions at scale for interesting use cases in agriculture.

From MIT researchers who have an AI system that rapidly predicts how two proteins will attach, to Facebook’s first high-performance self-supervised algorithm that works for speech, vision, and text, Daniel and Chris survey the AI landscape for notable milestones in the application of AI in industry and research.

In the third of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome Kathleen Siminyu, who is building Kiswahili voice tools at Mozilla. We had a great discussion with Kathleen about creating more diverse voice and language datasets, involving local language communities in NLP work, and expanding grassroots ML/AI efforts across Africa.

In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Hugging Face, Thomas Simonini is building next-gen AI in games that can talk and have smart interactions with the player using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also created a Deep Reinforcement Learning course that takes a DRL beginner to from zero to hero. Natalie and Chris explore what’s involved, and what the implications are, with a focus on the development path of the new AI data scientist.

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.

You might know about MLPerf, a benchmark from MLCommons that measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. However, MLCommons is working on so much more! David Kanter joins us in this episode to discuss two new speech datasets that are democratizing machine learning for speech via data scale and language/speaker diversity.

We have all seen how AI models fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. Yaron Singer joins us in this episode to discuss model vulnerabilities and automatic prevention of bad outcomes. By separating concerns and creating a “firewall” around your AI models, it’s possible to secure your AI workflows and prevent model failure.

In the second of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome guests from Radiant Earth to talk about machine learning for earth observation. They give us a glimpse into their amazing data and tooling for working with satellite imagery, and they talk about use cases including crop identification and tropical storm wind speed estimation.