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Daniel Whitenack

248 episodes

Practical AI Practical AI #261

Prompting the future

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2024-03-20T13:45:00Z #ai +2 🎧 23,381

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #259

YOLOv9: Computer vision is alive and well

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2024-03-06T17:00:00Z #ai 🎧 22,494

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #257

Leading the charge on AI in National Security

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2024-02-20T15:15:00Z #ai +2 🎧 23,243

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 testimony to the U.S. Senate’s AI Insight Forum on National Security, in which he provides the U.S. government with thoughtful guidance on how to achieve the best path forward with artificial intelligence.

Practical AI Practical AI #256

Gemini vs OpenAI

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2024-02-14T20:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 27,422

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #255

Data synthesis for SOTA LLMs

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2024-02-06T22:00:00Z #ai +1 🎧 23,531

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #254

Large Action Models (LAMs) & Rabbits 🐇

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2024-01-30T21:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 26,060

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #253

Collaboration & evaluation for LLM apps

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2024-01-23T22:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 25,952

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #252

Advent of GenAI Hackathon recap

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2024-01-17T20:00:00Z #ai 🎧 23,166

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #251

AI predictions for 2024

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2024-01-10T19:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 30,319

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #250

Open source, on-disk vector search with LanceDB

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2023-12-19T19:40:00Z #ai +3 🎧 27,881

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!

Practical AI Practical AI #249

The state of open source AI

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2023-12-12T19:45:00Z #oss +1
🎧 29,100

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #248

Suspicion machines ⚙️

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2023-12-05T21:45:00Z #ai +1 🎧 25,947

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 analyzing its behavior.

Practical AI Practical AI #246

Generating product imagery at Shopify

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2023-11-21T18:45:00Z #ai +1 🎧 26,353

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).

Practical AI Practical AI #245

AI trailblazers putting people first

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2023-11-14T17:45:00Z #ai +2 🎧 24,677

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #244

Government regulation of AI has arrived

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2023-11-07T14:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 28,742

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 and highlight key takeaways from these documents, especially the extensive and detailed executive order, which has the force of law in the United States.

Practical AI Practical AI #243

Self-hosting & scaling models

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2023-10-31T18:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 29,045

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #242

Deep learning in Rust with Burn 🔥

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2023-10-24T20:40:00Z #ai +2 🎧 28,932

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #240

Generative models: exploration to deployment

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2023-10-03T19:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 34,882

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.

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