Daniel and Chris explore the intersection of Kaggle and real-world data science in this illuminating conversation with Christof Henkel, Senior Deep Learning Data Scientist at NVIDIA and Kaggle Grandmaster. Christof offers a very lucid explanation into how participation in Kaggle can positively impact a data scientist’s skill and career aspirations. He also shared some of his insights and approach to maximizing AI productivity uses GPU-accelerated tools like RAPIDS and DALI.

We are seeing an explosion of AI apps that are (at their core) a thin UI on top of calls to OpenAI generative models. What risks are associated with this sort of approach to AI integration, and is explainability and accountability something that can be achieved in chat-based assistants?

Beth Rudden of Bast.ai has been thinking about this topic for some time and has developed an ontological approach to creating conversational AI. We hear more about that approach and related work in this episode.

Neural search and chat-based search are all the rage right now. However, You.com has been innovating in these topics long before ChatGPT. In this episode, Bryan McCann from You.com shares insights related to our mental model of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions and practical tips related to integrating LLMs into production systems.

We’ve all experienced pain moving from local development, to testing, and then on to production. This cycle can be long and tedious, especially as AI models and datasets are integrated. Modal is trying to make this loop of development as seamless as possible for AI practitioners, and their platform is pretty incredible!

Erik from Modal joins us in this episode to help us understand how we can run or deploy machine learning models, massively parallel compute jobs, task queues, web apps, and much more, without our own infrastructure.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.

Daniel and Chris do a deep dive into OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is the first LLM to enjoy direct mass adoption by folks outside the AI world. They discuss how it works, its effect on the world, ramifications of its adoption, and what we may expect in the future as these types of models continue to evolve.

While at EMNLP 2022, Daniel got a chance to sit down with an amazing group of researchers creating NLP technology that actually works for their local language communities. Just Zwennicker (Universiteit van Amsterdam) discusses his work on a machine translation system for Sranan Tongo, a creole language that is spoken in Suriname. Andiswa Bukula (SADiLaR), Rooweither Mabuya (SADiLaR), and Bonaventure Dossou (Lanfrica, Mila) discuss their work with Masakhane to strengthen and spur NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans.

The group emphasized the need for more linguistically diverse NLP systems that work in scenarios of data scarcity, non-Latin scripts, rich morphology, etc. You don’t want to miss this one!

José and Ricardo joined Daniel at EMNLP 2022 to discuss state-of-the-art machine translation, the WMT shared tasks, and quality estimation. Among other things, they talk about Unbabel’s innovations in quality estimation including COMET, a neural framework for training multilingual machine translation (MT) evaluation models.

In this special episode, we interview some of the sponsors and teams from a recent case competition organized by Purdue University, Microsoft, INFORMS, and SIL International. 170+ teams from across the US and Canada participated in the competition, which challenged students to create AI-driven systems to caption images in three languages (Thai, Kyrgyz, and Hausa).

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.

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.

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.

Recently Chris and Daniel briefly discussed the Open RAIL-M licensing and model releases on Hugging Face. In this episode, Daniel follows up on this topic based on some recent practical experience. Also included is a discussion about graph neural networks, message passing, and tweaking synthesized voices!

This panel discussion was recorded at a recent event hosted by a company, Aryballe, that we previously featured on the podcast (#120). We got a chance to discuss the AI-driven technology transforming the order/fragrance industries, and we went down the rabbit hole discussing how this technology is being adopted at large, well-established companies.