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.

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.

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.

It’s one thing to gather some labels for your data. It’s another thing to integrate data labeling into your workflows and infrastructure in a scalable, secure, and useful way. Mark from Xelex joins us to talk through some of what he has learned after helping companies scale their data annotation efforts. We get into workflow management, labeling instructions, team dynamics, and quality assessment. This is a super practical episode!

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.

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).

(Image from stability.ai)

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.

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.

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.

Daniel and Chris cover the AI news of the day in this wide-ranging discussion. They start with Truss from Baseten while addressing how to categorize AI infrastructure and tools. Then they move on to transformers (again!), and somehow arrive at an AI pilot model from CMU that can navigate crowded airspace (much to Chris’s delight).

AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment, and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology. Daniel and Chris delve into protein folding, and explore the implications of this revolutionary and hugely impactful application of AI.

Every year Mozilla releases an Internet Health Report that combines research and stories exploring what it means for the internet to be healthy. This year’s report is focused on AI. In this episode, Solana and Bridget from Mozilla join us to discuss the power dynamics of AI and the current state of AI worldwide. They highlight concerning trends in the application of this transformational technology along with positive signs of change.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Chris and Daniel explore the geopolitics, economics, and power-brokering of artificial intelligence. What does control of AI mean for nations, corporations, and universities? What does control or access to AI mean for conflict and autonomy? The world is changing rapidly, and the rate of change is accelerating. Daniel and Chris look behind the curtain in the halls of power.

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore DALL-E 2, the amazing new model from Open AI that generates incredibly detailed novel images from text captions for a wide range of concepts expressible in natural language. Along the way, they acknowledge that some folks in the larger AI community are suggesting that sophisticated models may be approaching sentience, but together they pour cold water on that notion. But they can’t seem to get away from DALL-E’s images of raccoons in space, and of course, who would want to?

Coqui is a speech technology startup that making huge waves in terms of their contributions to open source speech technology, open access models and data, and compelling voice cloning functionality. Josh Meyer from Coqui joins us in this episode to discuss cloning voices that have emotion, fostering open source, and how creators are using AI tech.

Drausin Wulsin, Director of ML at Immunai, joins Daniel & Chris to talk about the role of AI in immunotherapy, and why it is proving to be the foremost approach in fighting cancer, autoimmune disease, and infectious diseases.

The large amount of high dimensional biological data that is available today, combined with advanced machine learning techniques, creates unique opportunities to push the boundaries of what is possible in biology.

To that end, Immunai has built the largest immune database called AMICA that contains tens of millions of cells. The company uses cutting-edge transfer learning techniques to transfer knowledge across different cell types, studies, and even species.

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!

Could we create a digital human that processes data in a variety of modalities and detects emotions? Well, that’s exactly what NTT DATA Services is trying to do, and, in this episode, Theresa Kushner joins us to talk about their motivations, use cases, current systems, progress, and related ethical issues.

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).