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Fully Connected

Fully Connected – a series where Chris and Daniel keep you up to date with everything that’s happening in the AI community.
65 episodes
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Practical AI Practical AI #297

Clones, commerce & campaigns

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2024-11-29T17:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 19,589

Chris and Daniel dive into what Trump’s impending second term could mean for AI companies, model developers, and regulators, unpacking the potential shifts in policy and innovation. Next, they discuss the latest models, like Qwen, that blur the performance gap between open and closed systems. Finally, they explore new AI tools for meeting clones and AI-driven commerce, sparking a conversation about the balance between digital convenience and fostering genuine human connections.

Practical AI Practical AI #287

Pausing to think about scikit-learn & OpenAI o1

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2024-09-17T19:00:00Z #ai +1 🎧 28,240

Recently the company stewarding the open source library scikit-learn announced their seed funding. Also, OpenAI released “o1” with new behavior in which it pauses to “think” about complex tasks. Chris and Daniel take some time to do their own thinking about o1 and the contrast to the scikit-learn ecosystem, which has the goal to promote “data science that you own.”

Practical AI Practical AI #285

AI is more than GenAI

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2024-09-05T14:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 32,328

GenAI is often what people think of when someone mentions AI. However, AI is much more. In this episode, Daniel breaks down a history of developments in data science, machine learning, AI, and GenAI in this episode to give listeners a better mental model. Don’t miss this one if you are wanting to understand the AI ecosystem holistically and how models, embeddings, data, prompts, etc. all fit together.

Practical AI Practical AI #282

Only as good as the data

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2024-08-14T21:15:00Z #ai +1 🎧 30,502

You might have heard that “AI is only as good as the data.” What does that mean and what data are we talking about? Chris and Daniel dig into that topic in the episode exploring the categories of data that you might encounter working in AI (for training, testing, fine-tuning, benchmarks, etc.). They also discuss the latest developments in AI regulation with the EU’s AI Act coming into force.

Practical AI Practical AI #278

The first real-time voice assistant

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2024-07-18T12:45:00Z #ai +1 🎧 26,727

In the midst of the demos & discussion about OpenAI’s GPT-4o voice assistant, Kyutai swooped in to release the first real-time AI voice assistant model and a pretty slick demo (Moshi). Chris & Daniel discuss what this more open approach to a voice assistant might catalyze. They also discuss recent changes to Gartner’s ranking of GenAI on their hype cycle.

Practical AI Practical AI #272

Rise of the AI PC & local LLMs

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2024-06-04T18:45:00Z #ai +2 🎧 34,122

We’ve seen a rise in interest recently and a number of major announcements related to local LLMs and AI PCs. NVIDIA, Apple, and Intel are getting into this along with models like the Phi family from Microsoft. In this episode, we dig into local AI tooling, frameworks, and optimizations to help you navigate this AI niche, and we talk about how this might impact AI adoption in the longer term.

Practical AI Practical AI #265

Udio & the age of multi-modal AI

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2024-04-16T18:20:00Z #ai +2 🎧 26,476

2024 promises to be the year of multi-modal AI, and we are already seeing some amazing things. In this “fully connected” episode, Chris and Daniel explore the new Udio product/service for generating music. Then they dig into the differences between recent multi-modal efforts and more “traditional” ways of combining data modalities.

Practical AI Practical AI #263

Should kids still learn to code?

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2024-04-02T20:00:00Z #ai +3 🎧 26,715

In this fully connected episode, Daniel & Chris discuss NVIDIA GTC keynote comments from CEO Jensen Huang about teaching kids to code. Then they dive into the notion of “community” in the AI world, before discussing challenges in the adoption of generative AI by non-technical people. They finish by addressing the evolving balance between generative AI interfaces and search engines.

Practical AI Practical AI #256

Gemini vs OpenAI

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2024-02-14T20:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 30,736

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 #254

Large Action Models (LAMs) & Rabbits 🐇

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2024-01-30T21:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 27,881

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 #251

AI predictions for 2024

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2024-01-10T19:30:00Z #ai +1 🎧 32,785

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 #244

Government regulation of AI has arrived

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2023-11-07T14:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 29,565

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 #240

Generative models: exploration to deployment

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2023-10-03T19:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 35,855

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.

Practical AI Practical AI #236

The new AI app stack

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2023-08-23T12:00:00Z #ai +2 🎧 35,416

Recently a16z released a diagram showing the “Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications.” In this episode, we expand on things covered in that diagram to a more general mental model for the new AI app stack. We cover a variety of things from model “middleware” for caching and control to app orchestration.

Practical AI Practical AI #235

Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights

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2023-08-09T16:20:00Z #ai +3 🎧 32,949

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris kick it off by noting that Stability AI released their SDXL 1.0 LLM! They discuss its virtues, and then dive into a discussion regarding how the United States, European Union, and other entities are approaching governance of AI through new laws and legal frameworks. In particular, they review the White House’s approach, noting the potential for unexpected consequences.

Practical AI Practical AI #230

Cambrian explosion of generative models

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2023-07-06T17:30:00Z #ai +3 🎧 30,256

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore recent highlights from the current model proliferation wave sweeping the world - including Stable Diffusion XL, OpenChat, Zeroscope XL, and Salesforce XGen. They note the rapid rise of open models, and speculate that just as in open source software, open models will dominate the future. Such rapid advancement creates its own problems though, so they finish by itemizing concerns such as cybersecurity, workflow productivity, and impact on human culture.

Practical AI Practical AI #228

From ML to AI to Generative AI

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2023-06-21T13:30:00Z #ai +2 🎧 36,893

Chris and Daniel take a step back to look at how generative AI fits into the wider landscape of ML/AI and data science. They talk through the differences in how one approaches “traditional” supervised learning and how practitioners are approaching generative AI based solutions (such as those using Midjourney or GPT family models). Finally, they talk through the risk and compliance implications of generative AI, which was in the news this week in the EU.

Practical AI Practical AI #213

Success (and failure) in prompting

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2023-02-28T21:15:00Z #ai +1 🎧 26,786

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 #202

Copilot lawsuits & Galactica "science"

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2022-11-29T20:45:00Z #fully-connected +2 🎧 20,147

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.

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