About This Episode Shreya Shankar is a computer scientist, PhD student in databases at UC Berkeley, and co-author of "Operationalizing Machine Learning: An Interview Study", an ethnographic interview study with 18 machine learning engineers across a variety of industries on their experience deploying and maintaining ML pipelines in production. Shreya explains the high-level findings of "Operationalizing Machine Learning"; variables that indicate a successful deployment (velocity, validation, and versioning), common pain points, and a grouping of the MLOps tool stack into four layers. Shreya an ..read more

About this episode In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas interviews Dave Rogenmoser (CEO & Co-Founder) and Saad Ansari (Director of AI) of Jasper AI, a generative AI company with a focus on text generation for content like blog posts, articles, and more. The company has seen impressive growth since it's launch at the start of 2021. Lukas talks with Dave and Saad about how Jasper AI was able to sell the capabilities of large language models as a product so successfully, and how they are able to continually improve their product and take advantage of steps forward in the AI industry at ..read more

Cristóbal Valenzuela is co-founder and CEO of Runway ML, a startup that's building the future of AI-powered content creation tools. Runway's research on diffusion for image generation is behind Stable Diffusion, the popular text-to-image model. Cris gives a demo of Runway's video platform, including a preview of an upcoming feature that turns a text prompt into edited video. Then, Cris shares how his interest in combining technology with creativity led to Runway, and where he thinks the world of computation and content might be headed to next. Cris and Lukas also discuss Runway's tech stack an ..read more

Jeremy Howard is a co-founder of fast.ai, the non-profit research group behind the popular massive open online course "Practical Deep Learning for Coders", and the open source deep learning library "fastai". Jeremy is also a co-founder of #Masks4All, a global volunteer organization founded in March 2020 that advocated for the public adoption of homemade face masks in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19. His Washington Post article "Simple DIY masks could help flatten the curve." went viral in late March/early April 2020, and is associated with the U.S CDC's change in guidance a few days ..read more

Jerome Pesenti is the former VP of AI at Meta, a tech conglomerate that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and one of the most exciting places where AI research is happening today. Jerome shares his thoughts on Transformers-based large language models, and why he's excited by the progress but skeptical of the term "AGI". Then, he discusses some of the practical applications of ML at Meta (recommender systems and moderation!) and dives into the story behind Meta's development of PyTorch. Jerome and Lukas also chat about Jerome's time at IBM Watson and in drug discovery. Show notes (tra ..read more

D. Sculley is CEO of Kaggle, the beloved and well-known data science and machine learning community. D. discusses his influential 2015 paper "Machine Learning: The High Interest Credit Card of Technical Debt" and what the current challenges of deploying models in the real world are now, in 2022. Then, D. and Lukas chat about why Kaggle is like a rain forest, and about Kaggle's historic, current, and potential future roles in the broader machine learning community. Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-d-sculley --- ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 1:02 Machine learning and technical de ..read more

Emad Mostaque is CEO and co-founder of Stability AI, a startup and network of decentralized developer communities building open AI tools. Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, the well-known, open source, text-to-image generation model. Emad shares the story and mission behind Stability AI (unlocking humanity's potential with open AI technology), and explains how Stability's role as a community catalyst and compute provider might evolve as the company grows. Then, Emad and Lukas discuss what the future might hold in store: big models vs "optimal" models, better datasets, and mor ..read more

Aaron Colak is the Leader of Core Machine Learning at Qualtrics, an experiment management company that takes large language models and applies them to real-world, B2B use cases. In this episode, Aaron describes mixing classical linguistic analysis with deep learning models and how Qualtrics organized their machine learning organizations and model to leverage the best of these techniques. He also explains how advances in NLP have invited new opportunities in low-resource languages. Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-aaron-colak --- ⏳ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:57 Evolving fro ..read more

Jordan Fisher is the CEO and co-founder of Standard AI, an autonomous checkout company that’s pushing the boundaries of computer vision. In this episode, Jordan discusses “the Wild West” of the MLOps stack and tells Lukas why Rust beats Python. He also explains why AutoML shouldn't be overlooked and uses a bag of chips to help explain the Manifold Hypothesis. Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-jordan-fisher --- ⏳ Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:40 The origins of Standard AI 08:30 Getting Standard into stores 18:00 Supervised learning, the advent of synthetic data, and the manifol ..read more

Jensen Huang is founder and CEO of NVIDIA, whose GPUs sit at the heart of the majority of machine learning models today. Jensen shares the story behind NVIDIA's expansion from gaming to deep learning acceleration, leadership lessons that he's learned over the last few decades, and why we need a virtual world that obeys the laws of physics (aka the Omniverse) in order to take AI to the next era. Jensen and Lukas also talk about the singularity, the slow-but-steady approach to building a new market, and the importance of MLOps. The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: ht ..read more