Practical AI

Latest Episodes:

Gemini vs OpenAI Feb 14, 2024

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and genAI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it’s easy to integrate into your tech stack. Visit Neo4j.com/developer to get started.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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Data synthesis for SOTA LLMs Feb 06, 2024

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon—explores one possible solution to the internet’s authenticity problem: Blockchains. From AI that tracks its source material to generative programs that compensate—rather than cannibalize—creators. It’s a call to action for a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. One that opens the black box of AI, tracks the origins we see online, and much more. Order your copy of Read, Write, Own today at readwriteown.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Karan Malhotra – LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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Large Action Models (LAMs) & Rabbits 🐇 Jan 30, 2024

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon—explores one possible solution to the internet’s authenticity problem: Blockchains. From AI that tracks its source material to generative programs that compensate—rather than cannibalize—creators. It’s a call to action for a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. One that opens the black box of AI, tracks the origins we see online, and much more. Order your copy of Read, Write, Own today at readwriteown.com
Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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Collaboration & evaluation for LLM apps Jan 23, 2024

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon—explores one possible solution to the internet’s authenticity problem: Blockchains. From AI that tracks its source material to generative programs that compensate—rather than cannibalize—creators. It’s a call to action for a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. One that opens the black box of AI, tracks the origins we see online, and much more. Order your copy of Read, Write, Own today at readwriteown.com
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Raza Habib – LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Humanloop

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Advent of GenAI Hackathon recap Jan 17, 2024

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Read Write Own – Read, Write, Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet—a new book from entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon—explores one possible solution to the internet’s authenticity problem: Blockchains. From AI that tracks its source material to generative programs that compensate—rather than cannibalize—creators. It’s a call to action for a more open, transparent, and democratic internet. One that opens the black box of AI, tracks the origins we see online, and much more. Order your copy of Read, Write, Own today at readwriteown.com
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Rahul Nair – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Ryan Metz – LinkedIn, X
Eugenie Wirz – LinkedIn
Ralph de Wargny – LinkedIn
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

AI predictions for 2024 Jan 10, 2024

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Upcoming Events:

Open source, on-disk vector search with LanceDB Dec 19, 2023

Show notes

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!

Sponsors:

Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!

Featuring:

Chang She – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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The state of open source AI Dec 12, 2023

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Casper da Costa-Luis – GitHub
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

State of Open Source AI Book - 2023 Edition

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Suspicion machines ⚙️ Dec 05, 2023

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Gabriel Geiger – X
Justin-Casimir Braun – X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

The OpenAI debacle (a retrospective) Nov 29, 2023

Show notes

Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry.

Sponsors:

Traceroute – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs.

Featuring:

Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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