Practical AI

Latest Episodes:

Generating product imagery at Shopify Nov 21, 2023

Show notes

Shopify recently released a Hugging Face space demonstrating very impressive results for replacing background scenes in product imagery. In this episode, we hear the backstory technical details about this work from Shopify’s Russ Maschmeyer. Along the way we discuss how to come up with clever AI solutions (without training your own model).

Sponsors:

Advent of GenAI Hackathon – Join us for a 7-day journey into the world of Generative AI with the Advent of GenAI Hackathon. Learn more here!
Traceroute – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Featuring:

Russ Maschmeyer – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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AI trailblazers putting people first Nov 14, 2023

Show notes

According to Solana Larsen: “Too often, it feels like we have lost control of the internet to the interests of Big Tech, Big Data — and now Big AI.” In the latest season of Mozilla’s IRL podcast (edited by Solana), a number of stories are featured to highlight the trailblazers who are reclaiming power over AI to put people first. We discuss some of those stories along with the issues that they surface.

Sponsors:

Traceroute Podcast – 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:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Government regulation of AI has arrived Nov 07, 2023

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Traceroute Podcast – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
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

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Self-hosting & scaling models Oct 31, 2023

Show notes

We’re excited to have Tuhin join us on the show once again to talk about self-hosting open access models. Tuhin’s company Baseten specializes in model deployment and monitoring at any scale, and it was a privilege to talk with him about the trends he is seeing in both tooling and usage of open access models. We were able to touch on the common use cases for integrating self-hosted models and how the boom in generative AI has influenced that ecosystem.

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:

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

Show Notes:

Baseten

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Deep learning in Rust with Burn 🔥 Oct 24, 2023

Show notes

It seems like everyone is interested in Rust these days. Even the most popular Python linter, Ruff, isn’t written in Python! It’s written in Rust. But what is the state of training or inferencing deep learning models in Rust? In this episode, we are joined by Nathaniel Simard, the creator burn. We discuss Rust in general, the need to have support for AI in multiple languages, and the current state of doing “AI things” in Rust.

Sponsors:

Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
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:

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

Show Notes:

burn-rs: This library strives to serve as a comprehensive deep learning framework, offering exceptional flexibility and written in Rust.

Upcoming Events:

AI's impact on developers Oct 20, 2023

Show notes

Chris & Daniel are out this week, so we’re bringing you a panel discussion from All Things Open 2023 moderated by Jerod Santo (Practical AI producer and co-host of The Changelog) and featuring keynoters Emily Freeman and James Q Quick.

Sponsors:

Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
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:

Emily Freeman – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
James Q Quick – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Upcoming Events:

Generative models: exploration to deployment Oct 03, 2023

Show notes

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.

Sponsors:

Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
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:

Upcoming Events:

Automate all the UIs! Sep 20, 2023

Show notes

Dominik Klotz from askui joins Daniel and Chris to discuss the automation of UI, and how AI empowers them to automate any use case on any operating system. Along the way, the trio explore various approaches and the integration of generative AI, large language models, and computer vision.

Sponsors:

Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month.
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:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Fine-tuning vs RAG Sep 06, 2023

Show notes

In this episode we welcome back our good friend Demetrios from the MLOps Community to discuss fine-tuning vs. retrieval augmented generation. Along the way, we also chat about OpenAI Enterprise, results from the MLOps Community LLM survey, and the orchestration and evaluation of generative AI workloads.

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:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Automating code optimization with LLMs Aug 29, 2023

Show notes

You might have heard a lot about code generation tools using AI, but could LLMs and generative AI make our existing code better? In this episode, we sit down with Mike from TurinTech to hear about practical code optimizations using AI “translation” of slow to fast code. We learn about their process for accomplishing this task along with impressive results when automated code optimization is run on existing open source projects.

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!
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.

Featuring: