Practical AI

Latest Episodes:

Explainable AI that is accessible for all humans Mar 28, 2023

Show notes

We are seeing an explosion of AI apps that are (at their core) a thin UI on top of calls to OpenAI generative models. What risks are associated with this sort of approach to AI integration, and is explainability and accountability something that can be achieved in chat-based assistants?

Beth Rudden of Bast.ai has been thinking about this topic for some time and has developed an ontological approach to creating conversational AI. We hear more about that approach and related work in this episode.

Sponsors:

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.
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
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Bast.ai

Upcoming Events:

AI search at You.com Mar 15, 2023

Show notes

Neural search and chat-based search are all the rage right now. However, You.com has been innovating in these topics long before ChatGPT. In this episode, Bryan McCann from You.com shares insights related to our mental model of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions and practical tips related to integrating LLMs into production systems.

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.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

End-to-end cloud compute for AI/ML Mar 07, 2023

Show notes

We’ve all experienced pain moving from local development, to testing, and then on to production. This cycle can be long and tedious, especially as AI models and datasets are integrated. Modal is trying to make this loop of development as seamless as possible for AI practitioners, and their platform is pretty incredible!

Erik from Modal joins us in this episode to help us understand how we can run or deploy machine learning models, massively parallel compute jobs, task queues, web apps, and much more, without our own infrastructure.

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.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Success (and failure) in prompting Feb 28, 2023

Show notes

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.

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.
Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this!

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Generative AI model behavior in the news:

Useful guides related to prompt engineering:

co:here prompt engineering guide
Prompt engineering overview from Elvis Savaria
10 Amazing Resources For Prompt Engineering, ChatGPT, and GPT-3
Image generation prompt engineering guides: see here and here

Upcoming Events:

Applied NLP solutions & AI education Feb 22, 2023

Show notes

We’re super excited to welcome Jay Alammar to the show. Jay is a well-known AI educator, applied NLP practitioner at co:here, and author of the popular blog, “The Illustrated Transformer.” In this episode, he shares his ideas on creating applied NLP solutions, working with large language models, and creating educational resources for state-of-the-art AI.

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.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Serverless GPUs Feb 14, 2023

Show notes

We’ve been hearing about “serverless” CPUs for some time, but it’s taken a while to get to serverless GPUs. In this episode, Erik from Banana explains why its taken so long, and he helps us understand how these new workflows are unlocking state-of-the-art AI for application developers. Forget about servers, but don’t forget to listen to this one!

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.
Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this!

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Banana - Scale your machine learning inference and training on serverless GPUs.

Upcoming Events:

MLOps is alive and well Feb 07, 2023

Show notes

Worlds are colliding! This week we join forces with the hosts of the MLOps.Community podcast to discuss all things machine learning operations. We talk about how the recent explosion of foundation models and generative models is influencing the world of MLOps, and we discuss related tooling, workflows, perceptions, etc.

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.
Changelog++ – You love our content and you want to take it to the next level by showing your support. We’ll take you closer to the metal with extended episodes, make the ads disappear, and increment your audio quality with higher bitrate mp3s. Let’s do this!

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

MLOps.Community

Upcoming Events:

3D assets & simulation at NVIDIA Jan 31, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

GPU dev environments that just work Jan 24, 2023

Show notes

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!

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.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

brev.dev

DISCOUNT for our listeners 🔥:

Use coupon code “practical-ai-2023” for 5 hours of free GPU compute!
brev.dev doesn’t offer credits often, so the credit redemption button is hidden by default. Go to this link to expose the button.

Upcoming Events:

Machine learning at small organizations Jan 17, 2023

Show notes

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.

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