Practical AI

Latest Episodes:

Exploring deep reinforcement learning Feb 01, 2022

Show notes

In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Hugging Face, Thomas Simonini is building next-gen AI in games that can talk and have smart interactions with the player using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also created a Deep Reinforcement Learning course that takes a DRL beginner to from zero to hero. Natalie and Chris explore what’s involved, and what the implications are, with a focus on the development path of the new AI data scientist.

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
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 no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!

Featuring:

Thomas Simonini – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Natalie Pistunovich – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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The world needs an AI superhero Jan 25, 2022

Show notes

From drug discovery at the Quebec AI Institute to improving capabilities with low-resourced languages at the Masakhane Research Foundation and Google AI, Bonaventure Dossou looks for opportunities to use his expertise in natural language processing to improve the world - and especially to help his homeland in the Benin Republic in Africa.

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
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 no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!

Featuring:

Bonaventure Dossou – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Natalie Pistunovich – GitHub, X

Show Notes:

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Democratizing ML for speech Jan 19, 2022

Show notes

You might know about MLPerf, a benchmark from MLCommons that measures how fast systems can train models to a target quality metric. However, MLCommons is working on so much more! David Kanter joins us in this episode to discuss two new speech datasets that are democratizing machine learning for speech via data scale and language/speaker diversity.

Sponsors:

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 no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!
The Brave Browser – Browse the web up to 8x faster than Chrome and Safari, block ads and trackers by default, and reward your favorite creators with the built-in Basic Attention Token. Download Brave for free and give tipping a try right here on changelog.com.
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:

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

Show Notes:

Press Release about MLCommons datasets: MLCommons™ Association Unveils Open Datasets and Tools to Drive Democratization of Machine Learning
NeurIPS Papers:
- People’s Speech Dataset
- Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC)
Gradient article: New Datasets to Democratize Speech Recognition Technology
Blog posts for more insight:
- People’s Speech
- Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus (MSWC)
Downloads:
- People’s Speech
- Multilingual Spoken Words Corpus

Upcoming Events:

Eliminate AI failures Jan 11, 2022

Show notes

We have all seen how AI models fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. Yaron Singer joins us in this episode to discuss model vulnerabilities and automatic prevention of bad outcomes. By separating concerns and creating a “firewall” around your AI models, it’s possible to secure your AI workflows and prevent model failure.

Sponsors:

Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI.
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 no ads, extended episodes, outtakes, bonus content, a deep discount in our merch store (soon), and more to come. Let’s do this!
Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion!
LaunchDarkly – Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

🌍 AI in Africa - Radiant Earth Jan 05, 2022

Show notes

In the second of the “AI in Africa” spotlight episodes, we welcome guests from Radiant Earth to talk about machine learning for earth observation. They give us a glimpse into their amazing data and tooling for working with satellite imagery, and they talk about use cases including crop identification and tropical storm wind speed estimation.

Sponsors:

Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI.
Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion!
LaunchDarkly – Fundamentally change how you deliver software. Innovate faster, deploy fearlessly, and make each release a masterpiece.

Featuring:

Hamed Alemohammad – X
Abba Barde – LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Joyce Nabende – X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

OpenAI and Hugging Face tooling Dec 14, 2021

Show notes

The time has come! OpenAI’s API is now available with no waitlist. Chris and Daniel dig into the API and playground during this episode, and they also discuss some of the latest tool from Hugging Face (including new reinforcement learning environments). Finally, Daniel gives an update on how he is building out infrastructure for a new AI team.

Sponsors:

RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative.
Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Friendly federated learning 🌼 Dec 07, 2021

Show notes

This episode is a follow up to our recent Fully Connected show discussing federated learning. In that previous discussion, we mentioned Flower (a “friendly” federated learning framework). Well, one of the creators of Flower, Daniel Beutel, agreed to join us on the show to discuss the project (and federated learning more broadly)! The result is a really interesting and motivating discussion of ML, privacy, distributed training, and open source AI.

Sponsors:

RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative.
Me, Myself, and AI – A podcast on artificial intelligence and business produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. Each episode, Sam Ransbotham and Sheervin Khodabandeh talk to AI leaders from organizations like Nasdaq, Spotify, Starbucks, and IKEA. Me, Myself, and AI is available wherever you get your podcasts. Just search Me, Myself, and AI.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Technology as a force for good Dec 02, 2021

Show notes

Here’s a bonus episode this week from our friends behind Me, Myself, and AI — a podcast on artificial intelligence and business, and produced by MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group. We partnered with them to help promote their awesome podcast.

We hand picked this full-length episode to share with you because of its focus on using technology as a force for good, something we’re very passionate about. This episode features, Paula Goldman, Chief Ethical and Humane Use Officer at Salesforce, and the conversation touches on some interesting topics around the role tech companies play in society at large.

Featuring:

Paula Goldman – Website, LinkedIn, X
Sam Ransbotham – X
Shervin Khodabandeh – Website, LinkedIn

Show Notes:

Subscribe to Me, Myself, and AI on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

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AI-generated code with OpenAI Codex Nov 30, 2021

Show notes

Recently, GitHub released Copilot, which is an amazing AI pair programmer powered by OpenAI’s Codex model. In this episode, Natalie Pistunovich tells us all about Codex and helps us understand where it fits in our development workflow. We also discuss MLOps and how AI is influencing software engineering more generally.

Sponsors:

RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative.
iMerit ML DataOps Summit – A FREE virtual event on December 2nd, 2021! iMerit is excited to gather 1000+ senior leaders at the forefront of deploying data solutions that power machine learning and artificial intelligence. Learn more and register to attend at imerit.net/dataops
Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion!

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Zero-shot multitask learning Nov 23, 2021

Show notes

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris ponder whether in-person AI conferences are on the verge of making a post-pandemic comeback. Then on to BigScience from Hugging Face, a year-long research workshop on large multilingual models and datasets. Specifically they dive into the T0, a series of natural language processing (NLP) AI models specifically trained for researching zero-shot multitask learning. Daniel provides a brief tour of the possible with the T0 family. They finish up with a couple of new learning resources.

Sponsors:

RudderStack – Smart customer data pipeline made for developers. RudderStack is the smart customer data pipeline. Connect your whole customer data stack. Warehouse-first, open source Segment alternative.
iMerit ML DataOps Summit – A FREE virtual event on December 2nd, 2021! iMerit is excited to gather 1000+ senior leaders at the forefront of deploying data solutions that power machine learning and artificial intelligence. Learn more and register to attend at imerit.net/dataops
Fastly – Compute@Edge free for 3 months — plus up to $100k a month in credit for an additional 6 months. Fastly’s Edge cloud network and modern approach to serverless computing allows you to deploy and run complex logic at the edge with unparalleled security and blazing fast computational speed. Head to fastly.com/podcast to take advantage of this limited time promotion!

Featuring: