Practical AI

Latest Episodes:

AI-Automated Film Making Jun 12, 2025

Show notes

An recent article in Variety was titled: "Sylvester Stallone-Backed Largo.ai Teams With Brilliant Pictures for ‘World’s First Fully AI-Automated Film Company’". Obviously this caught our attention! We sit down with Sami Arpa, CEO of Largo.ai, to unpack how films are developed, funded, and brought to life using AI. We discover how tools like script analysis, financial forecasting, and digital twins are helping creators and studios make smarter decisions.

Featuring:

Sami Arpa – LinkedIn
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

Sponsors:

Outshift by Cisco: AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

Federated learning in production (part 2) Jun 04, 2025

Show notes

Chong Shen from Flower Labs joins us to discuss what it really takes to build production-ready federated learning systems that work across data silos. We talk about the Flower framework and it's architecture (supernodes, superlinks, etc.), and what makes it both "friendly" and ready for real enterprise environments. We also explore how the generative Generative AI boom is reshaping Flower’s roadmap.

Featuring:

Chong Shen Ng – LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Episode links:

Check out upcoming webinars!

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Federated learning in production (part 1) May 30, 2025

Show notes

In this first of a two part series of episodes on federated learning, we dive into the evolving world of federated learning and distributed AI frameworks with Patrick Foley from Intel. We explore how frameworks like OpenFL and Flower are enabling secure, collaborative model training across silos, especially in sensitive fields like healthcare. The conversation touches on real-world use cases, the challenges of distributed ML/AI experiments, and why privacy-preserving techniques may become essential for deploying AI to production.

Featuring:

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

Links:

Sponsors:

NordLayer is a toggle-ready network security platform built for modern businesses. It combines VPN, access control, and threat protection in one easy-to-use platform. No hardware. No complex setup. Just secure connection and full control—in less than 10 minutes. Up to 22% off NordLayer yearly plans plus 10% on top with the coupon code practically-10.

Emailing like a superhuman May 20, 2025

Show notes

Loïc Houssier, Head of Engineering at Superhuman, joins us to discuss how AI and LLMs are reshaping the email experience. He highlights challenges related to the variability of user prompts and infrastructure optimization. Loïc emphasizes that a deep focus on user experience and real human workflows is key to building AI tools people actually love to use.

Featuring:

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

Links:

Sponsors:

Outshift by Cisco – AGNTCY is an open source collective building the Internet of Agents. It's a collaboration layer where AI agents can communicate, discover each other, and work across frameworks. For developers, this means standardized agent discovery tools, seamless protocols for inter-agent communication, and modular components to compose and scale multi-agent workflows.

Model Context Protocol Deep Dive May 08, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, Daniel and Chris unpack the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a rising standard for enabling agentic AI interactions with external systems, APIs, and data sources. They explore how MCP supports interoperability, community contributions, and a rapidly developing ecosystem of AI integrations. The conversation also highlights some real-world tooling such as FastAPI-MCP.

Featuring:

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

Links:

Seeing beyond the scan in neuroimaging Apr 30, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, we explore the intersection of AI, machine learning, and healthcare through the lens of neuroimaging and epilepsy diagnosis. Dr. Gavin Winston shares insights from his work using MRI data and machine learning to uncover subtle abnormalities in brain function. We discuss the cultural and ethical barriers to AI adoption in medicine, how predictive data analysis could transform the diagnostic workflow, and what the future holds for medical imaging in a world increasingly shaped by intelligent systems.

Featuring:

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

Links:

Open source AI to tackle your backlog Apr 17, 2025

Show notes

Vibe coding, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted pull requests? In this episode, Daniel and Chris chat with Robert Brennan and Graham Neubig of All Hands AI about how AI is transforming software development—from senior engineer productivity to open source agents that address GitHub issues. They dive into trust, tooling, collaboration, and what it means to build software in the era of AI agents. Whether you're coding from your laptop or your phone on a morning walk, the future is hands-free (and All Hands).

Featuring:

Robert Brennan – LinkedIn, X
Graham Neubig – LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

Orchestrating agents, APIs, and MCP servers Apr 14, 2025

Show notes

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Pavel Veller, EPAM’s Chief Technologist, to explore the practical challenges of orchestrating many AI agents and managing connections to disparate systems/tools. Pavel shares insights from his hands-on work with agentic architectures and internal tools like "DIAL". Pavel also helps us understand things like MCP servers and why connecting assistants via APIs is easy—but making them useful is hard.

Featuring:

Pavel Veller – LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Links:

Software and hardware acceleration with Groq Apr 02, 2025

Show notes

How do you enable AI acceleration (at both the hardware and software layers) that stays ahead of rapid industry shifts? In this episode, Dhananjay Singh from Groq dives into the evolving landscape of AI inference and acceleration. We explore how Groq optimizes the serving layer, adapts to industry shifts, and supports emerging model architectures.

Featuring:

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

Links:

Groq

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Augment Code - Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.

AI-assisted coding with GitHub's COO Mar 21, 2025

Show notes

Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, joins the hosts to discuss the evolving role of AI in software development, GitHub Copilot’s impact, and the challenges of AI-assisted coding. The conversation covers licensing concerns, ethical considerations, and how developers can navigate these complexities. Kyle also shares his vision for ambient AI, which seamlessly integrates into workflows to enhance productivity and innovation, shaping the future of developer tools.

Featuring: