Practical AI

Latest Episodes:

scikit-learn & data science you own Nov 19, 2024

Show notes

We are at GenAI saturation, so let’s talk about scikit-learn, a long time favorite for data scientists building classifiers, time series analyzers, dimensionality reducers, and more! Scikit-learn is deployed across industry and driving a significant portion of the “AI” that is actually in production. :probabl is a new kind of company that is stewarding this project along with a variety of other open source projects. Yann Lechelle and Guillaume Lemaitre share some of the vision behind the company and talk about the future of scikit-learn!

Sponsors:

Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai

Featuring:

Yann Lechelle – LinkedIn
Guillaume Lemaitre – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Creating tested, reliable AI applications Nov 13, 2024

Show notes

It can be frustrating to get an AI application working amazingly well 80% of the time and failing miserably the other 20%. How can you close the gap and create something that you rely on? Chris and Daniel talk through this process, behavior testing, and the flow from prototype to production in this episode. They also talk a bit about the apparent slow down in the release of frontier models.

Sponsors:

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai.
Eight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

MLOps Community “Agents in Production” event

Upcoming Events:

AI is changing the cybersecurity threat landscape Nov 05, 2024

Show notes

This week, Chris is joined by Gregory Richardson, Vice President and Global Advisory CISO at BlackBerry, and Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President of Threat Research & Intelligence at BlackBerry. They address how AI is changing the threat landscape, why human defenders remain a key part of our cyber defenses, and the explain the AI standoff between cyber threat actors and cyber defenders.

Sponsors:

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.
Eight Sleep – Take your sleep and recovery to the next level. Go to eightsleep.com/PRACTICALAI and use the code PRACTICALAI to get $350 off your very own Pod 4 Ultra. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it. Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

Featuring:

Gregory Richardson – LinkedIn
Ismael Valenzuela – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

The path towards trustworthy AI Oct 29, 2024

Show notes

Elham Tabassi, the Chief AI Advisor at the U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), joins Chris for an enlightening discussion about the path towards trustworthy AI. Together they explore NIST’s ‘AI Risk Management Framework’ (AI RMF) within the context of the White House’s ‘Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence’.

Sponsors:

Timescale – Real-time analytics on Postgres, seriously fast. Over 3 million Timescale databases power loT, sensors, Al, dev tools, crypto, and finance apps — all on Postgres. Postgres, for everything.
Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog
DeleteMe – DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online.

Featuring:

Elham Tabassi – Website, LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Big data is dead, analytics is alive Oct 24, 2024

Show notes

We are on the other side of “big data” hype, but what is the future of analytics and how does AI fit in? Till and Adithya from MotherDuck join us to discuss why DuckDB is taking the analytics and AI world by storm. We dive into what makes DuckDB, a free, in-process SQL OLAP database management system, unique including its ability to execute lighting fast analytics queries against a variety of data sources, even on your laptop! Along the way we dig into the intersections with AI, such as text-to-sql, vector search, and AI-driven SQL query correction.

Sponsors:

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Timescale – Real-time analytics on Postgres, seriously fast. Over 3 million Timescale databases power loT, sensors, Al, dev tools, crypto, and finance apps — all on Postgres. Postgres, for everything.
Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.

Featuring:

Till Döhmen – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Adithya Krishnan – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Practical workflow orchestration Oct 15, 2024

Show notes

Workflow orchestration has always been a pain for data scientists, but this is exacerbated in these AI hype days by agentic workflows executing arbitrary (not pre-defined) workflows with a variety of failure modes. Adam from Prefect joins us to talk through their open source Python library for orchestration and visibility into python-based pipelines. Along the way, he introduces us to things like Marvin, their AI engineering framework, and ControlFlow, their agent workflow system.

Sponsors:

WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai
Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Towards high-quality (maybe synthetic) datasets Oct 09, 2024

Show notes

As Argilla puts it: “Data quality is what makes or breaks AI.” However, what exactly does this mean and how can AI team probably collaborate with domain experts towards improved data quality? David Berenstein & Ben Burtenshaw, who are building Argilla & Distilabel at Hugging Face, join us to dig into these topics along with synthetic data generation & AI-generated labeling / feedback.

Sponsors:

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Eight Sleep – Take your sleep and recovery to the next level. Go to eightsleep.com/PRACTICALAI and use the code PRACTICALAI to get $350 off your very own Pod 4 Ultra. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it. Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

Featuring:

Ben Burtenshaw – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
David Berenstein – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Upcoming Events:

Understanding what's possible, doable & scalable Oct 03, 2024

Show notes

We are constantly hearing about disillusionment as it relates to AI. Some of that is probably valid, but Mike Lewis, an AI architect from Cincinnati, has proven that he can consistently get LLM and GenAI apps to the point of real enterprise value (even with the Big Cos of the world). In this episode, Mike joins us to share some stories from the AI trenches & highlight what it takes (practically) to show what is possible, doable & scalable with AI.

Sponsors:

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
Eight Sleep – Take your sleep and recovery to the next level. Go to eightsleep.com/PRACTICALAI and use the code PRACTICALAI to get $350 off your very own Pod 4 Ultra. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it. Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia.

Featuring:

Mike Lewis – LinkedIn
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

Synthoni

Upcoming Events:

GraphRAG (beyond the hype) Sep 25, 2024

Show notes

Seems like we are hearing a lot about GraphRAG these days, but there are lots of questions: what is it, is it hype, what is practical? One of our all time favorite podcast friends, Prashanth Rao, joins us to dig into this topic beyond the hype. Prashanth gives us a bit of background and practical use cases for GraphRAG and graph data.

Sponsors:

Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Assembly AI – Turn voice data into summaries with AssemblyAI’s leading Speech AI models. Built by AI experts, their Speech AI models include accurate speech-to-text for voice data (such as calls, virtual meetings, and podcasts), speaker detection, sentiment analysis, chapter detection, PII redaction, and more.
Speakeasy – Production-ready, enterprise-resilient, best-in-class SDKs crafted in minutes. Speakeasy takes care of the entire SDK workflow to save you significant time, delivering SDKs to your customers in minutes with just a few clicks! Create your first SDK for free!

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Kùzu: A highly scalable, extremely fast, easy-to-use embeddable, open source graph database: GitHub repo
The goals and vision of Kùzu: Blog post
Kùzu YouTube channel
Graph RAG strategies with Kùzu: GitHub repo
Prashanth Rao’s blog: thedataquarry.com

Upcoming Events:

Pausing to think about scikit-learn & OpenAI o1 Sep 17, 2024

Show notes

Recently the company stewarding the open source library scikit-learn announced their seed funding. Also, OpenAI released “o1” with new behavior in which it pauses to “think” about complex tasks. Chris and Daniel take some time to do their own thinking about o1 and the contrast to the scikit-learn ecosystem, which has the goal to promote “data science that you own.”

Sponsors:

Assembly AI – Turn voice data into summaries with AssemblyAI’s leading Speech AI models. Built by AI experts, their Speech AI models include accurate speech-to-text for voice data (such as calls, virtual meetings, and podcasts), speaker detection, sentiment analysis, chapter detection, PII redaction, and more.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Speakeasy – Production-ready, enterprise-resilient, best-in-class SDKs crafted in minutes. Speakeasy takes care of the entire SDK workflow to save you significant time, delivering SDKs to your customers in minutes with just a few clicks! Create your first SDK for free!

Featuring: