Hugo speaks with Jason Liu, an independent AI consultant with experience at Meta and Stitch Fix. At Stitch Fix, Jason developed impactful AI systems, like a $50 million product similarity search and the widely adopted Flight recommendation framework. Now, he helps startups and enterprises design and deploy production-level AI applications, with a focus on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and scalable solutions. This episode is a bit of an experiment. Instead of our usual technical deep...

Hugo speaks with three leading figures from the world of AI research: Sander Schulhoff, a recent University of Maryland graduate and lead contributor to the Learn Prompting initiative; Philip Resnik, professor at the University of Maryland, known for his pioneering work in computational linguistics; and Dennis Peskoff, a researcher from Princeton specializing in prompt engineering and its applications in the social sciences. This is Part 2 of a special two-part episode, prompted—no pun...

Hugo speaks with three leading figures from the world of AI research: Sander Schulhoff, a recent University of Maryland graduate and lead contributor to the Learn Prompting initiative; Philip Resnik, professor at the University of Maryland, known for his pioneering work in computational linguistics; and Dennis Peskoff, a researcher from Princeton specializing in prompt engineering and its applications in the social sciences. This is Part 1 of a special two-part episode, prompted—no pun...

Hugo speaks with Dr. Chelle Gentemann, Open Science Program Scientist for NASA’s Office of the Chief Science Data Officer, about NASA’s ambitious efforts to integrate AI across the research lifecycle. In this episode, we’ll dive deeper into how AI is transforming NASA’s approach to science, making data more accessible and advancing open science practices. We explore Measuring the Impact of Open Science: How NASA is developing new metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of open science,...

Hugo speaks with Ines Montani and Matthew Honnibal, the creators of spaCy and founders of Explosion AI. Collectively, they've had a huge impact on the fields of industrial natural language processing (NLP), ML, and AI through their widely-used open-source library spaCy and their innovative annotation tool Prodigy. These tools have become essential for many data scientists and NLP practitioners in industry and academia alike. In this wide-ranging discussion, we dive into: • The evolution...

Hugo speaks with Dan Becker and Hamel Husain, two veterans in the world of data science, machine learning, and AI education. Collectively, they’ve worked at Google, DataRobot, Airbnb, Github (where Hamel built out the precursor to copilot and more) and they both currently work as independent LLM and Generative AI consultants. Dan and Hamel recently taught a course on fine-tuning large language models that evolved into a full-fledged conference, attracting over 2,000 participants. This...

Hugo speaks with Shreya Shankar, a researcher at UC Berkeley focusing on data management systems with a human-centered approach. Shreya's work is at the cutting edge of human-computer interaction (HCI) and AI, particularly in the realm of large language models (LLMs). Her impressive background includes being the first ML engineer at Viaduct, doing research engineering at Google Brain, and software engineering at Facebook. In this episode, we dive deep into the world of LLMs and the critical...

Hugo speaks with Vincent Warmerdam, a senior data professional and machine learning engineer at :probabl, the exclusive brand operator of scikit-learn. Vincent is known for challenging common assumptions and exploring innovative approaches in data science and machine learning. In this episode, they dive deep into rethinking established methods in data science, machine learning, and AI. We explore Vincent's principled approach to the field, including: The critical importance of exposing...

Hugo speaks about Lessons Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs with Eugene Yan from Amazon, Bryan Bischof from Hex, Charles Frye from Modal, Hamel Husain from Parlance Labs, and Shreya Shankar from UC Berkeley. These five guests, along with Jason Liu who couldn't join us, have spent the past year building real-world applications with Large Language Models (LLMs). They've distilled their experiences into a report of 42 lessons across operational, strategic, and tactical dimensions, and...

Hugo speaks about Lessons Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs with Eugene Yan from Amazon, Bryan Bischof from Hex, Charles Frye from Modal, Hamel Husain from Parlance Labs, and Shreya Shankar from UC Berkeley. These five guests, along with Jason Liu who couldn't join us, have spent the past year building real-world applications with Large Language Models (LLMs). They've distilled their experiences into a report of 42 lessons across operational, strategic, and tactical dimensions, and...

Hugo speaks with Alan Nichol, co-founder and CTO of Rasa, where they build software to enable developers to create enterprise-grade conversational AI and chatbot systems across industries like telcos, healthcare, fintech, and government. What's super cool is that Alan and the Rasa team have been doing this type of thing for over a decade, giving them a wealth of wisdom on how to effectively incorporate LLMs into chatbots - and how not to. For example, if you want a chatbot that takes...

Hugo speaks with Jason Liu, an independent consultant who uses his expertise in recommendation systems to help fast-growing startups build out their RAG applications. He was previously at Meta and Stitch Fix is also the creator of Instructor, Flight, and an ML and data science educator. They talk about how Jason approaches consulting companies across many industries, including construction and sales, in building production LLM apps, his playbook for getting ML and AI up and running to build...

Hugo speaks with Sebastian Raschka, a machine learning & AI researcher, programmer, and author. As Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he focuses on the intersection of AI research, software development, and large language models (LLMs). How do you build LLMs? How can you use them, both in prototype and production settings? What are the building blocks you need to know about? ​In this episode, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about LLMs, but were too afraid to ask: from...

Hugo speaks with Omoju Miller, a machine learning guru and founder and CEO of Fimio, where she is building 21st century dev tooling. In the past, she was Technical Advisor to the CEO at GitHub, spent time co-leading non-profit investment in Computer Science Education for Google, and served as a volunteer advisor to the Obama administration’s White House Presidential Innovation Fellows. We need open tools, open data, provenance, and the ability to build fully reproducible, transparent...

Hugo speaks with Johno Whitaker, a Data Scientist/AI Researcher doing R&D with answer.ai. His current focus is on generative AI, flitting between different modalities. He also likes teaching and making courses, having worked with both Hugging Face and fast.ai in these capacities. Johno recently reminded Hugo how hard everything was 10 years ago: “Want to install TensorFlow? Good luck. Need data? Perhaps try ImageNet. But now you can use big models from Hugging Face with hi-res satellite...

Hugo speaks with Allen Downey, a curriculum designer at Brilliant, Professor Emeritus at Olin College, and the author of Think Python, Think Bayes, Think Stats, and other computer science and data science books. In 2019-20 he was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. He previously taught at Wellesley College and Colby College and was a Visiting Scientist at Google. He is also the author of the upcoming book Probably Overthinking It! They discuss Allen's new book and the key...

Jeremy Howard (Fast.ai), Shreya Shankar (UC Berkeley), and Hamel Husain (Parlance Labs) join Hugo Bowne-Anderson to talk about how LLMs and OpenAI are changing the worlds of data science, machine learning, and machine learning engineering. Jeremy Howard is co-founder of fast.ai, an ex-Chief Scientist at Kaggle, and creator of the ULMFiT approach on which all modern language models are based. Shreya Shankar is at UC Berkeley, ex Google brain, Facebook, and Viaduct. Hamel Husain has his own...

Hugo speaks with Hamel Husain, a machine learning engineer who loves building machine learning infrastructure and tools 👷. Hamel leads and contributes to many popular open-source machine learning projects. He also has extensive experience (20+ years) as a machine learning engineer across various industries, including large tech companies like Airbnb and GitHub. At GitHub, he led CodeSearchNet, a large language model for semantic search that was a precursor to CoPilot. Hamel is the founder of...

Hugo speaks with Chris Wiggins (Columbia, NYTimes) and Matthew Jones (Princeton) about their recent book How Data Happened, and the Columbia course it expands upon, data: past, present, and future. Chris is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the New York Times’ chief data scientist, and Matthew is a professor of history at Princeton University and former Guggenheim Fellow. From facial recognition to automated decision systems that inform who gets...

Hugo speaks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and security in data science and machine learning. Katharine is a Principal Data Scientist at Thoughtworks Germany focusing on privacy, ethics, and security for data science workflows. Previously, she has held numerous roles at large companies and startups in the US and Germany, implementing data processing and machine learning systems with a focus on reliability, testability, privacy, and security. In this episode, Hugo and Katharine talk...

Hugo speaks with Eric Ma about Research Data Science in Biotech. Eric leads the Research team in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence group at Moderna Therapeutics. Prior to that, he was part of a special ops data science team at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research's Informatics department. In this episode, Hugo and Eric talk about What tools and techniques they use for drug discovery (such as mRNA vaccines and medicines); The importance of machine learning, deep...

Hugo speaks with Tanya Cashorali, a data scientist and consultant that helps businesses get the most out of data, about what end-to-end data science looks like across many industries, such as retail, defense, biotech, and sports, including scoping out projects, figuring out the correct questions to ask, how projects can change, delivering on the promise, the importance of rapid prototyping, what it means to put models in production, and how to measure success. And much more, all the...

Hugo speaks with JD Long, agricultural economist, quant, and stochastic modeler, about decision making under uncertainty and how we can use our knowledge of risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, causal inference, and more to help us use data science and machine learning to make better decisions in an uncertain world. This is part 2 of a two part conversation in which we delve into decision making under uncertainty. Feel free to check out part 1 here but this episode should also stand...

Hugo speaks with JD Long, agricultural economist, quant, and stochastic modeler, about decision making under uncertainty and how we can use our knowledge of risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, causal inference, and more to help us use data science and machine learning to make better decisions in an uncertain world. This is part 1 of a two part conversation. In this, part 1, we discuss risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, and simulation, all with a view towards improving...