Practical AI
Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson
300 episodes
Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).
More about the show
The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!
Episodes page 3 of 6
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The first real-time voice assistant
In the midst of the demos & discussion about OpenAI’s GPT-4o voice assistant, Kyutai swooped in to release the first real-time AI voice assistant model and a pretty slick demo (Moshi). Chris & Daniel discuss what this…
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Vectoring in on Pinecone
Daniel & Chris explore the advantages of vector databases with Roie Schwaber-Cohen of Pinecone. Roie starts with a very lucid explanation of why you need a vector database in your machine learning pipeline, and then…
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Stanford's AI Index Report 2024
We’ve had representatives from Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) on the show in the past, but we were super excited to talk through their 2024 AI Index Report after such a crazy year…
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Apple Intelligence & Advanced RAG
Daniel & Chris engage in an impromptu discussion of the state of AI in the enterprise. Then they dive into the recent Apple Intelligence announcement to explore its implications. Finally, Daniel leads a deep dive into…
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The perplexities of information retrieval
Daniel & Chris sit down with Denis Yarats, Co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, to discuss Perplexity’s sophisticated AI-driven answer engine. Denis outlines some of the deficiencies in search engines, and how Perplexity’s…
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Using edge models to find sensitive data
We’ve all heard about breaches of privacy and leaks of private health information (PHI). For healthcare providers and those storing this data, knowing where all the sensitive data is stored is non-trivial. Ramin, from…
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Rise of the AI PC & local LLMs
We’ve seen a rise in interest recently and a number of major announcements related to local LLMs and AI PCs. NVIDIA, Apple, and Intel are getting into this along with models like the Phi family from Microsoft. In this…
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AI in the U.S. Congress
At the age of 72, U.S. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia enrolled at GMU to pursue a Master’s degree in C.S. with a concentration in Machine Learning. Rep. Beyer is Vice Chair of the bipartisan Artificial…
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First impressions of GPT-4o
Daniel & Chris share their first impressions of OpenAI’s newest LLM: GPT-4o and Daniel tries to bring the model into the conversation with humorously mixed results. Together, they explore the implications of Omni’s new…
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Full-stack approach for effective AI agents
There’s a lot of hype about AI agents right now, but developing robust agents isn’t yet a reality in general. Imbue is leading the way towards more robust agents by taking a full-stack approach; from hardware…
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Autonomous fighter jets?!
Yep, you heard that right. Autonomous fighter jets are in the news. Chris and Daniel discuss a modified F-16 known as the X-62A VISTA and autonomous vehicles/ systems more generally. They also comment on the Linux…
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Private, open source chat UIs
We recently gathered some Practical AI listeners for a live webinar with Danny from LibreChat to discuss the future of private, open source chat UIs. During the discussion we hear about the motivations behind…
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Mamba & Jamba
First there was Mamba… now there is Jamba from AI21. This is a model that combines the best non-transformer goodness of Mamba with good ‘ol attention layers. This results in a highly performant and efficient model that…
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Udio & the age of multi-modal AI
2024 promises to be the year of multi-modal AI, and we are already seeing some amazing things. In this “fully connected” episode, Chris and Daniel explore the new Udio product/service for generating music. Then they…
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RAG continues to rise
Daniel & Chris delight in conversation with “the funniest guy in AI”, Demetrios Brinkmann. Together they explore the results of the MLOps Community’s latest survey. They also preview the upcoming AI Quality Conference.…
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Should kids still learn to code?
In this fully connected episode, Daniel & Chris discuss NVIDIA GTC keynote comments from CEO Jensen Huang about teaching kids to code. Then they dive into the notion of “community” in the AI world, before discussing…
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AI vs software devs
Daniel and Chris are out this week, so we’re bringing you conversations all about AI’s complicated relationship to software developers from other Changelog pods: JS Party, Go Time & The Changelog. Sponsors: • Neo4j –…
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Prompting the future
Daniel & Chris explore the state of the art in prompt engineering with Jared Zoneraich, the founder of PromptLayer. PromptLayer is the first platform built specifically for prompt engineering. It can visually manage…
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Generating the future of art & entertainment
Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the…
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YOLOv9: Computer vision is alive and well
While everyone is super hyped about generative AI, computer vision researchers have been working in the background on significant advancements in deep learning architectures. YOLOv9 was just released with some…
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Representation Engineering (Activation Hacking)
Recently, we briefly mentioned the concept of “Activation Hacking” in the episode with Karan from Nous Research. In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel dive into the details of this model control mechanism,…
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Leading the charge on AI in National Security
Chris & Daniel explore AI in national security with Lt. General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.). The conversation reflects Jack’s unique background as the only senior U.S. military officer responsible for standing up and…
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Gemini vs OpenAI
Google has been releasing a ton of new GenAI functionality under the name “Gemini”, and they’ve officially rebranded Bard as Gemini. We take some time to talk through Gemini compared with offerings from OpenAI,…
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Data synthesis for SOTA LLMs
Nous Research has been pumping out some of the best open access LLMs using SOTA data synthesis techniques. Their Hermes family of models is incredibly popular! In this episode, Karan from Nous talks about the origins…
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Large Action Models (LAMs) & Rabbits 🐇
Recently the release of the rabbit r1 device resulted in huge interest in both the device and “Large Action Models” (or LAMs). What is an LAM? Is this something new? Did these models come out of nowhere, or are they…
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Collaboration & evaluation for LLM apps
Small changes in prompts can create large changes in the output behavior of generative AI models. Add to that the confusion around proper evaluation of LLM applications, and you have a recipe for confusion and…
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Advent of GenAI Hackathon recap
Recently, Intel’s Liftoff program for startups and Prediction Guard hosted the first ever “Advent of GenAI” hackathon. 2,000 people from all around the world participated in Generate AI related challenges over 7 days.…
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AI predictions for 2024
We scoured the internet to find all the AI related predictions for 2024 (at least from people that might know what they are talking about), and, in this episode, we talk about some of the common themes. We also take a…
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Open source, on-disk vector search with LanceDB
Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234. Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk through the specifics of their open source, on-disk,…
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The state of open source AI
The new open source AI book from PremAI starts with “As a data scientist/ML engineer/developer with a 9 to 5 job, it’s difficult to keep track of all the innovations.” We couldn’t agree more, and we are so happy that…
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Suspicion machines ⚙️
In this enlightening episode, we delve deeper than the usual buzz surrounding AI’s perils, focusing instead on the tangible problems emerging from the use of machine learning algorithms across Europe. We explore…
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The OpenAI debacle (a retrospective)
Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved…
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Generating product imagery at Shopify
Shopify recently released a Hugging Face space demonstrating very impressive results for replacing background scenes in product imagery. In this episode, we hear the backstory technical details about this work from…
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AI trailblazers putting people first
According to Solana Larsen: “Too often, it feels like we have lost control of the internet to the interests of Big Tech, Big Data — and now Big AI.” In the latest season of Mozilla’s IRL podcast (edited by Solana), a…
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Government regulation of AI has arrived
On Monday, October 30, 2023, the U.S. White House issued its Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Two days later, a policy paper was issued by the U.K.…
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Self-hosting & scaling models
We’re excited to have Tuhin join us on the show once again to talk about self-hosting open access models. Tuhin’s company Baseten specializes in model deployment and monitoring at any scale, and it was a privilege to…
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Deep learning in Rust with Burn 🔥
It seems like everyone is interested in Rust these days. Even the most popular Python linter, Ruff, isn’t written in Python! It’s written in Rust. But what is the state of training or inferencing deep learning models…
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AI's impact on developers
Chris & Daniel are out this week, so we’re bringing you a panel discussion from All Things Open 2023 moderated by Jerod Santo (Practical AI producer and co-host of The Changelog) and featuring keynoters Emily Freeman…
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Generative models: exploration to deployment
What is the model lifecycle like for experimenting with and then deploying generative AI models? Although there are some similarities, this lifecycle differs somewhat from previous data science practices in that models…
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Automate all the UIs!
Dominik Klotz from askui joins Daniel and Chris to discuss the automation of UI, and how AI empowers them to automate any use case on any operating system. Along the way, the trio explore various approaches and the…
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Fine-tuning vs RAG
In this episode we welcome back our good friend Demetrios from the MLOps Community to discuss fine-tuning vs. retrieval augmented generation. Along the way, we also chat about OpenAI Enterprise, results from the MLOps…
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Automating code optimization with LLMs
You might have heard a lot about code generation tools using AI, but could LLMs and generative AI make our existing code better? In this episode, we sit down with Mike from TurinTech to hear about practical code…
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The new AI app stack
Recently a16z released a diagram showing the “Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications.” In this episode, we expand on things covered in that diagram to a more general mental model for the new AI app stack. We cover…
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Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights
In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris kick it off by noting that Stability AI released their SDXL 1.0 LLM! They discuss its virtues, and then dive into a discussion regarding how the United States, European…
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Vector databases (beyond the hype)
There’s so much talk (and hype) these days about vector databases. We thought it would be timely and practical to have someone on the show that has been hands on with the various options and actually tried to build…
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There's a new Llama in town
It was an amazing week in AI news. Among other things, there is a new NeRF and a new Llama in town!!! Zip-NeRF can create some amazing 3D scenes based on 2D images, and Llama 2 from Meta promises to change the LLM…
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Legal consequences of generated content
As a technologist, coder, and lawyer, few people are better equipped to discuss the legal and practical consequences of generative AI than Damien Riehl. He demonstrated this a couple years ago by generating, writing to…
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A developer's toolkit for SOTA AI
Chris sat down with Varun Mohan and Anshul Ramachandran, CEO / Cofounder and Lead of Enterprise and Partnership at Codeium, respectively. They discussed how to streamline and enable modern development in generative AI…
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Cambrian explosion of generative models
In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore recent highlights from the current model proliferation wave sweeping the world - including Stable Diffusion XL, OpenChat, Zeroscope XL, and Salesforce XGen.…
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Automated cartography using AI
Your feed might be dominated by LLMs these days, but there are some amazing things happening in computer vision that you shouldn’t ignore! In this episode, we bring you one of those amazing stories from Gabriel Ortiz,…
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