Hugo speaks with Ravin Kumar,*Senior Research Data Scientist at Google Labs. Ravin’s career has taken him from building rockets at SpaceX to driving data science and technology at Sweetgreen, and now to advancing generative AI research and applications at Google Labs and DeepMind. His multidisciplinary experience gives him a rare perspective on building AI systems that combine technical rigor with practical utility.

In this episode, we dive into:

We also include a live demo where Ravin uses Notebook LM to analyze my website, extract insights, and even generate a podcast-style conversation about me. While some of the demo is visual, much can be appreciated through audio, and we’ve added a link to the video in the show notes for those who want to see it in action. We’ve also included the generated segment at the end of the episode for you to enjoy.

LINKS

As mentioned in the episode, Hugo is teaching a four-week course, Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and SWEs, co-led with Stefan Krawczyk (Dagworks, ex-StitchFix). The course focuses on building scalable, production-grade generative AI systems, with hands-on sessions, $1,000+ in cloud credits, live Q&As, and guest lectures from industry experts.

Listeners of Vanishing Gradients can get 25% off the course using this special link or by applying the code VG25 at checkout.