Practical 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 dig into the differences between recent multi-modal efforts and more “traditional” ways of combining data modalities.

Sponsors:

• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 
• Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Udio
• CLIP
• BridgeTower
• LLaVA

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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.

Sponsors:

• The Hacker Mindset – “The Hacker Mindset” written by Garrett Gee, a seasoned white hat hacker with over 20 years of experience, is available for pre-order now. This book reveals the secrets of white hat hacking and how you can apply them to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals. In a world where hacking often gets a bad rap, this book shows you the white hat side – the side focused on innovation, problem-solving, and ethical principles. 
• Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

• Demetrios Brinkmann – X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• MLOps Community
• AI Quality Conference
• Evaluation Survey
• RAG failover talk from Jerry Lui
• Prompt Templates the Song

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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 challenges in the adoption of generative AI by non-technical people. They finish by addressing the evolving balance between generative AI interfaces and search engines.

Sponsors:

• Ladder Life Insurance – 100% digital — no doctors, no needles, no paperwork. Don’t put it off until the very last minute to get term coverage life insurance through Ladder. Find out if you’re instantly approved. They’re rated A and A plus. Life insurance costs more as you age, now’s the time to cross it off your list. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• NVIDIA GTC March 2024 Keynote with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang
• 5 Forces That Will Drive the Adoption of GenAI | Harvard Business Review
• Here’s why AI search engines really can’t kill Google | The Verge

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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 – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and genAI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it’s easy to integrate into your tech stack. Visit Neo4j.com/developer to get started. 
• The Hacker Mindset – “The Hacker Mindset” written by Garrett Gee, a seasoned white hat hacker with over 20 years of experience, is available for pre-order now. This book reveals the secrets of white hat hacking and how you can apply them to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals. In a world where hacking often gets a bad rap, this book shows you the white hat side – the side focused on innovation, problem-solving, and ethical principles. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

• Kent Quirk – GitHub, Mastodon, X
• Sharon DiOrio – X
• Steven Pyle – LinkedIn
• José Valim – Website, GitHub, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Kevin Ball – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Nick Nisi – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
• Johnny Boursiquot – Website, GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• JS Party #317 (This will 404 until Thursday!)
• Go Time #306
• Changelog & Friends #28

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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 prompts, evaluate models, log LLM requests, search usage history, and help your organization collaborate as a team. Jared provides expert guidance in how to be implement prompt engineering, but also illustrates how we got here, and where we’re likely to go next.

Sponsors:

• Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

• Jared Zoneraich – LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• PromptLayer

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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 future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did.

Sponsors:

• Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and genAI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it’s easy to integrate into your tech stack. Visit Neo4j.com/developer to get started. 
• Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

• Anastasis Germanidis – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• Runway | Website
• Runway | Twitter
• Runway | AI Film Festival (AIFF)
• Runway | Gen-2
• Runway | Gen48

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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 noteworthy advancements relevant to parameter efficient models. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details and also discuss advancements in parameter efficient LLMs, such as Microsofts 1-Bit LLMs and Qualcomm’s new AI Hub.

Sponsors:

• Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 
• Sentry – Launch week! New features and products all week long (so get comfy)! Tune in to Sentry’s YouTube and Discord daily at 9am PT to hear the latest scoop. Too busy? No problem - enter your email address to receive all the announcements (and win swag along the way). Use the code CHANGELOG when you sign up to get $100 OFF the team plan. 
• Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

YOLOv9:

• Yolov9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information
• Yolov9 Object Detection with Programmable Gradient Information (PGI) and Generalized Efficient
• Yolov9: A Comprehensive Guide and Custom Dataset Fine-Tuning
• YOLOv9 SOTA Machine Learning Object Detection Model
• YOLOv9
• Unleashing the Power of YOLOv9
• YOLOv9 with NNCF and OpenVINO
• ArXiv:2402.13616

Parameter efficient LLMs:

• Hugging Face Paper page, 1-Bit LLMs
• ArXiv paper: “The Era of 1-bit LLMs: All Large Language Models are in 1.58 Bits”
• Qualcomm AI Hub

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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, also called “representation engineering”. Of course, they also take time to discuss the new Sora model from OpenAI.

Sponsors:

• Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and genAI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it’s easy to integrate into your tech stack. Visit Neo4j.com/developer to get started. 
• Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Data synthesis for SOTA LLMs with Karan Malhotra from Nous Research (Practical AI #255)
• Article: Representation Engineering Mistral-7B an Acid Trip
• OpenAI Sora

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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 leading two organizations in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated to fielding artificial intelligence capabilities: Project Maven and the DoD Joint AI Center (JAIC).

Together, Jack, Daniel & Chris dive into the fascinating details of Jack’s recent written testimony to the U.S. Senate’s AI Insight Forum on National Security, in which he provides the U.S. government with thoughtful guidance on how to achieve the best path forward with artificial intelligence.

Sponsors:

• Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

• Jack Shanahan – LinkedIn
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Gen AI Master class
• Written Testimony of Lieutenant General John (Jack) N.T. Shanahan (USAF, Ret.) AI Insight Forum: National Security
• Software Defined Warfare: Architecting the DOD’s Transition to the Digital Age
• Artificial Intelligence and Geopolitics:vHitching the Disruptive Technology Cart to the Geopolitics Horse | LinkedIn
• Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) | Wikipedia

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

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, Anthropic, Cohere, etc.

We also discuss the recent FCC decision to ban the use of AI voices in robocalls and what the decision might mean for government involvement in AI in 2024.

Sponsors:

• Neo4j – Is your code getting dragged down by JOINs and long query times? The problem might be your database…Try simplifying the complex with graphs. Stop asking relational databases to do more than they were made for. Graphs work well for use cases with lots of data connections like supply chain, fraud detection, real-time analytics, and genAI. With Neo4j, you can code in your favorite programming language and against any driver. Plus, it’s easy to integrate into your tech stack. Visit Neo4j.com/developer to get started. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Gemini
• FCC decision on AI voices
• FCC Bans AI Voices in Unsolicited Robocalls
• Prompt Engineering Guide

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!