Practical AI

By Daniel Whitenack and Chris BensonTechnology

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Typical duration
48 min
per episode

Based on Podcast App listening data

Practical AI episodes

November 14, 2023AI 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 number of stories are featured to highlight the trailblazers who are reclaiming power over AI to put people first. We discuss some of those stories along with the issues that they surface.

Sponsors:
Traceroute Podcast – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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:
Solana Larsen – LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Blog post announcing this season of IRL about putting people first in AI
The IRL podcast
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
48 min
November 07, 2023Government 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. government entitled The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023. It was signed by 29 countries, including the United States and China, the global leaders in AI research.
In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris parse the details and highlight key takeaways from these documents, especially the extensive and detailed executive order, which has the force of law in the United States.

Sponsors:
Traceroute Podcast – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts!
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
Featuring:
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence
FACT SHEET: President Biden Issues Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence
The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
46 min
October 31, 2023Self-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 talk with him about the trends he is seeing in both tooling and usage of open access models. We were able to touch on the common use cases for integrating self-hosted models and how the boom in generative AI has influenced that ecosystem.

Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Featuring:
Tuhin Srivastava – GitHub, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
Baseten
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
42 min
October 24, 2023Deep 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 in Rust? In this episode, we are joined by Nathaniel Simard, the creator burn. We discuss Rust in general, the need to have support for AI in multiple languages, and the current state of doing “AI things” in Rust.

Sponsors:
Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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:
Nathaniel Simard – GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
burn-rs: This library strives to serve as a comprehensive deep learning framework, offering exceptional flexibility and written in Rust.

Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
41 min
October 20, 2023AI'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 and James Q Quick.

Sponsors:
Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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:
Emily Freeman – Website, GitHub, Mastodon, X
James Q Quick – Website, GitHub, X
Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
49 min
October 03, 2023Generative 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 are typically not trained from scratch (or even fine-tuned). Chris and Daniel give a high level overview in this effort and discuss model optimization and serving.

Sponsors:
Neo4j – NODES 2023 is coming in October!
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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:
BigDL
Article: Making LLMs even more accessible with bitsandbytes, 4-bit quantization and QLoRA
Previous episode: Running large models on CPUs
Baseten’s Truss
Seldon
Hugging Face’s TGI
Intel Gaudi 2
Intel TDX
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
50 min
September 20, 2023Automate 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 integration of generative AI, large language models, and computer vision.

Sponsors:
Statsig – Build faster with confidence. Startups to Fortune 500s rely on Statsig to make data-driven decisions. Ship smarter and faster with the unified platform for feature flags, experimentation, and analytics. Our listeners get free white-glove onboarding, migration support, and 5 million free events per month.
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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:
Dominik Klotz – GitHub, LinkedIn
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
askui.com
askui on GitHub
askui on LinkedIn
askui on Twitter/X
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
44 min
September 06, 2023Fine-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 Community LLM survey, and the orchestration and evaluation of generative AI workloads.

Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Featuring:
Demetrios Brinkmann – X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
MLOps Community
LLM survey report
LLMs in Production Event - Part III
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
59 min
August 29, 2023Automating 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 optimizations using AI “translation” of slow to fast code. We learn about their process for accomplishing this task along with impressive results when automated code optimization is run on existing open source projects.

Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
Changelog News – A podcast+newsletter combo that’s brief, entertaining & always on-point. Subscribe today.
Featuring:
Mike Basios – LinkedIn, X
Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
Show Notes:
TurinTech AI
Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
45 min
August 23, 2023The 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 a variety of things from model “middleware” for caching and control to app orchestration.

Sponsors:
Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com
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.
Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster!
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:
Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications

Upcoming Events:
Register for upcoming webinars here!
46 min

About Practical AI

From the publisher's feed

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).