Practical AI

It’s one thing to gather some labels for your data. It’s another thing to integrate data labeling into your workflows and infrastructure in a scalable, secure, and useful way. Mark from Xelex joins us to talk through some of what he has learned after helping companies scale their data annotation efforts. We get into workflow management, labeling instructions, team dynamics, and quality assessment. This is a super practical episode!

Featuring:

• Mark Christensen – Website, LinkedIn
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• Xelex.ai

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

WeightWatcher, created by Charles Martin, is an open source diagnostic tool for analyzing Neural Networks without training or even test data! Charles joins us in this episode to discuss the tool and how it fills certain gaps in current model evaluation workflows. Along the way, we discuss statistical methods from physics and a variety of practical ways to modify your training runs.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• WeightWatcher
• Talk from the Silicon Valley ACM meetup
• A deep dive into the theory behind WeightWatcher (a talk from ENS)

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

The new stable diffusion model is everywhere! Of course you can use this model to quickly and easily create amazing, dream-like images to post on twitter, reddit, discord, etc., but this technology is also poised to be used in very pragmatic ways across industry. In this episode, Chris and Daniel take a deep dive into all things stable diffusion. They discuss the motivations for the work, the model architecture, and the differences between this model and other related releases (e.g., DALL·E 2).

 (Image from stability.ai)

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Announcement blog post
• Stable diffusion paper
• Blog post about the model from Marc Päpper
• Stable Diffusion on Hugging Face
• Hugging Face Diffusers library

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

AI is increasingly being applied in creative and artistic ways, especially with recent tools integrating models like Stable Diffusion. This is making some artists mad. How should we be thinking about these trends more generally, and how can we as practitioners release and license models anticipating human impacts? We explore this along with other topics (like AI models detecting swimming pools 😊) in this fully connected episode.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Automation and creativity

• Goodbye, humans: Call centers ‘could save $80b’ switching to AI
• DALL-E can now use AI to extend images as a human artist might
  -An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed

Nation states and AI

• Undeclared pools in France uncovered by AI technology
• France reveals hidden swimming pools with AI, taxes them
• Nvidia says U.S. government allows A.I. chip development in China
• Foreign Affairs: Spirals of Delusion - How AI Distorts Decision-Making and Makes Dictators More Dangerous

Resources

• Open RAIL Licenses
• NormConf

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this Fully-Connected episode, Daniel and Chris discuss concerns of privacy in the face of ever-improving AI / ML technologies. Evaluating AI’s impact on privacy from various angles, they note that ethical AI practitioners and data scientists have an enormous burden, given that much of the general population may not understand the implications of the data privacy decisions of everyday life.

This intentionally thought-provoking conversation advocates consideration and action from each listener when it comes to evaluating how their own activities either protect or violate the privacy of those whom they impact.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Google’s Responsible AI Practices - Privacy
• What is Data De-identification and Why is It Important?
• Hugging Face - Stable Diffusion Demo
• floret: lightweight, robust word vectors
• Using oneAPI with Intel® FPGAs Workshop

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Differentiating between what is real versus what is fake on the internet can be challenging. Historically, AI deepfakes have only added to the confusion and chaos, but when labeled and intended for good, deepfakes can be extremely helpful. But with all of the misinformation surrounding deepfakes, it can be hard to see the benefits they bring. Lior Hakim, CTO at Hour One, joins Chris and Daniel to shed some light on the practical uses of deepfakes. He addresses the AI technology behind deepfakes, how to make positive use of deep fakes such as breaking down communications barriers, and shares how Hour One specializes in the development of virtual humans for use in professional video communications.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Hour One

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Daniel and Chris cover the AI news of the day in this wide-ranging discussion. They start with Truss from Baseten while addressing how to categorize AI infrastructure and tools. Then they move on to transformers (again!), and somehow arrive at an AI pilot model from CMU that can navigate crowded airspace (much to Chris’s delight).

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Truss on GitHub
• CMU: AI Pilot Can Navigate Crowded Airspace
• Embarrassingly Parallel Training of Expert Language Models
• Toucan: Learn español without even trying
• 3D Vision with Transformers: A Survey
• Sphere: Natural Language Processing with Transformers
• SkyJack on GitHub
• NVIDIA AI Demos

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

AlphaFold is an AI system developed by DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. It regularly achieves accuracy competitive with experiment, and is accelerating research in nearly every field of biology. Daniel and Chris delve into protein folding, and explore the implications of this revolutionary and hugely impactful application of AI.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• AlphaFold
• AlphaFold reveals the structure of the protein universe
• AlphaFold: Timeline of a breakthrough
• AlphaFold Protein Structure Database
• GitHub: deepmind / alphafold
• Oxford Protein Informatics Group: AlphaFold 2 is here: what’s behind the structure prediction miracle
• Nature: How AlphaFold can realize AI’s full potential in structural biology
• Nature: ‘The entire protein universe’: AI predicts shape of nearly every known protein
• Nature: Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Every year Mozilla releases an Internet Health Report that combines research and stories exploring what it means for the internet to be healthy. This year’s report is focused on AI. In this episode, Solana and Bridget from Mozilla join us to discuss the power dynamics of AI and the current state of AI worldwide. They highlight concerning trends in the application of this transformational technology along with positive signs of change.

Featuring:

• Solana Larsen – LinkedIn, X
• Bridget Todd – X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• The Internet Health Report 2022
• Facts of the AI Power Imbalance

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

In this Fully-Connected episode, Chris and Daniel explore the geopolitics, economics, and power-brokering of artificial intelligence. What does control of AI mean for nations, corporations, and universities? What does control or access to AI mean for conflict and autonomy? The world is changing rapidly, and the rate of change is accelerating. Daniel and Chris look behind the curtain in the halls of power.

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

Source articles for our conversation

• The Geopolitics Of Artificial Intelligence
• Geopolitical implications of AI and digital surveillance adoption
• Artificial intelligence is already upending geopolitics
• Huge “foundation models” are turbo-charging AI progress

Learning Resource

• National Artificial Intelligence Initiative

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!