Practical AI

How can every single person build a personal AI protégé and then accumulate (and share) a host of other assistants? In this episode, we dive into the world of no-code AI with Scott Meyer from Chipp.ai. We discuss AI tooling for people that can't code, the cultural shift that needs to happen for widespread AI adoption in businesses, and the predicted growth trajectory of AI assistant that you can own.

Featuring:

• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X
• Scott Meyer - LinkedIn, X

Sponsors:

• Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products.

Show Notes:

• Chipp.ai
• Chipp.ai's Discord

It seems like all we hear about are the great use cases for GenAI, but where should you NOT be using the technology? On this episode Chris and Daniel share their hot takes and bad use cases. Some may surprise you!

Sponsors:

• Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. 
• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. 

Featuring:

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

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

It seems like everyone is uses the term “agent” differently these days. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details of tool calling and its connection to agents. They help clarify how LLMs can “talk to” and “interact with” other systems like databases, APIs, web apps, etc. Along the way they share related learning resources.

• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• smolagents
• Hugging Face agents course

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

There is crazy hype and a lot of confusion related to DeepSeek’s latest model DeepSeek R1. The products provided by DeepSeek (their version of a ChatGPT-like app) has exploded in popularity. However, ties to China have raised privacy and geopolitical concerns. In this episode, Chris and Daniel cut through the hype to talk about the model, privacy implications, running DeepSeek models securely, and what this signals for open models in 2025.

Sponsors:

• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. 
• Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Daniel’s blog post on DeepSeek
• DeepSeek R1 on Hugging Face
• DeepSeek

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

We seem to be experiencing a surge of video generation tools, models, and applications. However, video generation models generally struggle with some basic physics, like realistic walking motion. This leaves some generated videos lacking true motion with disappointing, simplistic panning camera views. Genmo is focused on the motion side of video generation and has released some of the best open models. Paras joins us to discuss video generation and their journey at Genmo.

Sponsors:

• Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Genmo

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Daniel and Chris groove with Jeff Smith, Founder and CEO at CHRP.ai. Jeff describes how CHRP anonymously analyzes emotional wellness data, derived from employees’ music preferences, giving HR leaders actionable insights to improve productivity, retention, and overall morale. By monitoring key trends and identifying shifts in emotional health across teams, CHRP.ai enables proactive decisions to ensure employees feel supported and engaged.

Sponsors:

• Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai
• Eight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra — Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. 
• DeleteMe – DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. 

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• CHRP | Website
• MyCHRP
• CHRP | Instagram
• CHRP | LinkedIn

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Today, Chris explores Shopify Magic and other AI offerings with Mike Tamir, Distinguished ML Engineer and Head of Machine Learning, and Matt Colyer, Director of Product Management for Sidekick. They talk about how Shopify uses generative AI and LLMs to enhance their products, and they take a deeper dive into Sidekick, a first-of-its-kind, AI-enabled commerce assistant that understands a merchant’s business (products, orders, customers) and has been trained to know all about Shopify.

Sponsors:

• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. 
• Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. 
• Eight Sleep – Up to $600 off Pod 4 Ultra — Go to eightsleep.com/changelog and use the code CHANGELOG. You can try it for free for 30 days - but we’re confident you will not want to return it (we love ours). Once you experience AI-optimized sleep, you’ll wonder how you ever slept without it. Currently shipping to: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Europe, and Australia. 

Featuring:

• Mike Tamir – LinkedIn
• Matt Colyer – LinkedIn, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X

Show Notes:

• Shopify
• Shopify’s Winter Edition ’25

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Kyutai, an open science research lab, made headlines over the summer when they released their real-time speech-to-speech AI assistant (beating OpenAI to market with their teased GPT-driven speech-to-speech functionality). Alex from Kyutai joins us in this episode to discuss the research lab, their recent Moshi models, and what might be coming next from the lab. Along the way we discuss small models and the AI ecosystem in France.

Sponsors:

• Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. 
• Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. 
• WorkOS – AuthKit offers 1,000,000 monthly active users (MAU) free — The world’s best login box, powered by WorkOS + Radix. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• Kyutai
• Kyutai on GitHub
• Kyutai on Hugging Face

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

Chris and Daniel dive into what Trump’s impending second term could mean for AI companies, model developers, and regulators, unpacking the potential shifts in policy and innovation. Next, they discuss the latest models, like Qwen, that blur the performance gap between open and closed systems. Finally, they explore new AI tools for meeting clones and AI-driven commerce, sparking a conversation about the balance between digital convenience and fostering genuine human connections.

Sponsors:

• WorkOS – AuthKit offers 1,000,000 monthly active users (MAU) free — The world’s best login box, powered by WorkOS + Radix. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com
• Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. 
• Retool – The low-code platform for developers to build internal tools — Some of the best teams out there trust Retool…Brex, Coinbase, Plaid, Doordash, LegalGenius, Amazon, Allbirds, Peloton, and so many more – the developers at these teams trust Retool as the platform to build their internal tools. Try it free at retool.com/changelog

Featuring:

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

Show Notes:

• New Models 
  • Qwen2.5 
    • Alibaba’s Qwen AI Model
    • Qwen2.5 Turbo Reads Ten Novels in One Minute
  • DeepSeek 
    • DeepSeek API Docs Update
  • FLUX 
    • Black Forest Labs’ FLUX.1-dev on Hugging Face
  • OuteTTS 
    • OuteTTS 0.1 - 350M Blog
    • OuteTTS 0.2 - 500M Blog
    • Smol TTS Update on LinkedIn
  • SmolLVM 
    • SmolLVM Updates on LinkedIn
• What Donald Trump’s Win Means for AI
  • Practical AI Podcast: Episode 244
• GetPickle.ai
• Docling 
  • Docling Paper on arXiv
  • Docling GitHub Repository
  • Red Hat Blog on Docling
  • LinkedIn Post on PDF Table Extraction
  • Hugging Face Blog on Observers SDK
• AI and Commerce 
  • Stripe Blog: Adding Payments to Agentic Workflows
  • LinkedIn Announcement: Payments Integration SDK

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!

We are at GenAI saturation, so let’s talk about scikit-learn, a long time favorite for data scientists building classifiers, time series analyzers, dimensionality reducers, and more! Scikit-learn is deployed across industry and driving a significant portion of the “AI” that is actually in production. :probabl is a new kind of company that is stewarding this project along with a variety of other open source projects. Yann Lechelle and Guillaume Lemaitre share some of the vision behind the company and talk about the future of scikit-learn!

Sponsors:

• Timescale – Purpose-built performance for AI Build RAG, search, and AI agents on the cloud and with PostgreSQL and purpose-built extensions for AI: pgvector, pgvectorscale, and pgai. 
• WorkOS – A platform that gives developers a set of building blocks for quickly adding enterprise-ready features to their application. Add Single Sign-On (Okta, Azure, Google, Microsoft OAuth), sync users from any SCIM directory, HRIS integration, audit trails (SIEM), free magic link sign-in. WorkOS is designed for developers and offers a single, elegant interface that abstracts dozens of enterprise integrations. Learn more and get started at WorkOS.com
• Shopify – Sign up for a $1/month trial period at shopify.com/practicalai

Featuring:

• Yann Lechelle – LinkedIn
• Guillaume Lemaitre – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Daniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, X

Show Notes:

• :probabl.
• TechCrunch: Probabl is a new AI company built around popular library scikit-learn
• scikit-learn

Upcoming Events: 

• Register for upcoming webinars here!