Practical AI

Loïc Houssier, Head of Engineering at Superhuman, joins us to discuss how AI and LLMs are reshaping the email experience. He highlights challenges related to the variability of user prompts and infrastructure optimization. Loïc emphasizes that a deep focus on user experience and real human workflows is key to building AI tools people actually love to use. Featuring: Loïc Houssier – LinkedIn Chris...

In this episode, Daniel and Chris unpack the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a rising standard for enabling agentic AI interactions with external systems, APIs, and data sources. They explore how MCP supports interoperability, community contributions, and a rapidly developing ecosystem of AI integrations. The conversation also highlights some real-world tooling such as FastAPI-MCP. Featuring: Chris...

In this episode, we explore the intersection of AI, machine learning, and healthcare through the lens of neuroimaging and epilepsy diagnosis. Dr. Gavin Winston shares insights from his work using MRI data and machine learning to uncover subtle abnormalities in brain function. We discuss the cultural and ethical barriers to AI adoption in medicine, how predictive data analysis could transform the d...

Vibe coding, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted pull requests? In this episode, Daniel and Chris chat with Robert Brennan and Graham Neubig of All Hands AI about how AI is transforming software development—from senior engineer productivity to open source agents that address GitHub issues. They dive into trust, tooling, collaboration, and what it means to build software in the era of AI agents. Whe...

In this episode, Daniel sits down with Pavel Veller, EPAM’s Chief Technologist, to explore the practical challenges of orchestrating many AI agents and managing connections to disparate systems/tools. Pavel shares insights from his hands-on work with agentic architectures and internal tools like "DIAL". Pavel also helps us understand things like MCP servers and why connecting assistants via APIs i...

How do you enable AI acceleration (at both the hardware and software layers) that stays ahead of rapid industry shifts? In this episode, Dhananjay Singh from Groq dives into the evolving landscape of AI inference and acceleration. We explore how Groq optimizes the serving layer, adapts to industry shifts, and supports emerging model architectures.  Featuring: Dhananjay Singh – LinkedIn , X Chris B...

Kyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, joins the hosts to discuss the evolving role of AI in software development, GitHub Copilot’s impact, and the challenges of AI-assisted coding. The conversation covers licensing concerns, ethical considerations, and how developers can navigate these complexities. Kyle also shares his vision for ambient AI, which seamlessly integrates into workflows to enhance productivit...

We often judge AI models by leaderboard scores, but what if efficiency matters more? Kate Soule from IBM joins us to discuss how Granite AI is rethinking AI at the edge—breaking tasks into smaller, efficient components and co-designing models with hardware. She also shares why AI should prioritize efficiency frontiers over incremental benchmark gains and how seamless model routing can optimize per...

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 o...

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...

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, org...

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...

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 mo...

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 ens...

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...

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 model...

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 abou...

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 op...

It can be frustrating to get an AI application working amazingly well 80% of the time and failing miserably the other 20%. How can you close the gap and create something that you rely on? Chris and Daniel talk through this process, behavior testing, and the flow from prototype to production in this episode. They also talk a bit about the apparent slow down in the release of frontier models. Sponso...

This week, Chris is joined by Gregory Richardson, Vice President and Global Advisory CISO at BlackBerry, and Ismael Valenzuela, Vice President of Threat Research & Intelligence at BlackBerry. They address how AI is changing the threat landscape, why human defenders remain a key part of our cyber defenses, and the explain the AI standoff between cyber threat actors and cyber defenders. Sponsors...

Elham Tabassi, the Chief AI Advisor at the U.S. National Institute of Standards & Technology (NIST), joins Chris for an enlightening discussion about the path towards trustworthy AI. Together they explore NIST’s ‘AI Risk Management Framework’ (AI RMF) within the context of the White House’s ‘Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence’. S...

We are on the other side of “big data” hype, but what is the future of analytics and how does AI fit in? Till and Adithya from MotherDuck join us to discuss why DuckDB is taking the analytics and AI world by storm. We dive into what makes DuckDB, a free, in-process SQL OLAP database management system, unique including its ability to execute lighting fast analytics queries against a variety of data...

Workflow orchestration has always been a pain for data scientists, but this is exacerbated in these AI hype days by agentic workflows executing arbitrary (not pre-defined) workflows with a variety of failure modes. Adam from Prefect joins us to talk through their open source Python library for orchestration and visibility into python-based pipelines. Along the way, he introduces us to things like...

As Argilla puts it: “Data quality is what makes or breaks AI.” However, what exactly does this mean and how can AI team probably collaborate with domain experts towards improved data quality? David Berenstein & Ben Burtenshaw, who are building Argilla & Distilabel at Hugging Face, join us to dig into these topics along with synthetic data generation & AI-generated labeling / feedback....

We are constantly hearing about disillusionment as it relates to AI. Some of that is probably valid, but Mike Lewis, an AI architect from Cincinnati, has proven that he can consistently get LLM and GenAI apps to the point of real enterprise value (even with the Big Cos of the world). In this episode, Mike joins us to share some stories from the AI trenches & highlight what it takes (practicall...