Vanishing Gradients

Hugo speaks about Lessons Learned from a Year of Building with LLMs with Eugene Yan from Amazon, Bryan Bischof from Hex, Charles Frye from Modal, Hamel Husain from Parlance Labs, and Shreya Shankar from UC Berkeley. These five guests, along with Jason Liu who couldn't join us, have spent the past year building real-world applications with Large Language Models (LLMs). They've distilled their exper...

Hugo speaks with Alan Nichol, co-founder and CTO of Rasa, where they build software to enable developers to create enterprise-grade conversational AI and chatbot systems across industries like telcos, healthcare, fintech, and government. What's super cool is that Alan and the Rasa team have been doing this type of thing for over a decade, giving them a wealth of wisdom on how to effectively incorp...

Hugo speaks with Jason Liu, an independent consultant who uses his expertise in recommendation systems to help fast-growing startups build out their RAG applications. He was previously at Meta and Stitch Fix is also the creator of Instructor, Flight, and an ML and data science educator. They talk about how Jason approaches consulting companies across many industries, including construction and sal...

Hugo speaks with Sebastian Raschka, a machine learning & AI researcher, programmer, and author. As Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI, he focuses on the intersection of AI research, software development, and large language models (LLMs). How do you build LLMs? How can you use them, both in prototype and production settings? What are the building blocks you need to know about? ​In this episode...

Hugo speaks with Omoju Miller, a machine learning guru and founder and CEO of Fimio, where she is building 21st century dev tooling. In the past, she was Technical Advisor to the CEO at GitHub, spent time co-leading non-profit investment in Computer Science Education for Google, and served as a volunteer advisor to the Obama administration’s White House Presidential Innovation Fellows. We need ope...

Hugo speaks with Johno Whitaker, a Data Scientist/AI Researcher doing R&D with answer.ai . His current focus is on generative AI, flitting between different modalities. He also likes teaching and making courses, having worked with both Hugging Face and fast.ai in these capacities. Johno recently reminded Hugo how hard everything was 10 years ago: “Want to install TensorFlow? Good luck. Need data?...

Hugo speaks with Allen Downey, a curriculum designer at Brilliant, Professor Emeritus at Olin College, and the author of Think Python, Think Bayes, Think Stats, and other computer science and data science books. In 2019-20 he was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. He previously taught at Wellesley College and Colby College and was a Visiting Scientist at Google. He is also the author of t...

Jeremy Howard ( Fast.ai ), Shreya Shankar (UC Berkeley), and Hamel Husain (Parlance Labs) join Hugo Bowne-Anderson to talk about how LLMs and OpenAI are changing the worlds of data science, machine learning, and machine learning engineering. Jeremy Howard ( https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward ) is co-founder of fast.ai , an ex-Chief Scientist at Kaggle, and creator of the ULMFiT approach on which al...

Hugo speaks with Hamel Husain, a machine learning engineer who loves building machine learning infrastructure and tools 👷. Hamel leads and contributes to many popular open-source machine learning projects. He also has extensive experience (20+ years) as a machine learning engineer across various industries, including large tech companies like Airbnb and GitHub. At GitHub, he led CodeSearchNet ( h...

Hugo speaks with Chris Wiggins (Columbia, NYTimes) and Matthew Jones (Princeton) about their recent book How Data Happened, and the Columbia course it expands upon, data: past, present, and future. Chris is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the New York Times’ chief data scientist, and Matthew is a professor of history at Princeton University and former Gugge...

Hugo speaks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and security in data science and machine learning. Katharine is a Principal Data Scientist at Thoughtworks Germany focusing on privacy, ethics, and security for data science workflows. Previously, she has held numerous roles at large companies and startups in the US and Germany, implementing data processing and machine learning systems with a focus o...

Hugo speaks with Eric Ma about Research Data Science in Biotech. Eric leads the Research team in the Data Science and Artificial Intelligence group at Moderna Therapeutics. Prior to that, he was part of a special ops data science team at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research's Informatics department. In this episode, Hugo and Eric talk about What tools and techniques they use for drug di...

Hugo speaks with Tanya Cashorali, a data scientist and consultant that helps businesses get the most out of data, about what end-to-end data science looks like across many industries, such as retail, defense, biotech, and sports, including scoping out projects, figuring out the correct questions to ask, how projects can change, delivering on the promise, the importance of rapid prototyping, what i...

Hugo speaks with JD Long, agricultural economist, quant, and stochastic modeler, about decision making under uncertainty and how we can use our knowledge of risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, causal inference, and more to help us use data science and machine learning to make better decisions in an uncertain world. This is part 2 of a two part conversation in which we delve into decision ma...

Hugo speaks with JD Long, agricultural economist, quant, and stochastic modeler, about decision making under uncertainty and how we can use our knowledge of risk, uncertainty, probabilistic thinking, causal inference, and more to help us use data science and machine learning to make better decisions in an uncertain world. This is part 1 of a two part conversation. In this, part 1, we discuss risk,...

Hugo Bowne-Anderson, host of Vanishing Gradients, reads 3 audio essays about decision science, MLOps, and what happens when machine learning models are everywhere. Links Our upcoming Vanishing Gradients live recording of Data Science and Decision Making Under Uncertainty with Hugo and JD Long! ( https://www.eventbrite.com/e/data-science-and-decision-making-under-uncertainty-tickets-467379864757?af...

Hugo speak with Norma Padron about data science education and continuous learning for people working in healthcare, broadly construed, along with how we can think about the democratization of data science skills more generally. Norma is CEO of EmpiricaLab, where her team‘s mission is to bridge work and training and empower healthcare teams to focus on what they care about the most: patient care. I...

Hugo speakswith Katie Bauer ( https://twitter.com/imightbemary ) about her time working in data science at both Twitter and Reddit. At the time of recording, Katie was a data science manager at Twitter and prior to that, a founding member of the data team at Reddit. She’s now Head of Data Science at Gloss Genius so congrats on the new job, Katie! In this conversation, we dive into what type of cha...

Hugo speaks with Mark Saroufim, an Applied AI Engineer at Meta who works on PyTorch where his team’s main focus is making it as easy as possible for people to deploy PyTorch in production outside Meta. Mark first came on our radar with an essay he wrote called Machine Learning: the Great Stagnation ( https://marksaroufim.substack.com/p/machine-learning-the-great-stagnation ), which was concerned w...

Hugo speaks with Sarah Catanzaro, General Partner at Amplify Partners, about investing in data science and machine learning tooling and where we see progress happening in the space. Sarah invests in the tools that we both wish we had earlier in our careers: tools that enable data scientists and machine learners to collect, store, manage, analyze, and model data more effectively. As you’ll discover...

Hugo speaks with Hamel Husain, Head of Data Science at Outerbounds, with extensive experience in data science consulting, at DataRobot, Airbnb, and Github. In this conversation, they talk about Hamel's early days in data science, consulting for a wide array of companies, such as Crocs, restaurants, and casinos in Las Vegas, diving into what data science even looked like in 2005 and how you could t...

Hugo speaks with Peter Wang, CEO of Anaconda, about what the value proposition of data science actually is, data not as the new oil, but rather data as toxic, nuclear sludge, the fact that data isn’t real (and what we really have are frozen models), and the future promise of data science. They also dive into an experimental conversation around open source software development as a model for the de...

Hugo speaks with Peter Wang, CEO of Anaconda, about how Python became so big in data science, machine learning, and AI. They jump into many of the technical and sociological beginnings of Python being used for data science, a history of PyData, the conda distribution, and NUMFOCUS. They also talk about the emergence of online collaborative environments, particularly with respect to open source, an...

Hugo speaks with Jacqueline Nolis, Chief Product Officer at Saturn Cloud (formerly Head of Data Science), about all types of failure modes in data science, ML, and AI, and they delve into bullshit jobs in data science (yes, that’s a technical term, as you’ll find out) –they discuss the elements that are bullshit, the elements that aren’t, and how to increase the ratio of the latter to the former....

Hugo speaks with Jim Savage, the Director of Data Science at Schmidt Futures, about the need for data science in executive training and decision, what data scientists can learn from economists, the perils of "data for good", and why you should always be integrating your loss function over your posterior. Jim and Hugo talk about what data science is and isn’t capable of, what can actually deliver v...