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.

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’.

GenAI is often what people think of when someone mentions AI. However, AI is much more. In this episode, Daniel breaks down a history of developments in data science, machine learning, AI, and GenAI in this episode to give listeners a better mental model. Don’t miss this one if you are wanting to understand the AI ecosystem holistically and how models, embeddings, data, prompts, etc. all fit together.

This week Daniel & Chris hang with repeat guest and good friend Demetrios Brinkmann of the MLOps Community. Together they review, debate, and poke fun at the 2024 Gartner Hype Cycle chart for Artificial Intelligence. You are invited to join them in this light-hearted fun conversation about the state of hype in artificial intelligence.

Daniel & Chris sit down with Denis Yarats, Co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, to discuss Perplexity’s sophisticated AI-driven answer engine. Denis outlines some of the deficiencies in search engines, and how Perplexity’s approach to information retrieval improves on traditional search engine systems, with a focus on accuracy and validation of the information provided.

At the age of 72, U.S. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia enrolled at GMU to pursue a Master’s degree in C.S. with a concentration in Machine Learning.

Rep. Beyer is Vice Chair of the bipartisan Artificial Intelligence Caucus & Vice Chair of the NDC’s AI Working Group. He is the author of the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act & a lead cosponsor of the CREATE AI Act, the Federal Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Act & the Artificial Intelligence Environmental Impacts Act.

We hope you tune into this inspiring, nonpartisan conversation with Rep. Beyer about his decision to dive into the deep end of the AI pool & his leadership in bringing that expertise to Capitol Hill.

Daniel & Chris delight in conversation with “the funniest guy in AI”, Demetrios Brinkmann. Together they explore the results of the MLOps Community’s latest survey. They also preview the upcoming AI Quality Conference.

In this fully connected episode, Daniel & Chris discuss NVIDIA GTC keynote comments from CEO Jensen Huang about teaching kids to code. Then they dive into the notion of “community” in the AI world, before discussing challenges in the adoption of generative AI by non-technical people. They finish by addressing the evolving balance between generative AI interfaces and search engines.

Daniel & Chris explore the state of the art in prompt engineering with Jared Zoneraich, the founder of PromptLayer. PromptLayer is the first platform built specifically for prompt engineering. It can visually manage prompts, evaluate models, log LLM requests, search usage history, and help your organization collaborate as a team. Jared provides expert guidance in how to be implement prompt engineering, but also illustrates how we got here, and where we’re likely to go next.

Runway is an applied AI research company shaping the next era of art, entertainment & human creativity. Chris sat down with Runway co-founder / CTO, Anastasis Germanidis, to discuss their rise and how it’s defining the future of the creative landscape with its text & image to video models. We hope you find Anastasis’s founder story as inspiring as Chris did.

Chris & Daniel explore AI in national security with Lt. General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.). The conversation reflects Jack’s unique background as the only senior U.S. military officer responsible for standing up and leading two organizations in the United States Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated to fielding artificial intelligence capabilities: Project Maven and the DoD Joint AI Center (JAIC).

Together, Jack, Daniel & Chris dive into the fascinating details of Jack’s recent written testimony to the U.S. Senate’s AI Insight Forum on National Security, in which he provides the U.S. government with thoughtful guidance on how to achieve the best path forward with artificial intelligence.

Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234. Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk through the specifics of their open source, on-disk, embedded vector search offering. We talk about how their unique columnar database structure enables serverless deployments and drastic savings (without performance hits) at scale. This one is super practical, so don’t miss it!

Gregg Tavares (author of WebGL/WebGPU Fundamentals) joins Jerod & Amal to give us a tour of these low-level technologies that are pushing the web forward into the world of video games, machine learning & other exciting rich applications.

In this enlightening episode, we delve deeper than the usual buzz surrounding AI’s perils, focusing instead on the tangible problems emerging from the use of machine learning algorithms across Europe. We explore “suspicion machines” — systems that assign scores to welfare program participants, estimating their likelihood of committing fraud. Join us as Justin and Gabriel share insights from their thorough investigation, which involved gaining access to one of these models and meticulously analyzing its behavior.

Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry.

Shopify recently released a Hugging Face space demonstrating very impressive results for replacing background scenes in product imagery. In this episode, we hear the backstory technical details about this work from Shopify’s Russ Maschmeyer. Along the way we discuss how to come up with clever AI solutions (without training your own model).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris kick it off by noting that Stability AI released their SDXL 1.0 LLM! They discuss its virtues, and then dive into a discussion regarding how the United States, European Union, and other entities are approaching governance of AI through new laws and legal frameworks. In particular, they review the White House’s approach, noting the potential for unexpected consequences.

Chris sat down with Varun Mohan and Anshul Ramachandran, CEO / Cofounder and Lead of Enterprise and Partnership at Codeium, respectively. They discussed how to streamline and enable modern development in generative AI and large language models (LLMs). Their new tool, Codeium, was born out of the insights they gleaned from their work in GPU software and solutions development, particularly with respect to generative AI, large language models, and supporting infrastructure. Codeium is a free AI-powered toolkit for developers, with in-house models and infrastructure - not another API wrapper.

In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore recent highlights from the current model proliferation wave sweeping the world - including Stable Diffusion XL, OpenChat, Zeroscope XL, and Salesforce XGen. They note the rapid rise of open models, and speculate that just as in open source software, open models will dominate the future. Such rapid advancement creates its own problems though, so they finish by itemizing concerns such as cybersecurity, workflow productivity, and impact on human culture.

Your feed might be dominated by LLMs these days, but there are some amazing things happening in computer vision that you shouldn’t ignore! In this episode, we bring you one of those amazing stories from Gabriel Ortiz, who is working with the government of Cantabria in Spain to automate cartography and apply AI to geospatial analysis. We hear about how AI tooling fits into the GIS workflow, and Gabriel shares some of his recent work (including work that can identify individual people, invasive plant species, building and more from aerial survey data).