AI Engineering Podcast

Summary Machine learning models have predominantly been built and updated in a batch modality. While this is operationally simpler, it doesn't always provide the best experience or capabilities for end users of the model. Tecton has been investing in the infrastructure and workflows that enable building and updating ML models with real-time data to…

Summary Shopify uses machine learning to power multiple features in their platform. In order to reduce the amount of effort required to develop and deploy models they have invested in building an opinionated platform for their engineers. They have gone through multiple iterations of the platform and their most recent version is called Merlin. In…

Summary All data systems are subject to the "garbage in, garbage out" problem. For machine learning applications bad data can lead to unreliable models and unpredictable results. Anomalo is a product designed to alert on bad data by applying machine learning models to various storage and processing systems. In this episode Jeremy Stanley discusses…

Summary Building a machine learning model one time can be done in an ad-hoc manner, but if you ever want to update it and serve it in production you need a way of repeating a complex sequence of operations. Dagster is an orchestration engine that understands the data that it is manipulating so that you can move beyond coarse task-based…

Summary Machine learning is a data-hungry approach to problem solving. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems that would benefit from the automation provided by artificial intelligence capabilities that don’t come with troves of data to build from. Christopher Nguyen and his team at Aitomatic are working to address the "cold start" problem…

Summary Data is one of the core ingredients for machine learning, but the format in which it is understandable to humans is not a useful representation for models. Embedding vectors are a way to structure data in a way that is native to how models interpret and manipulate information. In this episode Frank Liu shares how the Towhee library…

Summary Because machine learning models are constantly interacting with inputs from the real world they are subject to a wide variety of failures. The most commonly discussed error condition is concept drift, but there are numerous other ways that things can go wrong. In this episode Wojtek Kuberski explains how NannyML is designed to compare the…

Summary Using machine learning in production requires a sophisticated set of cooperating technologies. A majority of resources that are available for understanding how to design and operate these platforms are focused on either simple examples that don’t scale, or over-engineered technologies designed for the massive scale of big tech companies. In…

Summary The increasing sophistication of machine learning has enabled dramatic transformations of businesses and introduced new product categories. At Assembly AI they are offering advanced speech recognition and natural language models as an API service. In this episode founder Dylan Fox discusses the unique challenges of building a business with…

Summary The majority of machine learning projects that you read about or work on are built around batch processes. The model is trained, and then validated, and then deployed, with each step being a discrete and isolated task. Unfortunately, the real world is rarely static, leading to concept drift and model failures. River is a framework for…