Distillation reduces cost without hurting quality

Corey Zumar is a Product Manager at Databricks, working on MLflow and LLM evaluation, tracing, and lifecycle tooling for generative AI.

Jules Damji is a Lead Developer Advocate at Databricks, working on Spark, lakehouse technologies, and developer education across the data and AI community.

Danny Chiao is an Engineering Leader at Databricks, working on data and AI observability, quality, and production-grade governance for ML and agent systems.

MLflow Leading Open Source // MLOps Podcast #356 with Databricks' Corey Zumar, Jules Damji, and Danny Chiao

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// Abstract

MLflow isn’t just for data scientists anymore—and pretending it is is holding teams back. Corey Zumar, Jules Damji, and Danny Chiao break down how MLflow is being rebuilt for GenAI, agents, and real production systems where evals are messy, memory is risky, and governance actually matters. The takeaway: if your AI stack treats agents like fancy chatbots or splits ML and software tooling, you’re already behind.

// Bio

Corey Zumar

Corey has been working as a Software Engineer at Databricks for the last 4 years and has been an active contributor to and maintainer of MLflow since its first release.

Jules Damji

Jules is a developer advocate at Databricks Inc., an MLflow and Apache Spark™ contributor, and Learning Spark, 2nd Edition coauthor. He is a hands-on developer with over 25 years of experience. He has worked at leading companies, such as Sun Microsystems, Netscape, @Home, Opsware/LoudCloud, VeriSign, ProQuest, Hortonworks, Anyscale, and Databricks, building large-scale distributed systems. He holds a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in computer science (from Oregon State University and Cal State, Chico, respectively) and an MA in political advocacy and communication (from Johns Hopkins University)

Danny Chiao

Danny is an engineering lead at Databricks, leading efforts around data observability (quality, data classification). Previously, Danny led efforts at Tecton (+ Feast, an open source feature store) and Google to build ML infrastructure and large-scale ML-powered features. Danny holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from MIT.

// Related Links

Website: https://mlflow.org/

https://www.databricks.com/

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Timestamps:

[00:00] MLflow Open Source Focus

[00:49] MLflow Agents in Production

[00:00] AI UX Design Patterns

[12:19] Context Management in Chat

[19:24] Human Feedback in MLflow

[24:37] Prompt Entropy and Optimization

[30:55] Evolving MLFlow Personas

[36:27] Persona Expansion vs Separation

[47:27] Product Ecosystem Design

[54:03] PII vs Business Sensitivity

[57:51] Wrap up