Simba Khadder on FeatureForm - Weaviate Podcast #74!

Hey everyone! Thank you so much for watching the 74th Weaviate Podcast feature Simba Khadder, the CEO and Co-Founder of FeatureForm! To begin, "features" broadly describe the inputs to machine learning models that they use to produce outputs, or predictions. Feature stores orchestrate the construction of features, whether that be transformations for tabular machine learning models such as XGBoost, to chunking for vector embedding inference, and now features for LLM inference in RAG. Right out of the gate, Simba really opened my eyes to the role that feature engineering plays in RAG. Further touching on this at the very end under the "Exciting future for RAG with Features" chapter, Simba further describes how we can use more advanced features to provide better context to LLMs. In addition to these insights on RAG, there are so many nuggets in the podcast, Simba is a world class professional when it comes to building distributed systems, production scale recommendation systems, and more! I learned so much from chatting with Simba, I hope you enjoy listening to the podcast! As always we are more than happy to answer any questions or discuss any ideas you have about the content in the podcast! FeatureForm: https://www.featureform.com/ Highly Recommend!! Simba Khadder at the CMU DB Seminar series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsWa6XiBc-U FeatureForm and Weaviate demo! https://docs.featureform.com/providers/weaviate Chapters 0:00 Simba Khadder 0:35 RAG and Feature Stores 4:30 Experience building Recommendation Systems 9:47 The End-to-End Feature Lifecycle 15:08 Virtual Feature Store Orchestration 26:45 RAG Evaluation 31:27 Feature Engineering 34:15 LLM Tuning and Features 39:55 Streaming Features 51:15 Data Drift Detection 54:20 Exciting future for RAG with Features