AI Tinkerers - "One-Shot" Scaling AI in the Real World: Lukas Biewald on Tools, Teams & Tinkering
Jan 5, 2026
Lukas Biewald, founder of CrowdFlower and Weights & Biases, shares his journey from tinkering with robot cars to leading AI companies. He discusses the importance of hands-on ML experiences that shaped him and how his early projects inspired tools like Weights & Biases. Lukas also delves into 'vibe coding' with his daughter, effectively merging play and learning, while highlighting the importance of observability in AI production environments. He explores the future of AI, touching on reinforcement learning as a promising avenue for improvement.
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Garage Robot Led To Real Connections
- Lukas built an autonomous Raspberry Pi robot car in his tiny garage to learn embedded ML and run TensorFlow on edge devices.
- He met Pete Warden locally who reverse-engineered the Pi video card and helped make the project work.
Tinkering Videos Opened Doors
- Lukas made janky YouTube videos of drones and robot projects which later impressed unexpected partners.
- That tinkering content helped land interest from Department of Defense contacts who had seen his videos.
Tinkering Revealed Tooling Gaps
- Rebuilding toy projects helped Lukas reconnect with current ML tooling and revealed major gaps in observability.
- Those gaps motivated the creation of Weights & Biases to track training and model behavior.
