In this episode, Curtis Northcutt, CEO & Co-Founder of Cleanlab, discusses the importance of data-centric AI and the challenges of addressing noisy data. They also delve into the journey of Cleanlab in improving data labeling accuracy, the success of the startup in finding and correcting bad data, and the frustrations of bug smashing. Additionally, they explore the challenges of understanding the value and capabilities of AI tools and companies, as well as the hiring opportunities in DevRel and front-end engineering.
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Quick takeaways
Clean Lab is an open-source/SaaS company building data-centric AI tools for automatically correcting messy data and labels.
Clean Lab's tool can identify label errors in machine learning models and improve data quality.
Clean Lab is versatile and works with any dataset and model, providing insights into dataset quality and helping identify mislabeled examples.
Deep dives
The Power of Data-Centric AI and MLOps
Data-centric AI and MLOps are two important concepts in the field of machine learning operations. While MLOps focuses on ML operations and can involve the model and infrastructure, data-centric AI is more academic and industry-oriented. One major difference between the two is that data-centric AI emphasizes the importance of improving data quality to enhance the AI pipeline. In contrast, MLOps encompasses a wider range of operations and infrastructure improvements. An example of the significance of data-centric AI is its effectiveness in improving machine learning with noisy data and labels, where methods that alter the data outperform methods that alter the model. This highlights the need to focus on improving data quality in certain machine learning problems.
Building Clean Lab: Solving Data Quality Problems
Clean Lab is a powerful tool developed by Curtis, combining quantum computing principles with data-centric AI to address data quality problems. Confident learning, the foundation of Clean Lab, estimates noisy channels in the data to uncover true data and identify label errors. This method has proven effective in various real-world scenarios. For example, at Amazon, Clean Lab helped estimate the probability of false negatives in Alexa devices, providing insights into wake-up failure rates. While Clean Lab is prescriptive in identifying data issues, Clean Lab Studio, the SAS product, takes it further by suggesting corrections and facilitating the fixing of data sets with a more streamlined and efficient approach.
Validation and Adoption of Clean Lab: From Annotated Datasets to Real-World Applications
The validation and adoption of Clean Lab have been significant milestones for its creators. The tool has been successfully employed at Facebook, Oculus Research, and Google in various projects. Facebook used it to address bias in comment rankings, while Oculus Research leveraged Clean Lab for data cleaning in virtual reality. At Google, Clean Lab was utilized to clean the 'Okay Google' and 'Hey Google' datasets. These experiences, alongside positive testimonials and interest from industry players, solidified the realization that Clean Lab has immense value as a business offering, given the rising importance of data quality and its potential to mitigate the estimated trillions of dollars lost due to bad data.
Using Clean Lab to Identify Label Errors in Machine Learning Models
Clean Lab is a powerful tool that can identify label errors in machine learning models. By analyzing the predicted probabilities of a model and comparing them to the true labels, Clean Lab can detect instances where the model's confidence is significantly different from the expected label. This feature is especially useful for detecting mislabeled examples in noisy datasets. Clean Lab provides a simple and intuitive way of finding label errors, allowing users to improve the accuracy of their models and ensure better data quality.
Clean Lab: Empowering ML Engineers with Data and Label Quality Assurance
Clean Lab is a versatile tool that works with any dataset and model in the field of machine learning. Whether it's training on images, text, or any other type of ML data, Clean Lab can provide insights into the quality of the dataset and help identify which examples are mislabeled or have errors. This capability is especially relevant for industries like healthcare where accurate labeling is critical. With a focus on both data and label quality, Clean Lab aims to empower ML engineers with a comprehensive and easy-to-use solution for building clean and reliable machine learning models.
MLOps Coffee Sessions #106 with Curtis Northcutt, CEO & Co-Founder of Cleanlab, Cleanlab: Labeled Datasets that Correct Themselves Automatically co-hosted by Vishnu Rachakonda.
// Abstract
Pioneered at MIT by 3 Ph.D. Co-Founders, Cleanlab is an open-source/SaaS company building the premier data-centric AI tools workflows for (1) automatically correcting messy data and labels, (2) auto-tracking of dataset quality over time, (3) automatically finding classes to merge and delete, (4) auto ml for data tasks, (5) obtaining and ranking high-quality annotations, and (6) training ML models with messy data.
Most of the prescriptive tasks (finding issues) can be done in one line of code with their open-source product: https://github.com/cleanlab/cleanlab.
// Bio
Curtis Northcutt is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cleanlab focused on making AI work reliably for people and their messy, real-world data by automatically fixing issues in any ML dataset. Curtis completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science at MIT, receiving the MIT Thesis Award, NSF Fellowship, and the Goldwater Scholarship. Prior to Cleanlab, Curtis worked at AI research groups including Google, Oculus, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and NASA.
Timestamps:
[00:00] Introduction to Curtis Northcutt
[00:30] Difference between MLOps and Data-Centric AI
[04:04] Realizing the problem of data quality in ML manifesting
[05:11] Computer vision problems
[06:54] War story that got Curtis into Data-Centric AI
[13:50] Overview of Curtis' vision
[14:45] PU Learning
[21:25] Consistency Rate and Flipping Rate
[25:25] One line of code
[29:48] Models makes mistakes
[33:09] Cleanlab play with the environment
[36:30] How ML Engineers should approach data quality problem
[42:42] Quantum computing
[46:39] Result of confident learning
[52:31] Utility for small data sets
[53:53] Cleanlab's huge success stories
[56:13] Rapid fire questions
[58:58] Cloudy and mystified space
[1:03:46] Cleanlab is hiring!
[1:05:06] Wrap up
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