Douwe Kiela is the CEO of Contextual AI, building the contextual language model to power the future of businesses. Last month Contextual closed a $20M funding round including Bain Capital, Sarah Guo, Elad Gil and 20VC. He is also an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Head of Research at Hugging Face, and before that a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research. In Today's Episode with Douwe Kiela We Discuss: 1. Founding a Foundational Model Company in 2023: How did Douwe make his way into the world of AI and ML over a decade ago? What are some of his biggest lessons from his time working with Yann LeCun and Meta? How does Douwe's background in philosophy help him in AI today? 2. Foundational Model Providers: Challenges and Alternatives: What are the biggest problems with the existing foundational data models? Will there be one to rule them all? How does the landscape play out? Why does Douwe believe OpenAI's data acquisition strategy has been the best? 3. Data Models: Size and Structure: Why does Douwe believe it is naive to think the open approach will beat the closed approach? What are the biggest downsides to the open approach? Does the size of data model matter today? What matters more? How important is access to proprietary data? Are VCs naive to turn down founders due to a lack of access to proprietary data? 4. Regulation and the World Around Us: How does Douwe expect the regulatory landscape to play out around AI? Why is Europe the worst when it comes to regulation? Will this be different this time? How does Douwe analyse Elon's petition to pause the development of AI for 6 months? Do founders building AI companies have to be in the valley?

Richard Socher, Douwe Kiela, and Alex Lebrun discuss the importance of model size and data size in AI. They explore the impact of larger models and the significance of training data. The value accrual in AI startups is highlighted, along with the importance of feeding accurate data to language models for improved reasoning capabilities. They also discuss ML AI investments and the challenges of competing in the AI space.

Douwe Kiela, CEO and Co-Founder of Contextual AI, discusses his groundbreaking work in AI, including the development of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). He shares insights on the evolution of AI reasoning capabilities and the challenges of AI deployment in enterprises. Douwe emphasizes the collaboration between academia and industry, the future of multimodal data, and how AI can transform personalized entertainment. His candid thoughts on funding strategies and the AI ecosystem are both refreshing and thought-provoking.

In this extra special episode of the TWIML AI Podcast, a friend of the show John Bohannon leads a jam-packed conversation with Hugging Face’s recently appointed head of research Douwe Kiela. In our conversation with Douwe, we explore his role at the company, how his perception of Hugging Face has changed since joining, and what research entails at the company. We discuss the emergence of the transformer model and the emergence of BERT-ology, the recent shift to solving more multimodal problems, the importance of this subfield as one of the “Grand Directions'' of Hugging Face’s research agenda, and the importance of BLOOM, the open-access Multilingual Language Model that was the output of the BigScience project. Finally, we get into how Douwe’s background in philosophy shapes his view of current projects, as well as his projections for the future of NLP and multimodal ML.The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/589

CEOs of ContextualAI and Anthropic discuss the adoption of AI in enterprise. They explore the barriers to adoption and the most exciting use cases in big companies. The demands placed on software companies, including security and compliance, are also discussed. Concerns about fine tuning and training data for language models are addressed. The speakers envision a future with personal assistants doing our work and technology freeing up our time.