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

Today’s guest is John Bohannon, Senior Director of Data Science and Director of Science at Primer.ai. Primer is a security AI platform serving Fortune 500 companies and multiple defense agencies in the US federal government. Together with Emerj CEO and Head of Research, Daniel Faggella, John pulls apart what makes the Ukraine war truly unique in the scope of both history and technology – and how AI is playing an integral role in the conflict for both sides. This episode is sponsored by Primer. Learn how brands work with Emerj and other Emerj Media options at emerj.com/ad1.