Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast
swyx + Alessio
The podcast by and for AI Engineers! In 2024, over 2 million readers and listeners came to Latent Space to hear about news, papers and interviews in Software 3.0.We cover Foundation Models changing every domain in Code Generation, Multimodality, AI Agents, GPU Infra and more, directly from the founders, builders, and thinkers involved in pushing the cutting edge. Striving to give you both the definitive take on the Current Thing down to the first introduction to the tech you'll be using in the next 3 months! We break news and exclusive interviews from OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Meta (Soumith Chintala), Sierra (Bret Taylor), tiny (George Hotz), Databricks/MosaicML (Jon Frankle), Modular (Chris Lattner), Answer.ai (Jeremy Howard), et al.Full show notes always on https://latent.space
Episodes
Mentioned books
80 snips
Aug 2, 2024 • 1h 55min
The Winds of AI Winter (Q2 Four Wars Recap) + ChatGPT Voice Mode Preview
Dive into the world of AI advancements as hosts celebrate their milestones and discuss the Sovereign AI Summit in Singapore. Explore how GPU-rich models like Llama 3.1 and Mistral Large are reshaping the landscape. Unpack the intriguing dynamics of synthetic data and the evolving competitive sphere beyond OpenAI. Engage in playful explorations of emotional expression through accents and voice modulation, while also uncovering the challenges of capturing tonal nuances in AI technology. Riddles and humor add a delightful twist to the conversation!
54 snips
Jul 23, 2024 • 1h 5min
Llama 2, 3 & 4: Synthetic Data, RLHF, Agents on the path to Open Source AGI
In this engaging discussion with Thomas Scialom, a leading mind behind Llama 2 and Llama 3 at Meta, listeners dive into the fascinating world of synthetic data and reinforcement learning techniques. He reveals how Llama 3 excels with 15T tokens, leveraging primarily synthetic content for training efficiency. The importance of evaluation methods and the balance between human feedback and model training strategies takes center stage. Scialom also shares insights on the future of intelligence with advanced, multi-step agents and the evolving landscape of AI innovation.
67 snips
Jul 12, 2024 • 58min
Benchmarks 201: Why Leaderboards > Arenas >> LLM-as-Judge
Clémentine Fourrier, lead maintainer of Hugging Face’s OpenLLM Leaderboard, shares her journey from geology to AI. She discusses the urgent need for standardized benchmarks in model evaluations as traditional metrics become outdated. Clémentine tackles the challenges of creating fair, community-driven assessments while addressing biases and resource limitations. She also highlights innovations like long-context reasoning benchmarks and predicts future advancements in LLM capabilities, emphasizing the importance of calibration for user trust.
23 snips
Jul 5, 2024 • 1h 45min
The 10,000x Yolo Researcher Metagame — with Yi Tay of Reka
Yi Tay, Chief Scientist at Reka AI and former tech lead at Google Brain, shares insights on the rapidly evolving landscape of AI. He discusses the challenges faced by smaller model labs, emphasizing Reka Core's impressive debut on the LMsys leaderboard. Yi also reflects on the importance of identifying crucial research problems and maintaining a long-term vision. Other topics include the impact of social media on research visibility and the balance between academic life and startup initiatives in AI development.
28 snips
Jun 25, 2024 • 1h 22min
State of the Art: Training >70B LLMs on 10,000 H100 clusters
In this engaging discussion, Jonathan Frankle, Chief AI Scientist at Databricks, and Josh Albrecht, CTO of Imbue, dive into groundbreaking advancements in AI. They unveil Imbue 70B, a model outperforming GPT-4o with significantly less data. The duo shares insights on the complexities of scaling GPU clusters and the importance of high-performance infrastructure. They also address evaluating language models and introduce innovative tools for hyperparameter tuning. Their expertise shines through as they explore the future of AI in coding and reasoning tasks.
13 snips
Jun 25, 2024 • 50min
[High Agency] AI Engineer World's Fair Preview
The World’s Fair for AI engineers is sold out, generating excitement in the community. Discussions revolve around the evolving role of AI engineers, distinguishing them from traditional ML engineers. Key insights include the necessity for specialization and new skill sets. The podcast also explores collaborative dynamics between engineers and product managers, and the impact of vertical AI startups. Trends in AI inference and creativity highlight innovative potentials, setting the stage for emerging technologies and community engagement.
66 snips
Jun 21, 2024 • 1h 4min
How To Hire AI Engineers — with James Brady & Adam Wiggins of Elicit
James Brady, Head of Engineering at Elicit, and Adam Wiggins, Internal Journalist at Elicit and co-founder of Heroku, dive into the world of hiring AI engineers. They explore the blend of traditional and AI-focused skills needed in candidates and share their journey transitioning into AI roles. The duo discusses the complexities of error handling, interview strategies, and balancing innovation with user experience. They emphasize the importance of community connections and employer branding to attract top talent in the fast-evolving AI landscape.
76 snips
Jun 11, 2024 • 55min
How AI is eating Finance — with Mike Conover of Brightwave
Mike Conover, Founder of Brightwave and former leader of the OSS models team at Databricks, shares insights on the transformative role of AI in finance. He discusses how language models reflect societal beliefs and the significant funding Brightwave secured to enhance market understanding. The conversation also dives into Brightwave's capabilities in combating information overload for finance professionals. They explore challenges in data handling and the balance between AI and human decision-making, particularly in hedge funds. A fascinating look at the future of investment analytics!
71 snips
Jun 10, 2024 • 4h 29min
ICLR 2024 — Best Papers & Talks (Benchmarks, Reasoning & Agents) — ft. Graham Neubig, Aman Sanger, Moritz Hardt)
Expert guests Graham Neubig and Aman Sanger discuss AI topics like Code Edits, Sandboxes, Academia vs Industry. They delve into Benchmarks like SWEBench, Dataset Contamination Detection, and GAIA Benchmark. The conversation also touches on Reasoning - Self-RAG, Let's Verify Step By Step, and developments in multi-agent systems with MetaGPT.
50 snips
May 30, 2024 • 58min
How to train a Million Context LLM — with Mark Huang of Gradient.ai
Mark Huang, Co-founder of Gradient.ai, dives into the exciting advancements in AI, particularly long context learning. He discusses the evolution of context lengths, mapping out a timeline of breakthroughs and innovations in LLMs. Mark reflects on his team's work with Llama 3 and the challenges of training models with vast token capacities. He also sheds light on optimizing GPU performance and the pressing need for high-quality data in model training. Their vision is creating flexible AI solutions that truly adapt to enterprise workflows.
