
Weaviate Podcast
Join Connor Shorten as he interviews machine learning experts and explores Weaviate use cases from users and customers.
Latest episodes

Jul 5, 2023 • 1h 7min
Aleksa Gordcic - Weaviate Podcast #55!
Hey everyone! Thank you so much for watching the 55th episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Aleksa Gordcic! This episodes dives into Aleksa's incredible story from Deep Learning YouTube to DeepMind and now creating Ortus! We dived into all sorts of topics, I loved hearing about the latest updates on Ortus and how Aleksa is sees the current state of AI development! We are more than happy to answer any questions or discuss any ideas you might have about the content in the podcast! Thanks so much for watching!
Check out Ortus here! - https://www.ortusbuddy.ai/welcome
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
1:08 Deep Learning YouTube
5:40 DeepMind
9:40 Ortus
19:50 LangChain and LlamaIndex
23:10 Software 2.0 and Full Stack DL
29:20 Training Embedding Models
32:23 Text Chunking for Vector DBs
34:35 Visual Information in YouTube
38:15 Simulating Conversations
42:46 Aidan Gomez Quote on Synthetic Data
44:40 Tree of Thoughts
47:40 New Ortus Features
49:00 Embedding Marketplace
54:00 Personal Organization

Jun 22, 2023 • 56min
Stephanie Horbaczewski and Gunjan Bhattarai on Vody - Weaviate Podcast #53!
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:38 Founding Story of Vody
8:15 Custom Embedding Models
12:42 Movie Genre Vectors
13:42 Classification and Contrastive Learning
15:45 Foundation Model Tuning
21:13 Multimodal Generative Models
25:08 Training Embedding Models
33:20 Tabular Data Ranking Models
36:00 RoomGPT
41:36 Diversity in Recommendations
48:25 Future Directions in Multimodal AI
51:15 Open-Source
55:45 Keeping up with Vody!

5 snips
Jun 14, 2023 • 42min
Yana Welinder on Kraftful - Weaviate Podcast #52!
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching the 52nd episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Yana Welinder! Yana is the Founder and CEO of Kratful (https://www.kraftful.com/). Kratful is an incredibly interesting "ChatGPT but for Product Research" -- curating specific skills for Product Managers into a collection of prompts. We discussed all sorts of things from the latest innovations in LLMs to the ChatGPT marketplace and product management, I really hope you enjoy the podcast!

Jun 7, 2023 • 55min
Greg Kamradt and Colin Harmon on LLM Agents - Weaviate Podcast #51
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching the 51st episode of the Weaviate Podcast with Greg Kamradt and Colin Harmon! Greg and Colin are both entrepreneurs in the space of new AI tools powered by LLMs! This podcast is about keeping up with the evolution of LLM Agents from AutoGPT to connecting LLMs with Vector Databases or Wolfram Alpha, as well as the ChatGPT Marketplace, Personalized LLMs, Private LLMs, and many more! I think there are so many interesting nuggets from this podcast, thank you so much to Greg and Colin for joining, really enjoyed this one!
Data Independent: https://www.youtube.com/@DataIndependent
Greg Kamradt on Twitter: https://twitter.com/GregKamradt
Nesh: https://hellonesh.io/
Colin Harmon on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coluha/
Colin Harmon Blog: https://colinharman.substack.com/
Colin Harmon at Haystack US 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO3U5iqnTpk
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:42 Backgrounds
2:43 Defining “LLM Agents”
6:12 Data-Aware LLMs
13:04 Tool Use
13:38 ChatGPT API vs. Marketplace
17:40 Personalized LLMs, LLM for Greg
19:20 PrivateGPT
25:14 AutoGPT and Chain-of-Thought Prompting
32:30 Few-Shot Examples
35:30 Early AI Signals and Open-Source
43:10 Multi-Agent LLMs
47:14 Fine-Tuning and Long Input Lengths
52:20 Greg’s LLM Wishlist Hierarchy
53:15 Keeping up with Greg and Colin!

Jun 2, 2023 • 28min
Retrieving Texts based on Abstract Descriptions Explained!
This video explores a new paper exploring the use of summarization chains to represent long texts and use (original text, summary) pairs for optimizing text embeddings models! Here are 3 main takeaways I think everyone working with Weaviate may get value from:
1. Understanding of Summary Indexing and the Prompts (as well as Prompt Chains) used to build them.
2. Continued development of LLM-generated data for search -- creating (full text, summary) pairs gives you (1) data to build a summary index with as mentioned, (2) data to compare different embedding models with, and (3) data to train your own embedding model.
3. Tournament style evaluation with human annotators -- the top 5 retrieved texts from one model are concatenated with the top 5 from another model, these 10 are given to human annotators to pick 5 and this is how the authors are reporting the performance of their models rather than traditional benchmarks. This m ay be a more productive evaluation technique for most real world search applications.
Thank you so much for watching, here are some links mentioned in the video!
Retrieving Texts based on Abstract Descriptions: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12517
Weaviate Blog - Combining LangChain and Weaviate: https://weaviate.io/blog/combining-langchain-and-weaviate
Weaviate Blog - Generative Feedback Loops: https://weaviate.io/blog/generative-feedback-loops-with-llms
Jerry Liu in Llama Index Blog - A New Document Summary Index for LLM-powered QA Systems: https://medium.com/llamaindex-blog/a-new-document-summary-index-for-llm-powered-qa-systems-9a32ece2f9ec
Learning to Retrieve Passages without Supervision (Spider): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2112.07708.pdf
Weaviate Blog - Analysis of Spider - https://weaviate.io/blog/research-insights-spider
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:13 Quick Overview
7:30 How to use in Weaviate!
7:50 Background
12:08 Motivation
14:20 Prompts Used
18:14 More Details of training
21:12 Human Evaluation Study
22:40 My Takeaways from the Paper

May 31, 2023 • 36min
Kapa AI with Emil Sorensen and Finn Bauer - Weaviate Podcast #50!
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching the 50th (!!!) Weaviate Podcast with Emil Sorensen and Finn Bauer from Kapa AI! Are you curious about taking either your, or your company's, specific information and putting into a Vector DB + LLM system? Emil and Finn are doing this at the highest level, taking the documentation of software companies like Weaviate and building these LLM-augmetnted assistant systems for them. This podcast takes a complete tour from Data Ingestion to Cleaning, Chunking, LLM latency, and emerging trends in LLMs such as cheap fine-tuning with LoRA or Long Context Windows such as GPT-4 32K, MPT-7B 65K, or Anthropic Claude's 100k. I learned so much from speaking with Emil and Finn! Please let us know any questions you have or ideas you would like to discuss!
Check out Kapa here! https://www.kapa.ai/
Chapters
0:00 Welcome Emil and Finn!
0:42 Origin Story of Kapa
2:08 Data Ingestion
5:10 Data Cleaning
6:20 Slack / Discord / Forum Ingestion
9:05 Testing Models on Support QA
11:14 Selling Kapa to Weaviate and friends
12:37 Hallucinations in LLMs
14:06 Trends in Open-Source LLMs
15:20 Long Input LLMs (32K, 65K, 100K, …)
16:54 Retrieval-Augmentation for Long Input LLMs
18:08 Fine-Tuning LLMs
23:00 As much or as refined content as possible?
24:40 Adding Docs from Integrations
26:15 Generative Feedback Loops
29:00 What in AI excites you the most?

May 25, 2023 • 1h 30min
Neurosymbolic AI in Search with Professor Laura Dietz - Weaviate Podcast #49!
Professor Laura Dietz discusses Neurosymbolic Search, Entity Linking, Entity Re-Ranking, Knowledge Graphs, and Large Language Models. They explore the potentials of bias in using LLMs for relevance judgments and the complexities of merging neural technologies with symbolic systems in search technology. The conversation delves into enhancing search algorithms, filtered vector search, entity linking with context-specific models, and the nuances of relevance judgments in research papers.

12 snips
May 23, 2023 • 43min
Unstructured with Brian Raymond - Weaviate Podcast #48!
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching the 48th episode of the Weaviate Podcast!! This is a SUPER exciting one, welcoming Brian Raymond the CEO / Founder of Unstructured! Unstructured is a perfect complimenting technology for Weaviate, helping people get their Unstructured data into Weaviate! The podcast dives into the nuances of this task, but it generally revolves around Unstructured's abstraction of Partitioning, Cleaning, and Staging! Unstructured is making groundbreaking innovations on using Visual Document Layout models for Partitioning, for example saying that this part of the PDF is the header, body, image caption, and so on. Cleaning then describes removing pesky details like whitespaces or odd characters. Staging then describes the transformations of say formatting a text chunk with it's metadata into the JSON for a Weaviate object upload! I really hope you find this podcast interesting! We are publishing a blog post as well showing an example of how to use Unstructured to get PDF data into Weaviate, please please check that out and let us know if it works for your data and how we can improve it! This blog post can be found on weaviate.io and we will be managing discussions around it both in the Weaviate slack, as well as Unstructured! Thank you so much for listening!
Check out Unstructured here! https://www.unstructured.io/
Chapters
0:00 Welcome Brian!!
0:27 What is Unstructured?
5:42 Why now? New Advancements in Unstructured
8:02 Thoughts on Data Connectors Hub
10:55 PDFs to Weaviate with Unstructured
13:53 State-of-the-Art in OCR and Document Parsing
16:10 How to get the data from Weaviate.io?
18:06 Foundation Models from Unstructured
20:45 Evaporate-Code+
23:15 CSV, Parquet, JSON transformations in Staging
25:08 Cleaning Bricks
28:02 Visual Document Examples
30:45 Text Chunking with Metadata
33:25 Knowledge Graphs with Goldman Sachs example
39:10 LLM Hallucinations
42:10 Announcements from Brian!

May 17, 2023 • 52min
ChatArena with Yuxiang Wu - Weaviate Podcast #47!
Hey everyone, thank you so much for watching the Weaviate podcast! I am so excited about this episode! ChatArena is a software framework for multi-agent chat games. There are quite a few interesting applications of this, firstly we can use this kind of system to evaluate the intelligence of an LLM based on how intelligent it sounds in conversation with another LLM! Another interesting idea is to have the LLM impersonate people such as Lex Fridman or Sam Altman and simulate conversations between these people -- retrieving from their digital content to facilitate the impersonation. I thought there was so many interesting ideas in this podcast, please let us know what you think!
Links:
ChatArena on GitHub (please give it a star!) - https://github.com/chatarena/chatarena
Twitter thread from Yuxiang describing the launch of ChatArena - https://twitter.com/YuxiangJWu/status/1643633046208249856
Chapters
0:00 Welcome Yuxiang!
0:38 What is ChatArena?
2:38 Impersonating People with LLMs
4:58 Weaviate and ChatArena
8:14 Generative Feedback Loops
11:10 Chat Games
16:30 Scientific Peer Review Discussions
20:05 Code Repos and Multi-Agent LLMs
23:05 Scaling Multi-Agent LLMs
25:16 Role Evolution in Startups
26:00 Evolution of Multi-Agent RL Research
29:22 AlphaGo and MCTS Text Generation
36:55 Hallucination in Role Maintenance
41:15 Evaluating LLMs with ChatArena
45:40 ChatGPT Marketplace and Tool Use
50:30 Upcoming work from Yuxiang and ChatArena!

May 10, 2023 • 1h 6min
HyperDB with John Dagdelen, Bob van Luijt, and Etienne Dilocker - Weaviate Podcast #46!
Hey everyone! Thank you so much for watching the Weaviate Podcast! This is pretty novel episode featuring both Weaviate Co-Founders Bob van Luijt and Etienne Dilocker! This is also extremely novel because we are featuring a competitor vector database, HyperDB! John Dagdelen is the founder of HyperDB which is a hyper-fast local vector database for use with LLM Agents. Now accepting SAFEs at $135M cap.
HyperDB: https://github.com/jdagdelen/hyperDB
More seriously, John has produced an incredible body of research - https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=TiCS5FEAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao. John's work on Scientific Literature Mining for Materials Science literature has played an enormous role in my personal education of this technology and what it is capable. Please also follow John on twitter @jmdagdelen.
Chapters
0:00 Introduction
0:26 HyperDB!
3:58 Initial Discovery of Vector Dos
15:00 Search Engine versus Databases
18:40 Scientific Literature Mining
21:42 Structured Information Extraction
27:47 Generative Feedback Loops