

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Lukas Biewald
Join Lukas Biewald on Gradient Dissent, an AI-focused podcast brought to you by Weights & Biases. Dive into fascinating conversations with industry giants from NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, OpenAI, and more. Explore the cutting-edge of AI and learn the intricacies of bringing models into production.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Sep 9, 2020 • 44min
Anthony Goldbloom — How to Win Kaggle Competitions
Anthony Goldbloom is the founder and CEO of Kaggle. In 2011 & 2012, Forbes Magazine named Anthony as one of the 30 under 30 in technology. In 2011, Fast Company featured him as one of the innovative thinkers who are changing the future of business.
He and Lukas discuss the differences in strategies that do well in Kaggle competitions vs academia vs in production. They discuss his 2016 Ted talk through the lens of 2020, frameworks, and languages.
Topics Discussed:
0:00 Sneak Peek
0:20 Introduction
0:45 methods used in kaggle competitions vs mainstream academia
2:30 Feature engineering
3:55 Kaggle Competitions now vs 10 years ago
8:35 Data augmentation strategies
10:06 Overfitting in Kaggle Competitions
12:53 How to not overfit
14:11 Kaggle competitions vs the real world
18:15 Getting into ML through Kaggle
22:03 Other Kaggle products
25:48 Favorite under appreciated kernel or dataset
28:27 Python & R
32:03 Frameworks
35:15 2016 Ted talk though the lens of 2020
37:54 Reinforcement Learning
38:43 What’s the topic in ML that people don’t talk about enough?
42:02 Where are the biggest bottlenecks in deploying ML software?
Check out Kaggle: https://www.kaggle.com/
Follow Anthony on Twitter: https://twitter.com/antgoldbloom
Watch his 2016 Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_goldbloom_the_jobs_we_ll_lose_to_machines_and_the_ones_we_won_t
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
Get our podcast on Soundcloud, Apple, and Spotify!
Soundcloud: https://bit.ly/2YnGjIq
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
* Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
* Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
* Join our community of ML practitioners working on interesting problems - https://www.wandb.com/ml-community
Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Sep 2, 2020 • 35min
Suzana Ilić — Cultivating Machine Learning Communities
👩💻Today our guest is Suzanah Ilić!
Suzanah is a founder of Machine Learning Tokyo which is a nonprofit organization dedicated to democratizing Machine Learning. They are a team of ML Engineers and Researchers and a community of more than 3000 people.
Machine Learning Tokyo: https://mltokyo.ai/
Follow Suzanah on twitter: https://twitter.com/suzatweet
Check out our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Apple and Spotify!
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it.
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Aug 25, 2020 • 51min
Jeremy Howard — The Story of fast.ai and Why Python Is Not the Future of ML
Jeremy Howard is a founding researcher at fast.ai, a research institute dedicated to making Deep Learning more accessible. Previously, he was the CEO and Founder at Enlitic, an advanced machine learning company in San Francisco, California.
Howard is a faculty member at Singularity University, where he teaches data science. He is also a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum, and spoke at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2014 on "Jobs For The Machines."
Howard advised Khosla Ventures as their Data Strategist, identifying the biggest opportunities for investing in data-driven startups and mentoring their portfolio companies to build data-driven businesses. Howard was the founding CEO of two successful Australian startups, FastMail and Optimal Decisions Group. Before that, he spent eight years in management consulting, at McKinsey & Company and AT Kearney.
TOPICS COVERED:
0:00 Introduction
0:52 Dad things
2:40 The story of Fast.ai
4:57 How the courses have evolved over time
9:24 Jeremy’s top down approach to teaching
13:02 From Fast.ai the course to Fast.ai the library
15:08 Designing V2 of the library from the ground up
21:44 The ingenious type dispatch system that powers Fast.ai
25:52 Were you able to realize the vision behind v2 of the library
28:05 Is it important to you that Fast.ai is used by everyone in the world, beyond the context of learning
29:37 Real world applications of Fast.ai, including animal husbandry
35:08 Staying ahead of the new developments in the field
38:50 A bias towards learning by doing
40:02 What’s next for Fast.ai
40.35 Python is not the future of Machine Learning
43:58 One underrated aspect of machine learning
45:25 Biggest challenge of machine learning in the real world
Follow Jeremy on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward
Links:
Deep learning R&D & education: http://fast.ai
Software: http://docs.fast.ai
Book: http://up.fm/book
Course: http://course.fast.ai
Papers:
The business impact of deep learning
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2487575.2491127
De-identification Methods for Open Health Data
https://www.jmir.org/2012/1/e33/
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Soundcloud, Apple, and Spotify!
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/WeightsBiases
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Aug 12, 2020 • 45min
Anantha Kancherla — Building Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles
As Lyft’s VP of Engineering, Software at Level 5, Autonomous Vehicle Program, Anantha Kancherla has a birds-eye view on what it takes to make self-driving cars work in the real world. He previously worked on Windows at Microsoft focusing on DirectX, Graphics and UI; Facebook’s mobile Newsfeed and core mobile experiences; and led the Collaboration efforts at Dropbox involving launching Dropbox Paper as well as improving core collaboration functionality in Dropbox.
He and Lukas dive into the challenges of working on large projects and how to approach breaking down a major project into pieces, tracking progress and addressing bugs.
Check out Lyft’s Self-Driving Website:
https://self-driving.lyft.com/
And this article on building the self-driving team at Lyft:
https://medium.com/lyftlevel5/going-from-zero-to-sixty-building-lyfts-self-driving-software-team-1ac693800588
Follow Lyft Level 5 on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/LyftLevel5
Topics covered:
0:00 Sharp Knives
0:44 Introduction
1:07 Breaking down a big goal
8:15 Breaking down Metrics
10:50 Allocating Resources
12:40 Interventions
13:27 What part still has lots ofroom for improvement?
14:25 Various ways of deploying models
15:30 Rideshare
15:57 Infrastructure, updates
17:28 Model versioning
19:16 Model improvement goals
22:42 Unit testing
25:12 Interactions of models
26:30 Improvements in data vs models
29:50 finding the right data
30:38 Deploying models into production
32:17 Feature drift
34:20 When to file bug tickets
37:25 Processes and growth
40:56 Underrated aspect
42:34 Biggest challenges
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Apple and Spotify!
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF

Aug 5, 2020 • 55min
Bharath Ramsundar — Deep Learning for Molecules and Medicine Discovery
Bharath created the deepchem.io open-source project to grow the deep drug discovery open source community, co-created the moleculenet.ai benchmark suite to facilitate development of molecular algorithms, and more. Bharath’s graduate education was supported by a Hertz Fellowship, the most selective graduate fellowship in the sciences. Bharath is the lead author of “TensorFlow for Deep Learning: From Linear Regression to Reinforcement Learning”, a developer’s introduction to modern machine learning, with O’Reilly Media.
Today, Bharath is focused on designing the decentralized protocols that will unlock data and AI to create the next stage of the internet. He received a BA and BS from UC Berkeley in EECS and Mathematics and was valedictorian of his graduating class in mathematics. He did his PhD in computer science at Stanford University where he studied the application of deep-learning to problems in drug-discovery.
Follow Bharath on Twitter and Github
https://twitter.com/rbhar90
rbharath.github.io
Check out some of his projects:
https://deepchem.io/
https://moleculenet.ai/
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=LOdVDNYAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Apple and Spotify!
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Jul 29, 2020 • 43min
Chip Huyen — ML Research and Production Pipelines
Chip Huyen is a writer and computer scientist currently working at a startup that focuses on machine learning production pipelines. Previously, she’s worked at NVIDIA, Netflix, and Primer. She helped launch Coc Coc - Vietnam’s second most popular web browser with 20+ million monthly active users. Before all of that, she was a best selling author and traveled the world.
Chip graduated from Stanford, where she created and taught the course on TensorFlow for Deep Learning Research.
Check out Chip's recent article on ML Tools: https://huyenchip.com/2020/06/22/mlops.html
Follow Chip on Twitter: https://twitter.com/chipro
And on her Website: https://huyenchip.com/
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Apple and Spotify!
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

50 snips
Jul 21, 2020 • 1h 27min
Peter Skomoroch — Product Management for AI
👨🏻💻Our guest on this episode of Gradient Dissent is Peter Skomoroch!
Peter is the former head of data products at Workday and LinkedIn. Previously, he was the cofounder and CEO of venture-backed deep learning startup SkipFlag, which was acquired by Workday, and a principal data scientist at LinkedIn.
Check out his recent publication: What you need to know about product management for AI
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/what-you-need-to-know-about-product-management-for-ai/
Follow Peter on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/peteskomoroch
And read some of his other work:
Pangloss: Fast Entity Linking in Noisy Text Environments
Large-Scale Hierarchical Topic Models
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Soundcloud, Apple, and Spotify!
YouTube: https://bit.ly/32NzZvI
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Jul 8, 2020 • 48min
Josh Tobin — Productionizing ML Models
Josh Tobin is a researcher working at the intersection of machine learning and robotics. His research focuses on applying deep reinforcement learning, generative models, and synthetic data to problems in robotic perception and control.
Additionally, he co-organizes a machine learning training program for engineers to learn about production-ready deep learning called Full Stack Deep Learning. https://fullstackdeeplearning.com/
Josh did his PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley advised by Pieter Abbeel and was a research scientist at OpenAI for 3 years during his PhD.
Finally, Josh created this amazing field guide on troubleshooting deep neural networks:
http://josh-tobin.com/assets/pdf/troubleshooting-deep-neural-networks-01-19.pdf
Follow Josh on twitter: https://twitter.com/josh_tobin
And on his website:http://josh-tobin.com/
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Youtube, Apple, and Spotify!
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD80i8An1OEEb1jP0sjEyiLG8ULRXFob_
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Jul 1, 2020 • 1h 2min
Miles Brundage — Societal Impacts of Artificial Intelligence
Miles Brundage researches the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and how to make sure they go well. In 2018, he joined OpenAI, as a Research Scientist on the Policy team. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and served as a member of Axon's AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board.
Keep up with Miles on his website: https://www.milesbrundage.com/
and on Twitter: https://twitter.com/miles_brundage
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Soundcloud, Apple, and Spotify!
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/

Jun 24, 2020 • 36min
Hamel Husain — Building Machine Learning Tools
Hamel Husain is a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Github. He has extensive experience building data analytics and predictive modeling solutions for a wide range of industries, including: hospitality, telecom, retail, restaurant, entertainment and finance. He has built large data science teams (50+) from the ground up and have extensive experience building solutions as an individual contributor.
Follow Hamel on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/HamelHusain
And on his website: http://hamel.io/
Learn more about Github Actions:
https://github.com/features/actions
and the CodeSearchNet Challenge:
https://github.blog/2019-09-26-introducing-the-codesearchnet-challenge/
Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!
www.wandb.com/podcast
🔊 Get our podcast on Apple, and Spotify!
Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/2WdrUvI
Spotify: https://bit.ly/2SqtadF
We started Weights and Biases to build tools for Machine Learning practitioners because we care a lot about the impact that Machine Learning can have in the world and we love working in the trenches with the people building these models. One of the most fun things about these building tools has been the conversations with these ML practitioners and learning about the interesting things they’re working on. This process has been so fun that we wanted to open it up to the world in the form of our new podcast called Gradient Dissent. We hope you have as much fun listening to it as we had making it!
👩🏼🚀Weights and Biases:
We’re always free for academics and open source projects. Email carey@wandb.com with any questions or feature suggestions.
- Blog: https://www.wandb.com/articles
- Gallery: See what you can create with W&B - https://app.wandb.ai/gallery
- Continue the conversation on our slack community - http://bit.ly/wandb-forum
🎙Host: Lukas Biewald - https://twitter.com/l2k
👩🏼💻Producer: Lavanya Shukla - https://twitter.com/lavanyaai
📹Editor: Cayla Sharp - http://caylasharp.com/