
Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
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.
Latest episodes

Jun 10, 2021 • 47min
Clément Delangue — The Power of the Open Source Community
Clem explains the virtuous cycles behind the creation and success of Hugging Face, and shares his thoughts on where NLP is heading.
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Clément Delangue is co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, the AI community building the future. Hugging Face started as an open source NLP library and has quickly grown into a commercial product used by over 5,000 companies.
Connect with Clem:
📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClementDelangue
📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clementdelangue/
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🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-clement-delangue 🌟
⏳ Timestamps:
0:00 Sneak peek and intro
0:56 What is Hugging Face?
4:15 The success of Hugging Face Transformers
7:53 Open source and virtuous cycles
10:37 Working with both TensorFlow and PyTorch
13:20 The "Write With Transformer" project
14:36 Transfer learning in NLP
16:43 BERT and DistilBERT
22:33 GPT
26:32 The power of the open source community
29:40 Current applications of NLP
35:15 The Turing Test and conversational AI
41:19 Why speech is an upcoming field within NLP
43:44 The human challenges of machine learning
Links Discussed:
📍 Write With Transformer, Hugging Face Transformer's text generation demo: https://transformer.huggingface.co/
📍 "Attention Is All You Need" (Vaswani et al., 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
📍 EleutherAI and GPT-Neo: https://github.com/EleutherAI/gpt-neo]
📍 Rasa, open source conversational AI: https://rasa.com/
📍 Roblox article on BERT: https://blog.roblox.com/2020/05/scaled-bert-serve-1-billion-daily-requests-cpus/
---
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👉 YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
👉 Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
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Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

7 snips
Jun 3, 2021 • 44min
Wojciech Zaremba — What Could Make AI Conscious?
Wojciech Zaremba, co-founder of OpenAI and expert in robotics and AI safety, shares fascinating insights on the principles that guide OpenAI. He discusses future stages of AI development and the intriguing Fermi Paradox. Wojciech dives into the complex relationship between AI and consciousness, exploring what could make an AI truly sentient. He also shares his passion for robotics and the ethical responsibilities that come with developing AGI, blending technical depth with philosophical ponderings.

May 27, 2021 • 57min
Phil Brown — How IPUs are Advancing Machine Intelligence
Phil shares some of the approaches, like sparsity and low precision, behind the breakthrough performance of Graphcore's Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs).
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Phil Brown leads the Applications team at Graphcore, where they're building high-performance machine learning applications for their Intelligence Processing Units (IPUs), new processors specifically designed for AI compute.
Connect with Phil:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philipsbrown/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/phil_s_brown
---
0:00 Sneak peek, intro
1:44 From computational chemistry to Graphcore
5:16 The simulations behind weather prediction
10:54 Measuring improvement in weather prediction systems
15:35 How high performance computing and ML have different needs
19:00 The potential of sparse training
31:08 IPUs and computer architecture for machine learning
39:10 On performance improvements
44:43 The impacts of increasing computing capability
50:24 The ML chicken and egg problem
52:00 The challenges of converging at scale and bringing hardware to market
Links Discussed:
Rigging the Lottery: Making All Tickets Winners (Evci et al., 2019): https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11134
Graphcore MK2 Benchmarks: https://www.graphcore.ai/mk2-benchmarks
Check out the transcription and discover more awesome ML projects: http://wandb.me/gd-phil-brown
---
Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack
Check out our Gallery, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more: https://wandb.ai/gallery

May 20, 2021 • 45min
Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger — Responsible ML in the Real World
From working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout to writing a book on responsible ML, Alyssa shares her thoughts on meaningful projects and the importance of teamwork.
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Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger is as a Director of Product at Blue Shield of California, pursuing her dream of using technology to improve healthcare. She has over a decade of experience in building technical data-driven products and has held numerous leadership roles for machine learning organizations, including VP of AI and Data at Appen and Director of Product at IBM Watson.
Connect with Sean:
Personal website: https://seanjtaylor.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanjtaylor/
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Topics Discussed:
0:00 Sneak peak, intro
1:17 Working on COVID-19 vaccine rollout in California
6:50 Real World AI
12:26 Diagnosing bias in models
17:43 Common challenges in ML
21:56 Finding meaningful projects
24:28 ML applications in health insurance
31:21 Longitudinal health records and data cleaning
38:24 Following your interests
40:21 Why teamwork is crucial
Transcript:
http://wandb.me/gd-alyssa-s-rochwerger
Links Discussed:
My Turn: https://myturn.ca.gov/
"Turn the Ship Around!": https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314163/turn-the-ship-around-by-l-david-marquet/
---
Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
http://wandb.me/slack
Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

May 13, 2021 • 46min
Sean Taylor — Business Decision Problems
Sean joins us to chat about ML models and tools at Lyft Rideshare Labs, Python vs R, time series forecasting with Prophet, and election forecasting.
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Sean Taylor is a Data Scientist at (and former Head of) Lyft Rideshare Labs, and specializes in methods for solving causal inference and business decision problems. Previously, he was a Research Scientist on Facebook's Core Data Science team. His interests include experiments, causal inference, statistics, machine learning, and economics.
Connect with Sean:
Personal website: https://seanjtaylor.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanjtaylor/
---
Topics Discussed:
0:00 Sneak peek, intro
0:50 Pricing algorithms at Lyft
07:46 Loss functions and ETAs at Lyft
12:59 Models and tools at Lyft
20:46 Python vs R
25:30 Forecasting time series data with Prophet
33:06 Election forecasting and prediction markets
40:55 Comparing and evaluating models
43:22 Bottlenecks in going from research to production
Transcript:
http://wandb.me/gd-sean-taylor
Links Discussed:
"How Lyft predicts a rider’s destination for better in-app experience"": https://eng.lyft.com/how-lyft-predicts-your-destination-with-attention-791146b0a439
Prophet: https://facebook.github.io/prophet/
Andrew Gelman's blog post "Facebook's Prophet uses Stan": https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/03/01/facebooks-prophet-uses-stan/
Twitter thread "Election forecasting using prediction markets": https://twitter.com/seanjtaylor/status/1270899371706466304
"An Updated Dynamic Bayesian Forecasting Model for the 2020 Election": https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/nw1dzd02/release/1
---
Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
http://wandb.me/slack
Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Apr 29, 2021 • 46min
Polly Fordyce — Microfluidic Platforms and Machine Learning
Polly explains how microfluidics allow bioengineering researchers to create high throughput data, and shares her experiences with biology and machine learning.
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Polly Fordyce is an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Bioengineering and fellow of the ChEM-H Institute at Stanford. She is the Principal Investigator of The Fordyce Lab, which focuses on developing and applying new microfluidic platforms for quantitative, high-throughput biophysics and biochemistry.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/fordycelab
Website: http://www.fordycelab.com/
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Topics Discussed:
0:00 Sneak peek, intro
2:11 Background on protein sequencing
7:38 How changes to a protein's sequence alters its structure and function
11:07 Microfluidics and machine learning
19:25 Why protein folding is important
25:17 Collaborating with ML practitioners
31:46 Transfer learning and big data sets in biology
38:42 Where Polly hopes bioengineering research will go
42:43 Advice for students
Transcript:
http://wandb.me/gd-polly-fordyce
Links Discussed:
"The Weather Makers": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wea...
---
Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
http://wandb.me/slack
Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Apr 22, 2021 • 48min
Adrien Gaidon — Advancing ML Research in Autonomous Vehicles
Adrien Gaidon shares his approach to building teams and taking state-of-the-art research from conception to production at Toyota Research Institute.
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Adrien Gaidon is the Head of Machine Learning Research at the Toyota Research Institute (TRI). His research focuses on scaling up ML for robot autonomy, spanning Scene and Behavior Understanding, Simulation for Deep Learning, 3D Computer Vision, and Self-Supervised Learning.
Connect with Adrien:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/adnothing
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrien-gaidon-63ab2358/
Personal website: https://adriengaidon.com/
---
Topics Discussed:
0:00 Sneak peek, intro
0:48 Guitars and other favorite tools
3:55 Why is PyTorch so popular?
11:40 Autonomous vehicle research in the long term
15:10 Game-changing academic advances
20:53 The challenges of bringing autonomous vehicles to market
26:05 Perception and prediction
35:01 Fleet learning and meta learning
41:20 The human aspects of machine learning
44:25 The scalability bottleneck
Transcript:
http://wandb.me/gd-adrien-gaidon
Links Discussed:
TRI Global Research: https://www.tri.global/research/
todoist: https://todoist.com/
Contrastive Learning of Structured World Models: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05709
SimCLR: https://arxiv.org/abs/2002.05709
---
Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
http://wandb.me/slack
Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Apr 15, 2021 • 34min
Nimrod Shabtay — Deployment and Monitoring at Nanit
A look at how Nimrod and the team at Nanit are building smart baby monitor systems, from data collection to model deployment and production monitoring.
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Nimrod Shabtay is a Senior Computer Vision Algorithm Developer at Nanit, a New York-based company that's developing better baby monitoring devices.
Connect with Nimrod:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimrod-shabtay-76072840/
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Links Discussed:
Guidelines for building an accurate and robust ML/DL model in production: https://engineering.nanit.com/guideli...
Careers at Nanit: https://www.nanit.com/jobs
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Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
---
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects, and more:
http://wandb.me/slack
Our gallery features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, and industry leaders sharing best practices:
https://wandb.ai/gallery

Apr 8, 2021 • 42min
Chris Mattmann — ML Applications on Earth, Mars, and Beyond
Chris shares some of the incredible work and innovations behind deep space exploration at NASA JPL and reflects on the past, present, and future of machine learning.
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Chris Mattmann is the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he focuses on organizational innovation through technology. He's worked on space missions such as the Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2 and Soil Moisture Active Passive satellites.
Chris is also a co-creator of Apache Tika, a content detection and analysis framework that was one of the key technologies used to uncover the Panama Papers, and is the author of "Machine Learning with TensorFlow, Second Edition" and "Tika in Action".
Connect with Chris:
Personal website: https://www.mattmann.ai/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/chrismattmann
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Topics Discussed:
0:00 Sneak peek, intro
0:52 On Perseverance and Ingenuity
8:40 Machine learning applications at NASA JPL
11:51 Innovation in scientific instruments and data formats
18:26 Data processing levels: Level 1 vs Level 2 vs Level 3
22:20 Competitive data processing
27:38 Kerbal Space Program
30:19 The ideas behind "Machine Learning with Tensorflow, Second Edition"
35:37 The future of MLOps and AutoML
38:51 Machine learning at the edge
Transcript:
http://wandb.me/gd-chris-mattmann
Links Discussed:
Perseverance and Ingenuity: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
Data processing levels at NASA: https://earthdata.nasa.gov/collaborate/open-data-services-and-software/data-information-policy/data-levels
OCO-2: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/orbiting-carbon-observatory-2-oco-2
"Machine Learning with TensorFlow, Second Edition" (2020): https://www.manning.com/books/machine-learning-with-tensorflow-second-edition
"Tika in Action" (2011): https://www.manning.com/books/tika-in-action
Transcript:
http://wandb.me/gd-chris-mattmann
---
Get our podcast on these platforms:
Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts
Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify
Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
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Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more:
https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Apr 1, 2021 • 49min
Vladlen Koltun — The Power of Simulation and Abstraction
From legged locomotion to autonomous driving, Vladlen explains how simulation and abstraction help us understand embodied intelligence.
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Vladlen Koltun is the Chief Scientist for Intelligent Systems at Intel, where he leads an international lab of researchers working in machine learning, robotics, computer vision, computational science, and related areas.
Connect with Vladlen:
Personal website: http://vladlen.info/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladlenkoltun/
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0:00 Sneak peek and intro
1:20 "Intelligent Systems" vs "AI"
3:02 Legged locomotion
9:26 The power of simulation
14:32 Privileged learning
18:19 Drone acrobatics
20:19 Using abstraction to transfer simulations to reality
25:35 Sample Factory for reinforcement learning
34:30 What inspired CARLA and what keeps it going
41:43 The challenges of and for robotics
Links Discussed
Learning quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain (Lee et al., 2020): https://robotics.sciencemag.org/content/5/47/eabc5986.abstract
Deep Drone Acrobatics (Kaufmann et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.05768
Sample Factory: Egocentric 3D Control from Pixels at 100000 FPS with Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning (Petrenko et al., 2020): https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.11751
CARLA: https://carla.org/
---
Check out the transcription and discover more awesome ML projects:
http://wandb.me/vladlen-koltun-podcast
Get our podcast on these platforms:
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Google: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts
YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube
Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud
---
Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:
http://wandb.me/slack
Our gallery features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, and industry leaders sharing best practices:
https://wandb.ai/gallery