Chris Benson
Cohost @ Practical AI Podcast • AI / Autonomy Research Engineer @ Lockheed Martin
Appears in 297 Episodes
YOLOv9: Computer vision is alive and well
While everyone is super hyped about generative AI, computer vision researchers have been working in the background on significant advancements in deep learning archite...
Representation Engineering (Activation Hacking)
Recently, we briefly mentioned the concept of “Activation Hacking” in the episode with Karan from Nous Research. In this fully connected episode, Chris and Daniel dive...
Leading the charge on AI in National Security
Chris & Daniel explore AI in national security with Lt. General Jack Shanahan (USAF, Ret.). The conversation reflects Jack’s unique background as the only senior U.S. ...
Gemini vs OpenAI
Google has been releasing a ton of new GenAI functionality under the name “Gemini”, and they’ve officially rebranded Bard as Gemini. We take some time to talk through ...
Data synthesis for SOTA LLMs
Nous Research has been pumping out some of the best open access LLMs using SOTA data synthesis techniques. Their Hermes family of models is incredibly popular! In this...
Large Action Models (LAMs) & Rabbits 🐇
Recently the release of the rabbit r1 device resulted in huge interest in both the device and “Large Action Models” (or LAMs). What is an LAM? Is this something new? D...
AI predictions for 2024
We scoured the internet to find all the AI related predictions for 2024 (at least from people that might know what they are talking about), and, in this episode, we ta...
Open source, on-disk vector search with LanceDB
Prashanth Rao mentioned LanceDB as a stand out amongst the many vector DB options in episode #234. Now, Chang She (co-founder and CEO of LanceDB) joins us to talk thro...
The state of open source AI
The new open source AI book from PremAI starts with “As a data scientist/ML engineer/developer with a 9 to 5 job, it’s difficult to keep track of all the innovations.”...
The OpenAI debacle (a retrospective)
Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a n...
Generating product imagery at Shopify
Shopify recently released a Hugging Face space demonstrating very impressive results for replacing background scenes in product imagery. In this episode, we hear the b...
AI trailblazers putting people first
According to Solana Larsen: “Too often, it feels like we have lost control of the internet to the interests of Big Tech, Big Data — and now Big AI.” In the latest seas...
Government regulation of AI has arrived
On Monday, October 30, 2023, the U.S. White House issued its Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. Two d...
Self-hosting & scaling models
We’re excited to have Tuhin join us on the show once again to talk about self-hosting open access models. Tuhin’s company Baseten specializes in model deployment and m...
Deep learning in Rust with Burn 🔥
It seems like everyone is interested in Rust these days. Even the most popular Python linter, Ruff, isn’t written in Python! It’s written in Rust. But what is the stat...
Generative models: exploration to deployment
What is the model lifecycle like for experimenting with and then deploying generative AI models? Although there are some similarities, this lifecycle differs somewhat ...
Automate all the UIs!
Dominik Klotz from askui joins Daniel and Chris to discuss the automation of UI, and how AI empowers them to automate any use case on any operating system. Along the w...
Fine-tuning vs RAG
In this episode we welcome back our good friend Demetrios from the MLOps Community to discuss fine-tuning vs. retrieval augmented generation. Along the way, we also ch...
Automating code optimization with LLMs
You might have heard a lot about code generation tools using AI, but could LLMs and generative AI make our existing code better? In this episode, we sit down with Mike...
The new AI app stack
Recently a16z released a diagram showing the “Emerging Architectures for LLM Applications.” In this episode, we expand on things covered in that diagram to a more gene...