
MLOps.community
By Demetrios


Inside Uber’s AI Revolution - Everything about how they use AI/ML
Kai Wang joins the MLOps Community podcast LIVE to share how Uber built and scaled its ML platform, Michelangelo. From mission-critical models to tools for both beginners and experts, he walks us through Uber’s AI playbook—and teases plans to open-source parts of it.
// Bio
Kai Wang is the product lead of the AI platform team at Uber, overseeing Uber's internal end-to-end ML platform called Michelangelo that powers 100% Uber's business-critical ML use cases.
// Related Links
Uber GenAI: https://www.uber.com/blog/from-predictive-to-generative-ai/
#uber #podcast #ai #machinelearning
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Kai on LinkedIn: /kai-wang-67457318/
Timestamps:
[00:00] Rethinking AI Beyond ChatGPT
[04:01] How Devs Pick Their Tools
[08:25] Measuring Dev Speed Smartly
[10:14] Predictive Models at Uber
[13:11] When ML Strategy Shifts
[15:56] Smarter Uber Eats with AI
[19:29] Summarizing Feedback with ML
[23:27] GenAI That Users Notice
[27:19] Inference at Scale: Michelangelo
[32:26] Building Uber’s AI Studio
[33:50] Faster AI Agents, Less Pain
[39:21] Evaluating Models at Uber
[42:22] Why Uber Open-Sourced Machanjo
[44:32] What Fuels Uber’s AI Team

The Missing Data Stack for Physical AI
The Missing Data Stack for Physical AI // MLOps Podcast #328 with Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun.
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// Abstract
Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, breaks down the challenges and opportunities of physical AI—AI that interacts with the real world. He explains why traditional software falls short in dynamic environments and how visualization, adaptability, and better tooling are key to making robotics and spatial computing more practical.
// Bio
Niko is a second-time founder and software engineer with a computer vision background from Stanford. He’s a fanatic about bringing great computer vision and robotics products to the physical world.
// Related Links
Website: rerun.io
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
Join our Slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]
Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)]
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MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Niko on LinkedIn: /NikolausWest
Timestamps:
[00:00] Niko's preferred coffee
[00:35] Physical AI vs Robotics Debate
[04:40] IoT Hype vs Reality
[12:16] Physical AI Lifecycle Overview
[20:05] AI Constraints in Robotics
[23:42] Data Challenges in Robotics
[33:37] Open Sourcing AI Tools
[39:36] Rerun Platform Integration
[40:57] Data Integration for Insights
[45:02] Data Pipelines and Quality
[49:19] Robotics Design Trade-offs
[52:25] Wrap up

AI Reliability, Spark, Observability, SLAs and Starting an AI Infra Company
LLMs are reshaping the future of data and AI—and ignoring them might just be career malpractice. Yoni Michael and Kostas Pardalis unpack what’s breaking, what’s emerging, and why inference is becoming the new heartbeat of the data pipeline.
// Bio
Kostas Pardalis
Kostas is an engineer-turned-entrepreneur with a passion for building products and companies in the data space. He’s currently the co-founder of Typedef. Before that, he worked closely with the creators of Trino at Starburst Data on some exciting projects. Earlier in his career, he was part of the leadership team at Rudderstack, helping the company grow from zero to a successful Series B in under two years. He also founded Blendo in 2014, one of the first cloud-based ELT solutions.
Yoni Michael
Yoni is the Co-Founder of typedef, a serverless data platform purpose-built to help teams process unstructured text and run LLM inference pipelines at scale. With a deep background in data infrastructure, Yoni has spent over a decade building systems at the intersection of data and AI — including leading infrastructure at Tecton and engineering teams at Salesforce.
Yoni is passionate about rethinking how teams extract insight from massive troves of text, transcripts, and documents — and believes the future of analytics depends on bridging traditional data pipelines with modern AI workflows. At Typedef, he’s working to make that future accessible to every team, without the complexity of managing infrastructure.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.typedef.ai
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
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Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Kostas on LinkedIn: /kostaspardalis/
Connect with Yoni on LinkedIn: /yonimichael/
Timestamps:
[00:00] Breaking Tools, Evolving Data Workloads
[06:35] Building Truly Great Data Teams
[10:49] Making Data Platforms Actually Useful
[18:54] Scaling AI with Native Integration
[24:04] Empowering Employees to Build Agents
[28:17] Rise of the AI Sherpa
[36:09] Real AI Infrastructure Pain Points
[38:05] Fixing Gaps Between Data, AI
[46:04] Smarter Decisions Through Better Data
[50:18] LLMs as Human-Machine Interfaces
[53:40] Why Summarization Still Falls Short
[01:01:15] Smarter Chunking, Fixing Text Issues
[01:09:08] Evaluating AI with Canary Pipelines
[01:11:46] Finding Use Cases That Matter
[01:17:38] Cutting Costs, Keeping AI Quality
[01:25:15] Aligning MLOps to Business Outcomes
[01:29:44] Communities Thrive on Cross-Pollination
[01:34:56] Evaluation Tools Quietly Consolidating

Greg Kamradt: Benchmarking Intelligence | ARC Prize
What makes a good AI benchmark? Greg Kamradt joins Demetrios to break it down—from human-easy, AI-hard puzzles to wild new games that test how fast models can truly learn. They talk hidden datasets, compute tradeoffs, and why benchmarks might be our best bet for tracking progress toward AGI. It’s nerdy, strategic, and surprisingly philosophical.
// Bio
Greg has mentored thousands of developers and founders, empowering them to build AI-centric applications.By crafting tutorial-based content, Greg aims to guide everyone from seasoned builders to ambitious indie hackers.Greg partners with companies during their product launches, feature enhancements, and funding rounds. His objective is to cultivate not just awareness, but also a practical understanding of how to optimally utilize a company's tools.He previously led Growth @ Salesforce for Sales & Service Clouds in addition to being early on at Digits, a FinTech Series-C company.
// Related Links
Website: https://gregkamradt.com/
YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@DataIndependent
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
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Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: /gregkamradt/
Timestamps:
[00:00] Human-Easy, AI-Hard
[05:25] When the Model Shocks Everyone
[06:39] “Let’s Circle Back on That Benchmark…”
[09:50] Want Better AI? Pay the Compute Bill
[14:10] Can We Define Intelligence by How Fast You Learn?
[16:42] Still Waiting on That Algorithmic Breakthrough
[20:00] LangChain Was Just the Beginning
[24:23] Start With Humans, End With AGI
[29:01] What If Reality’s Just... What It Seems?
[32:21] AI Needs Fewer Vibes, More Predictions
[36:02] Defining Intelligence (No Pressure)
[36:41] AI Building AI? Yep, We're Going There
[40:13] Open Source vs. Prize Money Drama
[43:05] Architecting the ARC Challenge
[46:38] Agent 57 and the Atari Gauntlet

Bridging the Gap Between AI and Business Data // Deepti Srivastava // #325
Bridging the Gap Between AI and Business Data // MLOps Podcast #325 with Deepti Srivastava, Founder and CEO at Snow Leopard.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
I’m sure the MLOps community is probably aware – it's tough to make AI work in enterprises for many reasons, from data silos, data privacy and security concerns, to going from POCs to production applications. But one of the biggest challenges facing businesses today, that I particularly care about, is how to unlock the true potential of AI by leveraging a company’s operational business data. At Snow Leopard, we aim to bridge the gap between AI systems and critical business data that is locked away in databases, data warehouses, and other API-based systems, so enterprises can use live business data from any data source – whether it's database, warehouse, or APIs – in real time and on demand, natively. In this interview, I'd like to cover Snow Leopard’s intelligent data retrieval approach that can leverage business data directly and on-demand to make AI work.
// Bio
Deepti is the founder and CEO of Snow Leopard AI, a platform that helps teams build AI apps using their live business data, on-demand. She has nearly 2 decades of experience in data platforms and infrastructure.
As Head of Product at Observable, Deepti led the 0→1 product and GTM strategy in the crowded data analytics market. Before that, Deepti was the founding PM for Google Spanner, growing it to thousands of internal customers (Ads, PlayStore, Gmail, etc.), before launching it externally as a seminal cloud database service. Deepti started her career as a distributed systems engineer in the RAC database kernel at Oracle.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.snowleopard.ai/
AI SQL Data Analyst // Donné Stevenson - https://youtu.be/hwgoNmyCGhQ
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Deepti's preferred coffee
[00:49] MLflow vs Kubeflow Debate
[04:58] GenAI Data Integration Challenges
[09:02] GenAI Sidecar Spicy Takes
[14:07] Troubleshooting LLM Hallucinations
[19:03] AI Overengineering and Hype
[25:06] Self-Serve Analytics Governance
[33:29] Dashboards vs Data Quality
[37:06] Agent Database Context Control
[43:00] LLM as Orchestrator
[47:34] Tool Call Ownership Clarification
[51:45] MCP Server Challenges
[56:52] Wrap up

The Creator of FastAPI’s Next Chapter // Sebastián Ramírez // #324
The Creator of FastAPI’s Next Chapter // MLOps Podcast #324 with Sebastián Ramírez, Developer at FastAPI Labs.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
The creator of FastAPI is back with a new chapter—FastAPI Cloud. From building one of the most loved dev tools to launching a company, Sebastián Ramírez shares how open source, developer experience, and a dash of humor are shaping the future of APIs.
// Bio
Sebastián Ramírez (also known as Tiangolo) is the creator of FastAPI, Typer, SQLModel, Asyncer, and several other widely used open-source tools. He has collaborated with companies and teams around the world—from Latin America to the Middle East, Europe, and the United States—building a range of products and custom solutions focused on APIs, data processing, distributed systems, and machine learning. Today, he works full time on FastAPI and its growing ecosystem.
// Related Links
Website: https://tiangolo.com/
FastAPI: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/
FastAPI Cloud: https://fastapicloud.com/
FastAPI for Machine Learning // Sebastián Ramírez // MLOps Coffee Sessions #96 - https://youtu.be/NpvRhZnkEFg
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Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Sebastián's preferred coffee
[00:15] Takeaways
[01:43] Why Pydantic is Awesome
[06:47] ML Background and FastAPI
[10:44] NASA FastAPI Emojis
[15:21] FastAPI Cloud Journey
[26:07] FastAPI Cloud Open-Source Balance
[31:45] Basecamp Design Philosophy
[35:30] AI Abstraction Strategies
[42:56] Engineering vs Developer Experience
[51:40] Dogfooding and Docs Strategy
[59:44] Code Simplicity and Trust
[1:04:26] Scaling Without Losing Vision
[1:08:20] FastAPI Cloud Signup
[1:09:23] Wrap up

Everything Hard About Building AI Agents Today
Willem Pienaar and Shreya Shankar discuss the challenge of evaluating agents in production where "ground truth" is ambiguous and subjective user feedback isn't enough to improve performance.
The discussion breaks down the three "gulfs" of human-AI interaction—Specification, Generalization, and Comprehension—and their impact on agent success.
Willem and Shreya cover the necessity of moving the human "out of the loop" for feedback, creating faster learning cycles through implicit signals rather than direct, manual review.The conversation details practical evaluation techniques, including analyzing task failures with heat maps and the trade-offs of using simulated environments for testing.
Willem and Shreya address the reality of a "performance ceiling" for AI and the importance of categorizing problems your agent can, can learn to, or will likely never be able to solve.
// Bio
Shreya Shankar
PhD student in data management for machine learning.
Willem Pienaar
Willem Pienaar, CTO of Cleric, is a builder with a focus on LLM agents, MLOps, and open source tooling. He is the creator of Feast, an open source feature store, and contributed to the creation of both the feature store and MLOps categories.
Before starting Cleric, Willem led the open source engineering team at Tecton and established the ML platform team at Gojek, where he built high scale ML systems for the Southeast Asian decacorn.
// Related Links
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Shreya on LinkedIn: /shrshnk
Connect with Willem on LinkedIn: /willempienaar
Timestamps:
[00:00] Trust Issues in AI Data
[04:49] Cloud Clarity Meets Retrieval
[09:37] Why Fast AI Is Hard
[11:10] Fixing AI Communication Gaps
[14:53] Smarter Feedback for Prompts
[19:23] Creativity Through Data Exploration
[23:46] Helping Engineers Solve Faster
[26:03] The Three Gaps in AI
[28:08] Alerts Without the Noise
[33:22] Custom vs General AI
[34:14] Sharpening Agent Skills
[40:01] Catching Repeat Failures
[43:38] Rise of Self-Healing Software
[44:12] The Chaos of Monitoring AI

Tricks to Fine Tuning // Prithviraj Ammanabrolu // #318
Tricks to Fine Tuning // MLOps Podcast #318 with Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, Research Scientist at Databricks.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
Prithviraj Ammanabrolu drops by to break down Tao fine-tuning—a clever way to train models without labeled data. Using reinforcement learning and synthetic data, Tao teaches models to evaluate and improve themselves. Raj explains how this works, where it shines (think small models punching above their weight), and why it could be a game-changer for efficient deployment.
// Bio
Raj is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, San Diego, leading the PEARLS Lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). He is also a Research Scientist at Mosaic AI, Databricks, where his team is actively recruiting research scientists and engineers with expertise in reinforcement learning and distributed systems.
Previously, he was part of the Mosaic team at the Allen Institute for AI. He earned his PhD in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, advised by Professor Mark Riedl in the Entertainment Intelligence Lab.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.databricks.com/
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
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Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Raj on LinkedIn: /rajammanabrolu
Timestamps:
[00:00] Raj's preferred coffee
[00:36] Takeaways
[01:02] Tao Naming Decision
[04:19] No Labels Machine Learning
[08:09] Tao and TAO breakdown
[13:20] Reward Model Fine-Tuning
[18:15] Training vs Inference Compute
[22:32] Retraining and Model Drift
[29:06] Prompt Tuning vs Fine-Tuning
[34:32] Small Model Optimization Strategies
[37:10] Small Model Potential
[43:08] Fine-tuning Model Differences
[46:02] Mistral Model Freedom
[53:46] Wrap up

Packaging MLOps Tech Neatly for Engineers and Non-engineers // Jukka Remes // #322
Packaging MLOps Tech Neatly for Engineers and Non-engineers // MLOps Podcast #322 with Jukka Remes, Senior Lecturer (SW dev & AI), AI Architect at Haaga-Helia UAS, Founder & CTO at 8wave AI.
Join the Community:
https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
AI is already complex—adding the need for deep engineering expertise to use MLOps tools only makes it harder, especially for SMEs and research teams with limited resources. Yet, good MLOps is essential for managing experiments, sharing GPU compute, tracking models, and meeting AI regulations.
While cloud providers offer MLOps tools, many organizations need flexible, open-source setups that work anywhere—from laptops to supercomputers. Shared setups can boost collaboration, productivity, and compute efficiency.In this session, Jukka introduces an open-source MLOps platform from Silo AI, now packaged for easy deployment across environments. With Git-based workflows and CI/CD automation, users can focus on building models while the platform handles the MLOps.// BioFounder & CTO, 8wave AI | Senior Lecturer, Haaga-Helia University of Applied SciencesJukka Remes has 28+ years of experience in software, machine learning, and infrastructure. Starting with SW dev in the late 1990s and analytics pipelines of fMRI research in early 2000s, he’s worked across deep learning (Nokia Technologies), GPU and cloud infrastructure (IBM), and AI consulting (Silo AI), where he also led MLOps platform development.
Now a senior lecturer at Haaga-Helia, Jukka continues evolving that open-source MLOps platform with partners like the University of Helsinki. He leads R&D on GenAI and AI-enabled software, and is the founder of 8wave AI, which develops AI Business Operations software for next-gen AI enablement, including regulatory compliance of AI.
// Related Links
Open source -based MLOps k8s platform setup originally developed by Jukka's team at Silo AI - free for any use and installable in any environment from laptops to supercomputing: https://github.com/OSS-MLOPS-PLATFORM/oss-mlops-platform
Jukka's new company: https://8wave.ai
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
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Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)]
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Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Jukka on LinkedIn: /jukka-remes
Timestamps:
[00:00] Jukka's preferred coffee
[00:39] Open-Source Platform Benefits
[01:56] Silo MLOps Platform Explanation
[05:18] AI Model Production Processes
[10:42] AI Platform Use Cases
[16:54] Reproducibility in Research Models
[26:51] Pipeline setup automation
[33:26] MLOps Adoption Journey
[38:31] EU AI Act and Open Source
[41:38] MLOps and 8wave AI
[45:46] Optimizing Cross-Stakeholder Collaboration
[52:15] Open Source ML Platform
[55:06] Wrap up

Hard Learned Lessons from Over a Decade in AI
Tecton Founder and CEO Mike Del Balso talks about what ML/AI use cases are core components generating Millions in revenue. Demetrios and Mike go through the maturity curve that predictive Machine Learning use cases have gone through over the past 5 years, and why a feature store is a primary component of an ML stack.
// Bio
Mike Del Balso is the CEO and co-founder of Tecton, where he’s building the industry’s first feature platform for real-time ML. Before Tecton, Mike co-created the Uber Michelangelo ML platform. He was also a product manager at Google where he managed the core ML systems that power Google’s Search Ads business. He studied Applied Science, Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.
// Related Links
Website: www.tecton.ai
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Mike on LinkedIn: /michaeldelbalso
Timestamps:
[00:00] Smarter decisions, less manual work
[03:52] Data pipelines: pain and fixes
[08:45] Why Tecton was born
[11:30] ML use cases shift
[14:14] Models for big bets
[18:39] Build or buy drama
[20:20] Fintech's data playbook
[23:52] What really needs real-time
[28:07] Speeding up ML delivery
[32:09] Valuing ML is tricky
[35:29] Simplifying ML toolkits
[37:18] AI copilots in action
[42:13] AI that fights fraud
[45:07] Teaming up across coasts
[46:43] Tecton + Generative AI?

Product Metrics are LLM Evals // Raza Habib CEO of Humanloop // #320
Raza Habib, the CEO of LLM Eval platform Humanloop, talks to us about how to make your AI products more accurate and reliable by shortening the feedback loop of your evals. Quickly iterating on prompts and testing what works, along with some of his favorite Dario from Anthropic AI Quotes.
// Bio
Raza is the CEO and Co-founder at Humanloop. He has a PhD in Machine Learning from UCL, was the founding engineer of Monolith AI, and has built speech systems at Google. For the last 4 years, he has led Humanloop and supported leading technology companies such as Duolingo, Vanta, and Gusto to build products with large language models. Raza was featured in the Forbes 30 Under 30 technology list in 2022, and Sifted recently named him one of the most influential Gen AI founders in Europe.
// Related Links
Websites: https://humanloop.com
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Raza on LinkedIn: /humanloop-raza
Timestamps:
[00:00] Cracking Open System Failures and How We Fix Them
[05:44] LLMs in the Wild — First Steps and Growing Pains
[08:28] Building the Backbone of Tracing and Observability
[13:02] Tuning the Dials for Peak Model Performance
[13:51] From Growing Pains to Glowing Gains in AI Systems
[17:26] Where Prompts Meet Psychology and Code
[22:40] Why Data Experts Deserve a Seat at the Table
[24:59] Humanloop and the Art of Configuration Taming
[28:23] What Actually Matters in Customer-Facing AI
[33:43] Starting Fresh with Private Models That Deliver
[34:58] How LLM Agents Are Changing the Way We Talk
[39:23] The Secret Lives of Prompts Inside Frameworks
[42:58] Streaming Showdowns — Creativity vs. Convenience
[46:26] Meet Our Auto-Tuning AI Prototype
[49:25] Building the Blueprint for Smarter AI
[51:24] Feedback Isn’t Optional — It’s Everything

Getting AI Apps Past the Demo // Vaibhav Gupta // #319
Getting AI Apps Past the Demo // MLOps Podcast #319 with Vaibhav Gupta, CEO of BoundaryML.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
It's been two years, and we still seem to see AI disproportionately more in demos than production features. Why? And how can we apply engineering practices we've all learned in the past decades to our advantage here?
// Bio
Vaibhav is one of the creators of BAML and a YC alum. He spent 10 years in AI performance optimization at places like Google, Microsoft, and D.E. Shaw. He loves diving deep and chatting about anything related to Gen AI and Computer Vision!
// Related Links
Website: https://www.boundaryml.com/
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
Join our Slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]
Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)]
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MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Vaibhav on LinkedIn: /vaigup
Timestamps:
[00:00] Vaibhav's preferred coffee
[00:38] What is BAML
[03:07] LangChain Overengineering Issues
[06:46] Verifiable English Explained
[11:45] Python AI Integration Challenges
[15:16] Strings as First-Class Code
[21:45] Platform Gap in Development
[30:06] Workflow Efficiency Tools
[33:10] Surprising BAML Insights
[40:43] BAML Cool Projects
[45:54] BAML Developer Conversations
[48:39] Wrap up

Building Out GPU Clouds // Mohan Atreya // #317
Demetrios and Mohan Atreya break down the GPU madness behind AI — from supply headaches and sky-high prices to the rise of nimble GPU clouds trying to outsmart the giants. They cover power-hungry hardware, failed experiments, and how new cloud models are shaking things up with smarter provisioning, tokenized access, and a whole lotta hustle. It's a wild ride through the guts of AI infrastructure — fun, fast, and full of sparks!
Big thanks to the folks at Rafay for backing this episode — appreciate the support in making these conversations happen!
// Bio
Mohan is a seasoned and innovative product leader currently serving as the Chief Product Officer at Rafay Systems. He has led multi-site teams and driven product strategy at companies like Okta, Neustar, and McAfee.
// Related Links
Websites: https://rafay.co/
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~
Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExplore
MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]
Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkm
Connect with Mohan on LinkedIn: /mohanatreya
Timestamps:
[00:00] AI/ML Customer Challenges
[04:21] Dependency on Microsoft for Revenue
[09:08] Challenges of Hypothesis in AI/ML
[12:17] Neo Cloud Onboarding Challenges
[15:02] Elastic GPU Cloud Automation
[19:11] Dynamic GPU Inventory Management
[20:25] Terraform Lacks Inventory Awareness
[26:42] Onboarding and End-User Experience Strategies
[29:30] Optimizing Storage for Data Efficiency
[33:38] Pizza Analogy: User Preferences
[35:18] Token-Based GPU Cloud Monetization
[39:01] Empowering Citizen Scientists with AI
[42:31] Innovative CFO Chatbot Solutions
[47:09] Cloud Services Need Spectrum

A Candid Conversation Around MCP and A2A // Rahul Parundekar and Sam Partee // #316 SF Live
Demetrios, Sam Partee, and Rahul Parundekar unpack the chaos of AI agent tools and the evolving world of MCP (Model Context Protocol). With sharp insights and plenty of laughs, they dig into tool permissions, security quirks, agent memory, and the messy path to making agents actually useful.
// Bio
Sam Partee
Sam Partee is the CTO and Co-Founder of Arcade AI. Previously a Principal Engineer leading the Applied AI team at Redis, Sam led the effort in creating the ecosystem around Redis as a vector database. He is a contributor to multiple OSS projects including Langchain, DeterminedAI, LlamaIndex and Chapel amongst others. While at Cray/HPE he created the SmartSim AI framework which is now used at national labs around the country to integrate HPC simulations like climate models with AI.
Rahul Parundekar
Rahul Parundekar is the founder of AI Hero. He graduated with a Master's in Computer Science from USC Los Angeles in 2010, and embarked on a career focused on Artificial Intelligence. From 2010-2017, he worked as a Senior Researcher at Toyota ITC working on agent autonomy within vehicles. His journey continued as the Director of Data Science at FigureEight (later acquired by Appen), where he and his team developed an architecture supporting over 36 ML models and managing over a million predictions daily. Since 2021, he has been working on AI Hero, aiming to democratize AI access, while also consulting on LLMOps(Large Language Model Operations), and AI system scalability. Other than his full time role as a founder, he is also passionate about community engagement, and actively organizes MLOps events in SF, and contributes educational content on RAG and LLMOps at learn.mlops.community.
// Related Links
Websites: arcade.dev // aihero.studio
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Agents & Tools, Explained (Without Melting Your Brain)
[09:51] MVP Servers: Why Everything’s on Fire (and How to Fix It)
[13:18] Can We Actually Trust the Protocol?
[18:13] KYC, But Make It AI (and Less Painful)
[25:25] Web Automation Tests: The Bugs Strike Back
[28:18] MCP Dev: What Went Wrong (and What Saved Us)
[33:53] Social Login: One Button to Rule Them All
[39:33] What Even Is an AI-Native Developer?
[42:21] Betting Big on Smarter Models (High Risk, High Reward)
[51:40] Harrison’s Bold New Tactic (With Real-Life Magic Tricks)
[55:31] Async Task Handoffs: Herding Cats, But Digitally
[1:00:37] Getting AI to Actually Help Your Workflow
[1:03:53] The Infamous Varma System Error (And How We Dodge It)

AI in M&A: Building, Buying, and the Future of Dealmaking // Kison Patel // #315
AI in M&A: Building, Buying, and the Future of Dealmaking // MLOps Podcast #315 with Kison Patel, CEO and M&A Science at DealRoom .
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
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// Abstract
The intersection of M&A and AI, exploring how the DealRoom team developed AI capabilities and the practical use cases of AI in dealmaking. Discuss the evolving landscape of AI-driven M&A, the factors that make AI companies attractive acquisition targets, and the key indicators of success in this space.
// Bio
Kison Patel is the Founder and CEO of DealRoom, an M&A lifecycle management platform designed for buyer-led M&A and recognized twice on the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list. He also founded M&A Science, a global community offering courses, events, and the top-rated M&A Science podcast with over 2.25 million downloads.
Through the podcast, Kison shares actionable insights from top M&A experts, helping professionals modernize their approach to deal-making. He is also the author of *Agile M&A: Proven Techniques to Close Deals Faster and Maximize Value*, a guide to tech-enabled, adaptive M&A practices.
Kison is dedicated to disrupting traditional M&A with innovative tools and education, empowering teams to drive greater efficiency and value.
// Related Links
Website: https://dealroom.net
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Kison's preferred coffee
[00:11] Takeaways
[00:40] Founders Journey Slumps
[05:07] Jira for M&A
[10:57] Overcoming Idea Paralysis
[14:32] Customer-led Discovery Success
[22:20] Legal Fees in Deals
[26:24] Data Room Differentiators
[29:26] PLG vs Sales Teams
[31:43] AI Pricing Strategies
[35:15] PLG AI Cost Optimization
[40:53] Building AI Teams
[47:40] Great Companies Are Bought
[51:10] M&A Failures and Fever
[54:23] Wrap up

AI, Marketing, and Human Decision Making // Fausto Albers // #313
AI, Marketing, and Human Decision Making // MLOps Podcast #313 with Fausto Albers, AI Engineer & Community Lead at AI Builders Club.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
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// Abstract
Demetrios and Fausto Albers explore how generative AI transforms creative work, decision-making, and human connection, highlighting both the promise of automation and the risks of losing critical thinking and social nuance.
// Bio
Fausto Albers is a relentless explorer of the unconventional—a techno-optimist with a foundation in sociology and behavioral economics, always connecting seemingly absurd ideas that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be the missing pieces of a bigger puzzle. He thrives in paradox: he overcomplicates the simple, oversimplifies the complex, and yet somehow lands on solutions that feel inevitable in hindsight. He believes that true innovation exists in the tension between chaos and structure—too much of either, and you’re stuck.
His career has been anything but linear. He’s owned and operated successful restaurants, served high-stakes cocktails while juggling bottles on London’s bar tops, and later traded spirits for code—designing digital waiters, recommender systems, and AI-driven accounting tools. Now, he leads the AI Builders Club Amsterdam, a fast-growing community where AI engineers, researchers, and founders push the boundaries of intelligent systems.
Ask him about RAG, and he’ll insist on specificity—because, as he puts it, discussing retrieval-augmented generation without clear definitions is as useful as declaring that “AI will have an impact on the world.” An engaging communicator, a sharp systems thinker, and a builder of both technology and communities, Fausto is here to challenge perspectives, deconstruct assumptions, and remix the future of AI.
// Related Links
Website: aibuilders.club
Moravec's paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Behavior Modeling, Secondary AI Effects, Bias Reduction & Synthetic Data // Devansh Devansh // #311: https://youtu.be/jJXee5rMtHI
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Fausto's preferred coffee
[00:26] Takeaways
[01:18] Automated Ad Creative Generation
[07:14] AI in Marketing Workflows
[13:23] MCP and System Bottlenecks
[21:45] Forward Compatibility vs Optimization
[29:57] Unlocking Workflow Speed
[33:48] AI Dependency vs Critical Thinking
[37:44] AI Realism and Paradoxes
[42:30] Outsourcing Decision-Making Risks
[46:22] Human Value in Automation
[49:02] Wrap up

MLOps with Databricks // Maria Vechtomova // #314
MLOps with Databricks // MLOps Podcast #314 with Maria Vechtomova, MLOps Tech Lead | Founder at Ahold Delhaize | Marvelous MLOps.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
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// Abstract
The world of MLOps is very complex as there is an endless amount of tools serving its purpose, and it is very hard to get your head around it. Instead of combining various tools and managing them, it may make sense to opt for a platform instead. Databricks is a leading platform for MLOps. In this discussion, I will explain why it is the case, and walk you through Databricks MLOps features.
// Bio
Maria is an MLOps Tech lead with over 10 years of experience in Data and AI.
For the last 8 years, Maria has focused on MLOps and helped to establish MLOps best practices at large corporations.
Together with her colleague, she co-founded Marvelous MLOps to share knowledge on MLOps via training, social media posts, and blogs.
// Related Links
Website: marvelousmlops.io
MLOps Course discount code: MLOPS100 for the podcast listeners - https://maven.com/marvelousmlops/mlops-with-databricks?promoCode=MLOPS100
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Maria's preferred coffee
[00:42] Takeaways
[02:48] Why Databricks for MLOps
[09:56] Platform Adoption vs Procurement Pain
[12:56] Databricks Best Practices
[16:57] Feature Store Overview
[22:00] Managed system trade-offs
[29:15] Databricks Developments and Trends
[44:31] Insider Info and Summit
[45:47] Data Ownership Pros and Cons
[48:08] Data Contracts and Challenges
[51:25] MLOps Databricks Book Guide
[52:19] Wrap up

Making AI Reliable is the Greatest Challenge of the 2020s // Alon Bochman // #312
Making AI Reliable is the Greatest Challenge of the 2020s // MLOps Podcast #312 with Alon Bochman, CEO of RagMetrics.
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Huge shout-out to RagMetrics for sponsoring this episode!
// Abstract
Demetrios talks with Alon Bochman, CEO of RagMetrics, about testing in machine learning systems. Alon stresses the value of empirical evaluation over influencer advice, highlights the need for evolving benchmarks, and shares how to effectively involve subject matter experts without technical barriers. They also discuss using LLMs as judges and measuring their alignment with human evaluators.
// Bio
Alon is a product leader with a fintech and adtech background, ex-Google, ex-Microsoft. Co-founded and sold a software company to Thomson Reuters for $30M, grew an AI consulting practice from 0 to over $ 1 Bn in 4 years. 20-year AI veteran, winner of three medals in model-building competitions. In a prior life, he was a top-performing hedge fund portfolio manager.Alon lives near NYC with his wife and two daughters. He is an avid reader, runner, and tennis player, an amateur piano player, and a retired chess player.
// Related Links
Website: ragmetrics.ai
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Alon's preferred coffee
[00:15] Takeaways
[00:47] Testing Multi-Agent Systems
[05:55] Tracking ML Experiments
[12:28] AI Eval Redundancy Balance
[17:07] Handcrafted vs LLM Eval Tradeoffs
[28:15] LLM Judging Mechanisms
[36:03] AI and Human Judgment
[38:55] Document Evaluation with LLM
[42:08] Subject Matter Expertise in Co-Pilots
[46:33] LLMs as Judges
[51:40] LLM Evaluation Best Practices
[55:26] LM Judge Evaluation Criteria
[58:15] Visualizing AI Outputs
[1:01:16] Wrap up

Behavior Modeling, Secondary AI Effects, Bias Reduction & Synthetic Data // Devansh Devansh // #311
Behavior Modeling, Secondary AI Effects, Bias Reduction & Synthetic Data // MLOps Podcast #311 with Devansh Devansh, Head of AI at Stealth AI Startup.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
Open-source AI researcher Devansh Devansh joins Demetrios to discuss grounded AI research, jailbreaking risks, Nvidia’s Gretel AI acquisition, and the role of synthetic data in reducing bias. They explore why deterministic systems may outperform autonomous agents and urge listeners to challenge power structures and rethink how intelligence is built into data infrastructure.
// Bio
The best meme-maker in Tech. Writer on AI, Software, and the Tech Industry.
// Related Links
Subscribe to Artificial Intelligence Made Simple: https://artificialintelligencemadesimple.substack.com/
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Devansh's preferred coffee
[01:23] Jailbreaking DeepSeek
[02:24] AI Made Simple
[07:16] Leveraging AI for Data Insights
[10:42] Synthetic Data and LLMs
[19:29] AI Experience Design
[22:20] Synthetic Data Bias Reduction
[26:33] Data Ecosystem Insights
[29:50] Moving Intelligence to Data Layer
[36:37] Minimizing Model Responsibility
[40:04] Workflow vs Generalized Agents
[49:24] AI Second-Order Effects
[55:26] AI Experience vs Efficiency
[1:01:10] Wrap up

GraphBI: Expanding Analytics to All Data Through the Combination of GenAI, Graph, & Visual Analytics // Paco Nathan & Weidong Yang // #310
GraphBI: Expanding Analytics to All Data Through the Combination of GenAI, Graph, & Visual Analytics // MLOps Podcast #310 with Paco Nathan, Principal DevRel Engineer at Senzing & Weidong Yang, CEO of Kineviz.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
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// Abstract
Existing BI and big data solutions depend largely on structured data, which makes up only about 20% of all available information, leaving the vast majority untapped. In this talk, we introduce GraphBI, which aims to address this challenge by combining GenAI, graph technology, and visual analytics to unlock the full potential of enterprise data.
Recent technologies like RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and GraphRAG leverage GenAI for tasks such as summarization and Q&A, but they often function as black boxes, making verification challenging. In contrast, GraphBI uses GenAI for data pre-processing—converting unstructured data into a graph-based format—enabling a transparent, step-by-step analytics process that ensures reliability.
We will walk through the GraphBI workflow, exploring best practices and challenges in each step of the process: managing both structured and unstructured data, data pre-processing with GenAI, iterative analytics using a BI-focused graph grammar, and final insight presentation. This approach uniquely surfaces business insights by effectively incorporating all types of data.
// Bio
Paco Nathan
Paco is a "player/coach" who excels in data science, machine learning, and natural language, with 40 years of industry experience. He leads DevRel for the Entity Resolved Knowledge Graph practice area at Senzing.com and advises Argilla.io, Kurve.ai, KungFu.ai, and DataSpartan.co.uk, and is lead committer for the pytextrank and kglab open source projects. Formerly: Director of Learning Group at O'Reilly Media; and Director of Community Evangelism at Databricks.
Weidong Yang
Weidong Yang, Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Kineviz, a San Francisco-based company that develops interactive visual analytics based solutions to address complex big data problems. His expertise spans Physics, Computer Science and Performing Art, with significant contributions to the semiconductor industry and quantum dot research at UC, Berkeley and Silicon Valley. Yang also leads Kinetech Arts, a 501(c) non-profit blending dance, science, and technology. An eloquent public speaker and performer, he holds 11 US patents, including the groundbreaking Diffraction-based Overlay technology, vital for sub-10-nm semiconductor production.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.kineviz.com/
Blog: https://medium.com/kineviz
Website: https://derwen.ai/pacohttps://huggingface.co/pacoid
https://github.com/ceterihttps://neo4j.com/developer-blog/entity-resolved-knowledge-graphs/
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AI Data Engineers - Data Engineering After AI // Vikram Chennai // #309
AI Data Engineers - Data Engineering after AI // MLOps Podcast #309 with Vikram Chennai, Founder/CEO of Ardent AI.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
A discussion of Agentic approaches to Data Engineering. Exploring the benefits and pitfalls of AI solutions and how to design product-grade AI agents, especially in data.
// Bio
Second Time Founder. 5 years building Deep learning models. Currently, AI Data Engineers
// Related Links
Website: tryardent.com
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Vikram's preferred coffee
[00:09] Takeaways
[00:42] Please like, share, leave a review, and subscribe to our MLOps channels! You can give us up to 5 stars on Spotify and leave your reviews!
[01:53] Product User Categories
[02:47] AI Data Engineer Role
[05:40] AI Coding Limits Enterprise
[09:22] Creating Feedback Loops
[14:23] Breaking Down Big Tasks
[19:39] Marketing Data Agent Scope
[28:03] Clear Success Metrics
[32:20] Creating Agent Glossary
[36:43] AI Prompt Toolkits
[38:54] Pricing Strategy Discussion
[43:20] Compute Abstraction and Pipelines
[45:23] Agent Surprises and Logs
[47:12] Wrap up

I Am Once Again Asking "What is MLOps?" // Oleksandr Stasyk // #308
I am once again asking "What is MLOps?" // MLOps Podcast #308 with Oleksandr Stasyk, Engineering Manager, ML Platform of Synthesia.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
What does it mean to MLOps now? Everyone is trying to make a killing from AI, everyone wants the freshest technology to show off as part of their product. But what impact does that have on the "journey of the model". Do we still think about how an idea makes it's way to production to make money? How can we get better at it, maybe the answer lies in the ancient "non-AI" past...
// Bio
For the majority of my career I have been a "full stack" developer with a leaning towards devops and platforms. In the last four years or so, I have worked on ML Platforms. I find that applying good software engineering practises is more important than ever in this AI fueled world.
// Related Links
Blogs: https://medium.com/@sashman90/mlops-the-evolution-of-the-t-shaped-engineer-a4d8a24a4042
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Sash's preferred coffee
[00:09] Takeaways
[01:21] Vibe Coding Reality Check
[06:27] MLOps and Vibe Coding
[12:53] Data Engineering in GenAI
[14:53] MLOps in MVP Development
[21:13] Platform Engineering Org Models
[27:30] Empathy in Data Engineering
[31:11] Post-DevOps MLOps Evolution
[39:32] AI for Fast Feedback
[46:53] AI Workflow vs Real Work
[50:13] ML Confession Stories
[59:06] Shift Left in Testing
[1:05:49] Wrap up

How Sama is Improving ML Models to Make AVs Safer // Duncan Curtis // #307
How Sama is Improving ML Models to Make AVs Safer // MLOps Podcast #307 with Duncan Curtis, SVP of Product and Technology at Sama.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn
Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
Between Uber’s partnership with NVIDIA and speculation around the U.S.'s President Donald Trump enacting policies that allow fully autonomous vehicles, it’s more important than ever to ensure the accuracy of machine learning models. Yet, the public’s confidence in AVs is shaky due to scary accidents caused by gaps in the tech that Sama is looking to fill.As one of the industry’s top leaders, Duncan Curtis, SVP of Product and Technology at Sama, would be delighted to share how we can improve the accuracy, speed, and cost-efficiency of ML algorithms for AVs. Sama’s machine learning technologies minimize the risk of model failure and lower the total cost of ownership for car manufacturers including Ford, BMW, and GM, as well as four of the five top OEMs and their Tier 1 suppliers. This is especially timely as Tesla is under investigation for crashes due to its Smart Summon feature and Waymo recently had a passenger trapped in one of its driverless taxis.
// Bio
Duncan Curtis is the SVP of Product at Sama, a leader in de-risking ML models, delivering best-in-class data annotation solutions with our enterprise-strength, experience & expertise, and ethical AI approach. To this leadership role, he brings 4 years of Autonomous Vehicle experience as the Head of Product at Zoox (now part of Amazon) and VP of Product at Aptiv, and 4 years of AI experience as a product manager at Google where he delighted the +1B daily active users of the Play Store and Play Games.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.sama.com/
Tesla is under investigation: https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/07/business/nhtsa-tesla-smart-summon-probe/index.html
Waymo recently had a passenger trapped: https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/la-man-nearly-misses-flight-as-self-driving-waymo-taxi-drives-around-parking-lot-in-circles/
https://coruzant.com/profiles/duncan-curtis/
https://builtin.com/articles/remove-bias-from-machine-learning-algorithms
Look At Your ****ing Data :eyes: // Kenny Daniel // MLOps Podcast #292: https://youtu.be/6EMnkAHmoag
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Timestamps:
[00:00] Duncan's preferred coffee
[00:08] Takeaways
[01:00] AI Enterprise Focus
[04:18] Human-in-the-loop Efficiency
[08:42] Edge Cases in AI
[14:14] Forward Combat Compatibility Failures
[17:30] Specialized Data Annotation Challenges
[24:44] SAM for Ring Integration
[28:50] Data Bottleneck in AI
[31:29] Data Connector Horror Story
[33:17] Sama AI Data Annotation
[37:20] Cool Business Problems Solved
[40:50] AI ROI Framework
[45:11] Wrap up

Agents of Innovation: AI-Powered Product Ideation with Synthetic Consumer Testing // Luca Fiaschi // #306
Agents of Innovation: AI-Powered Product Ideation with Synthetic Consumer Testing // MLOps Podcast #306 with Luca Fiaschi, Partner of PyMC Labs.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
Traditional product development cycles require extensive consumer research and market testing, resulting in lengthy development timelines and significant resource investment. We've transformed this process by building a distributed multi-agent system that enables parallel quantitative evaluation of hundreds of product concepts. Our system combines three key components: an Agentic innovation lab generating high-quality product concepts, synthetic consumer panels using fine-tuned foundational models validated against historical data, and an evaluation framework that correlates with real-world testing outcomes. We can talk about how this architecture enables rapid concept discovery and digital experimentation, delivering insights into product success probability before development begins. Through case studies and technical deep-dives, you'll learn how we built an AI powered innovation lab that compresses months of product development and testing into minutes - without sacrificing the accuracy of insights.
// Bio
With over 15 years of leadership experience in AI, data science, and analytics, Luca has driven transformative growth in technology-first businesses. As Chief Data & AI Officer at Mistplay, he led the company’s revenue growth through AI-powered personalization and data-driven pricing. Prior to that, he held executive roles at global industry leaders such as HelloFresh ($8B), Stitch Fix ($1.2B) and Rocket Internet ($1B). Luca's core competencies include machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, data engineering, and computer vision, which he has applied to various domains such as marketing, logistics, personalization, product, experimentation and pricing.He is currently a partner at PyMC Labs, a leading data science consultancy, providing insights and guidance on applications of Bayesian and Causal Inference techniques and Generative AI to fortune 500 companies. Luca holds a PhD in AI and Computer Vision from Heidelberg University and has more than 450 citations on his research work.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.pymc-labs.com/
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreJoin our slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)] Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with Luca on LinkedIn: /lfiaschi

Real-Time Forecasting Faceoff: Time Series vs. DNNs // Josh Xi // #305
Real-Time Forecasting Faceoff: Time Series vs. DNNs // MLOps Podcast #305 with Josh Xi, Data Scientist at Lyft.
Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// Abstract
In real-time forecasting (e.g. geohash level demand and supply forecast for an entire region), time series-based forecasting methods are widely adopted due to their simplicity and ease of training. This discussion explores how Lyft uses time series forecasting to respond to real-time market dynamics, covering practical tips and tricks for implementing these methods, an in-depth look at their adaptability for online re-training, and discussions on their interpretability and user intervention capabilities. By examining these topics, listeners will understand how time series forecasting can outperform DNNs, and how to effectively use time series forecasting for dynamic market conditions and decision-making applications.
// Bio
Josh is a data scientist from the Marketplace team at Lyft, working on forecasting and modeling of marketplace signals that power products like pricing and driver incentives. Josh got his PHD in Operations Research in 2013, with minors in Statistics and Economics. Prior to joining Lyft, he worked as a research scientist in the Operations Research Lab at General Motors, focusing on optimization, simulation and forecasting modeling related to vehicle manufacturing, supply chain and car sharing systems.
// Related Links
Website: https://www.lyft.com/
Real-Time Spatial Temporal Forecasting @ Lyft blog: https://eng.lyft.com/real-time-spatial-temporal-forecasting-lyft-fa90b3f3ec24
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We're All Finetuning Incorrectly // Tanmay Chopra // #304
We're All Finetuning Incorrectly // MLOps Podcast #304 with Tanmay Chopra, Founder & CEO of Emissary.
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// Abstract
Finetuning is dead. Finetuning is only for style. We've all heard these claims. But the truth is we feel this way because all we've been doing is extended pretraining. I'm excited to chat about what real finetuning looks like - modifying output heads, loss functions and model layers, and it's implications on quality and latency. Happy to dive deeper into how DeepSeek leveraged this real version of finetuning through GRPO and how this is nothing more than a rediscovery of our old finetuning ways. I'm sure we'll naturally also dive into when developing and deploying your specialized models makes sense and the challenges you face when doing so.
// Bio
Tanmay is a machine learning engineer at Neeva, where he's currently engaged in reimagining the search experience through AI - wrangling with LLMs and building cold-start recommendation systems. Previously, Tanmay worked on TikTok's Global Trust&Safety Algorithms team - spearheading the development of AI technologies to counter violent extremism and graphic violence on the platform across 160+ countries.Tanmay has a bachelor's and master's in Computer Science from Columbia University, with a specialization in machine learning.
Tanmay is deeply passionate about communicating science and technology to those outside its realm. He's previously written about LLMs for TechCrunch, held workshops across India on the art of science communication for high school and college students, and is the author of Black Holes, Big Bang and a Load of Salt - a labor of love that elucidated the oft-overlooked contributions of Indian scientists to modern science and helped everyday people understand some of the most complex scientific developments of the past century without breaking into a sweat!
// Related Links
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From Shiny to Strategic: The Maturation of AI Across Industries // David Cox // #303
From Shiny to Strategic: The Maturation of AI Across Industries // MLOps Podcast #303 with David Cox, VP of Data Science; Assistant Director of Research at RethinkFirst; Institute of Applied Behavioral Science.
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// Abstract
Shiny new objects are made available to artificial intelligence(AI) practitioners daily. For many who are not AI practitioners, the release of ChatGPT in 2022 was their first contact with modern AI technology. This led to a flurry of funding and excitement around how AI might improve their bottom line. Two years on, the novelty of AI has worn off for many companies but remains a strategic initiative. This strategic nuance has led to two patterns that suggest a maturation of the AI conversation across industries. First, conversations seem to be pivoting from "Are we doing [the shiny new thing]" to serious analysis of the ROI from things built. This reframe places less emphasis on simply adopting new technologies for the sake of doing so and more emphasis on the optimal stack to maximize return relative to cost. Second, conversations are shifting to emphasize market differentiation. That is, anyone can build products that wrap around LLMs. In competitive markets, creating products and functionality that all your competitors can also build is a poor business strategy (unless having a particular thing is industry standard). Creating a competitive advantage requires companies to think strategically about their unique data assets and what they can build that their competitors cannot. // Bio
Dr. David Cox can formally lay claim to being a bioethicist (master's degree), a board-certified behavior analyst at the doctoral level, a behavioral economist (post-doc training), and a full-stack data scientist (post-doc training). He has worked in behavioral health for nearly 20 years as a clinician, academic researcher, scholar, technologist, and all-around behavior science junky. He currently works as the Assistant Director of Research for the Institute of Applied Behavioral Science at Endicott College and the VP of Data Science at RethinkFirst. David also likes to write, having published 60+ peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and a few books. When he's not doing research or building tools at the intersection of artificial intelligence and behavioral health, he enjoys spending time with his wife and two beagles in and around Jacksonville, FL.
// Related Links
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreJoin our slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)] Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with David on LinkedIn: /coxdavidj

Streaming Ecosystem Complexities and Cost Management // Rohit Agrawal // #302
Streaming Ecosystem Complexities and Cost Management // MLOps Podcast #302 with Rohit Agrawal, Director of Engineering at Tecton.
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// Abstract
Demetrios talks with Rohit Agrawal, Director of Engineering at Tecton, about the challenges and future of streaming data in ML. Rohit shares his path at Tecton and insights on managing real-time and batch systems. They cover tool fragmentation (Kafka, Flink, etc.), infrastructure costs, managed services, and trends like using S3 for storage and Iceberg as the GitHub for data. The episode wraps with thoughts on BYOC solutions and evolving data architectures.
// Bio
Rohit Agrawal is an Engineering Manager at Tecton, leading the Real-Time Execution team. Before Tecton, Rohit was the a Lead Software Engineer at Salesforce, where he focused on transaction processign and storage in OLTP relational databases. He holds a Master’s Degree in Computer Systems from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Biria Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India.
// Related Links
~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreJoin our slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)] Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with Rohit on LinkedIn: /agrawalrohit10

Fraud Detection in the AI Era // Rafael Sandroni // #301
Building Trust Through Technology: Responsible AI in Practice // MLOps Podcast #301 with Rafael Sandroni, Founder and CEO of GardionAI.
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// AbstractRafael Sandroni shares key insights on securing AI systems, tackling fraud, and implementing robust guardrails. From prompt injection attacks to AI-driven fraud detection, we explore the challenges and best practices for building safer AI.
// BioEntrepreneur and problem solver.
// Related LinksGardionAI LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/guardionai/
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Timestamps:[00:00] Rafael's preferred coffee[00:16] Takeaways[01:03] AI Assistant Best Practices[03:48] Siri vs In-App AI[08:44] AI Security Exploration[11:55] Zero Trust for LLMS[18:02] Indirect Prompt Injection Risks[22:42] WhatsApp Banking Risks[26:27] Traditional vs New Age Fraud[29:12] AI Fraud Mitigation Patterns[32:50] Agent Access Control Risks[34:31] Red Teaming and Pentesting[39:40] Data Security Paradox[40:48] Wrap up

Beyond the Matrix: AI and the Future of Human Creativity
Beyond the Matrix: AI and the Future of Human Creativity // MLOps Podcast #300 with Fausto Albers, AI Engineer & Community Lead at AI Builders Club.
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// Abstract
Fausto Albers discusses the intersection of AI and human creativity. He explores AI’s role in job interviews, personalized AI assistants, and the evolving nature of human-computer interaction. Key topics include AI-driven self-analysis, context-aware AI systems, and the impact of AI on optimizing human decision-making. The conversation highlights how AI can enhance creativity, collaboration, and efficiency by reducing cognitive load and making intelligent suggestions in real time.
// Bio
Fausto Albers is a relentless explorer of the unconventional—a techno-optimist with a foundation in sociology and behavioral economics, always connecting seemingly absurd ideas that, upon closer inspection, turn out to be the missing pieces of a bigger puzzle. He thrives in paradox: he overcomplicates the simple, oversimplifies the complex, and yet somehow lands on solutions that feel inevitable in hindsight. He believes that true innovation exists in the tension between chaos and structure—too much of either, and you’re stuck.His career has been anything but linear. He’s owned and operated successful restaurants, served high-stakes cocktails while juggling bottles on London’s bar tops, and later traded spirits for code—designing digital waiters, recommender systems, and AI-driven accounting tools. Now, he leads the AI Builders Club Amsterdam, a fast-growing community where AI engineers, researchers, and founders push the boundaries of intelligent systems.Ask him about RAG, and he’ll insist on specificity—because, as he puts it, discussing retrieval-augmented generation without clear definitions is as useful as declaring that “AI will have an impact on the world.” An engaging communicator, a sharp systems thinker, and a builder of both technology and communities, Fausto is here to challenge perspectives, deconstruct assumptions, and remix the future of AI.
// Related Links
Website: aibuilders.club
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Efficient GPU infrastructure at LinkedIn // Animesh Singh // MLOps Podcast #299
Building Trust Through Technology: Responsible AI in Practice // MLOps Podcast #299 with Animesh Singh, Executive Director, AI Platform and Infrastructure of LinkedIn.
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// AbstractAnimesh discusses LLMs at scale, GPU infrastructure, and optimization strategies. He highlights LinkedIn's use of LLMs for features like profile summarization and hiring assistants, the rising cost of GPUs, and the trade-offs in model deployment. Animesh also touches on real-time training, inference efficiency, and balancing infrastructure costs with AI advancements. The conversation explores the evolving AI landscape, compliance challenges, and simplifying architecture to enhance scalability and talent acquisition.
// BioExecutive Director, AI and ML Platform at LinkedIn | Ex IBM Senior Director and Distinguished Engineer, Watson AI and Data | Founder at Kubeflow | Ex LFAI Trusted AI NA Chair
Animesh is the Executive Director leading the next-generation AI and ML Platform at LinkedIn, enabling the creation of the AI Foundation Models Platform, serving the needs of 930+ Million members of LinkedIn. Building Distributed Training Platforms, Machine Learning Pipelines, Feature Pipelines, Metadata engines, etc. Leading the creation of the LinkedIn GAI platform for fine-tuning, experimentation and inference needs. Animesh has more than 20 patents and 50+ publications.
Past IBM Watson AI and Data Open Tech CTO, Senior Director, and Distinguished Engineer, with 20+ years experience in the Software industry, and 15+ years in AI, Data, and Cloud Platform. Led globally dispersed teams, managed globally distributed projects, and served as a trusted adviser to Fortune 500 firms. Played a leadership role in creating, designing, and implementing Data and AI engines for AI and ML platforms, led Trusted AI efforts, and drove the strategy and execution for Kubeflow, OpenDataHub, and execution in products like Watson OpenScale and Watson Machine Learning.
// Related LinksComposable Memory for GPU Optimization // Bernie Wu // Pod #270 - https://youtu.be/ccaDEFoKwko
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Timestamps:[00:00] Animesh's preferred coffee[00:16] Takeaways[02:12] What is working? [07:00] What's not working?[13:40] LLM vs Rexis Efficiency[21:49] GPU Utilization and Architecture[27:32] GPU reliability concerns[36:50] Memory Bottleneck in AI[41:06] Optimizing LLM Checkpointing[46:51] Checkpoint Offloading and Platform Design[54:55] Workflow Divergence Points[58:41] Wrap up

Building Trust Through Technology: Responsible AI in Practice // Allegra Guinan // #298
Building Trust Through Technology: Responsible AI in Practice // MLOps Podcast #298 with Allegra Guinan, Co-founder of Lumiera.
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// AbstractAllegra joins the podcast to discuss how Responsible AI (RAI) extends beyond traditional pillars like transparency and privacy. While these foundational elements are crucial, true RAI success requires deeply embedding responsible practices into organizational culture and decision-making processes. Drawing from Lumiera's comprehensive approach, Allegra shares how organizations can move from checkbox compliance to genuine RAI integration that drives innovation and sustainable AI adoption.
// BioAllegra is a technical leader with a background in managing data and enterprise engineering portfolios. Having built her career bridging technical teams and business stakeholders, she's seen the ins and outs of how decisions are made across organizations. She combines her understanding of data value chains, passion for responsible technology, and practical experience guiding teams through complex implementations into her role as co-founder and CTO of Lumiera.
// Related LinksWebsite: https://www.lumiera.ai/Weekly newsletter: https://lumiera.beehiiv.com/
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Timestamps:[00:00] Allegra's preferred coffee[00:14] Takeaways[01:11] Responsible AI principles[03:13] Shades of Transparency[07:56] Effective questioning for clarity [11:17] Managing stakeholder input effectively[14:06] Business to Tech Translation[19:30] Responsible AI challenges[23:59] Successful plan vs Retroactive responsibility[28:38] AI product robustness explained [30:44] AI transparency vs Engagement[34:10] Efficient interaction preferences[37:57] Preserving human essence[39:51] Conflict and growth in life[46:02] Subscribe to Allegra's Weekly Newsletter!

Claude Plays Pokémon - A Conversation with the Creator // David Hershey // #294
I Let An AI Play Pokémon! - Claude plays Pokémon Creator // MLOps Podcast #295 with David Hershey, Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic.
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// AbstractDemetrios chats with David Hershey from Anthropic's Applied AI team about his agent-powered Pokémon project using Claude. They explore agent frameworks, prompt optimization vs. fine-tuning, and AI's growing role in software, legal, and accounting fields. David highlights how managed AI platforms simplify deployment, making advanced AI more accessible.
// BioDavid Hershey devoted most of his career to machine learning infrastructure and trying to abstract away the hairy systems complexity that gets in the way of people building amazing ML applications.
// Related LinksWebsite: https://www.davidhershey.com/
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From Rules to Reasoning Engines // George Mathew // #296
From Rules to Reasoning Engines // MLOps Podcast #297 with George Mathew, Managing Director at Insight Partners.
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// AbstractGeorge Mathew (Insight Partners) joins Demetrios to break down how AI and ML have evolved over the past few years and where they’re headed. He reflects on the major shifts since his last chat with Demetrios, especially how models like ChatGPT have changed the game.
George dives into "generational outcomes"—building companies with lasting impact—and the move from rule-based software to AI-driven reasoning engines. He sees AI becoming a core part of all software, fundamentally changing business operations.
The chat covers the rise of agent-based systems, the importance of high-quality data, and recent breakthroughs like Deep SEQ, which push AI reasoning further. They also explore AI’s future—its role in software, enterprise adoption, and everyday life.
// BioGeorge Mathew is a Managing Director at Insight Partners focused on venture stage investments in AI, ML, Analytics, and Data companies as they are establishing product/market fit.
He brings 20+ years of experience developing high-growth technology startups including most recently being CEO of Kespry. Prior to Kespry, George was President & COO of Alteryx where he scaled the company through its IPO (AYX). Previously he held senior leadership positions at SAP and salesforce.com. He has driven company strategy, led product management and development, and built sales and marketing teams.
George holds a Bachelor of Science in Neurobiology from Cornell University and a Masters in Business Administration from Duke University, where he was a Fuqua Scholar.
// Related LinksWebsite: https://www.insightpartners.com/
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GenAI Traffic: Why API Infrastructure Must Evolve... Again // Erica Hughberg // #296
GenAI Traffic: Why API Infrastructure Must Evolve... Again // MLOps Podcast #295 with Erica Hughberg, Community Advocate at Tetrate.Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter

The Unbearable Lightness of Data // Rohit Krishnan // #295
The Unbearable Lightness of Data // MLOps Podcast #295 with Rohit Krishnan, Chief Product Officer at bodo.ai.Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter // AbstractRohit Krishnan, Chief Product Officer at Bodo.AI, joins Demetrios to discuss AI's evolving landscape. They explore interactive reasoning models, AI's impact on jobs, scalability challenges, and the path to AGI. Rohit also shares insights on Bodo.AI’s open-source move and its impact on data science.// BioBuilding products, writing, messing around with AI pretty much everywhere// Related LinksWebsite: www.strangeloopcanon.comIn life, my kids. Professionally, https://github.com/bodo-ai/Bodo ... Otherwise personally, it's writing every single day at strangeloopcanon.com! ~~~~~~~~ ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ~~~~~~~Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://go.mlops.community/TYExploreJoin our slack community [https://go.mlops.community/slack]Follow us on X/Twitter [@mlopscommunity](https://x.com/mlopscommunity) or [LinkedIn](https://go.mlops.community/linkedin)] Sign up for the next meetup: [https://go.mlops.community/register]MLOps Swag/Merch: [https://shop.mlops.community/]Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: /dpbrinkmConnect with Rohit on LinkedIn: /rkris

Kubernetes, AI Gateways, and the Future of MLOps // Alexa Griffith // #294
Kubernetes, AI Gateways, and the Future of MLOps // MLOps Podcast #294 with Alexa Griffith, Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg.
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// Abstract
Alexa shares her journey into software engineering, from early struggles with Airflow and Kubernetes to leading open-source projects like the Envoy AI Gateway. She and Demetrios discuss AI model deployment, tooling differences across tech roles, and the importance of abstraction. They highlight aligning technical work with business goals and improving cross-team communication, offering key insights into MLOps and AI infrastructure.
// Bio
Alexa Griffith is a Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg, where she builds scalable inference platforms for machine learning workflows and contributes to open-source projects like KServe. She began her career at Bluecore working in data science infrastructure, and holds an honors degree in Chemistry from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She shares her insights through her podcast, Alexa’s Input (AI), technical blogs, and active engagement with the tech community at conferences and meetups.
// Related LinksWebsite: https://alexagriffith.com/
Kubecon Keynote about Envoy AI Gateway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do1viOk8nok
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Future of Software, Agents in the Enterprise, and Inception Stage Company Building // Eliot Durbin // #293
Future of Software, Agents in the Enterprise, and Inception Stage Company Building // MLOps Podcast 293 with Eliot Durbin, General Partner at Boldstart Ventures.Join the Community: https://go.mlops.community/YTJoinIn Get the newsletter: https://go.mlops.community/YTNewsletter
// AbstractKey lessons for founders that are thinking about or starting their companies. 15 years of inception stage investing from how data science companies like Yhat went to market in 2013-14 and how that's evolved, to building companies around OSS frameworks like CrewAI; Eliot share's key learnings and questions for founders starting out.
// BioEliot is a General Partner @ boldstart ventures since it's founding in 2010. boldstart an inception stage lead investor for technical founders building the next generation of enterprise companies such as Clay, Snyk, BigID, Kustomer, Superhuman, and CrewAI.
// Related LinksWebsite: boldstart.vchttps://medium.com/@etdurbin
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The Agent Exchange: Practitioner Insights
Agents in Production [Podcast Limited Series] - Episode Five, Dmitri Jarnikov, Chiara Caratelli, and Steven Vester join Demetrios to explore AI agents in e-commerce. They discuss the trade-offs between generic and specialized agents, with Dmitri noting the need for a balance between scalability and precision. Chiara highlights how agents can dynamically blend both approaches, while Steven predicts specialized agents will dominate initially before trust in generic agents grows. The panel also examines how e-commerce platforms may resist but eventually collaborate with AI agents. Trust remains a key factor in adoption, with opportunities emerging for new agent-driven business models.
Guest speakers: Dmitri Jarnikov - Senior Director of Data Science at Prosus
Chiara Caratelli - Data Scientist at Prosus Group
Steven Vester - Head of Product at OLX
Host:Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community
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Talk to Your Data: The SQL Data Analyst
In Agents in Production [Podcast Limited Series] - Episode Four, Donné Stevenson and Paul van der Boor break down the deployment of a Token Data Analyst agent at Prosus—why, how, and what worked. They discuss the challenges of productionizing the agent, from architecture to mitigating LLM overconfidence, key design choices, the role of pre-checks for clarity, and why they opted for simpler text-based processes over complex recursive methods.
Guest speakers: Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group
Donne Stevenson - Machine Learning Engineer at Prosus Group
Host: Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community
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Getting to Grips with Web Agents
Agents in Production [Podcast Limited Series] - Episode Three explores the concept of web agents—AI-powered systems that interact with the web as humans do, navigating browsers instead of relying solely on APIs.
The discussion covers why web agents emerge as a natural step in AI evolution, their advantages over API-based systems, and their potential impact on e-commerce and automation.
The conversation also highlights challenges in making websites agent-friendly and envisions a future where agents seamlessly handle tasks like booking flights or ordering food.
Guest speakers:
Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group
Chiara Caratelli - Data Scientist at Prosus Group
Host:
Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community
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The Challenge with Voice Agents
In Agents in Production Series - Episode Two, Demetrios, Paul, and Floris explore the latest in Voice AI agents. They discuss real-time voice interactions, OpenAI's real-time Voice API, and real-world deployment challenges. Paul shares insights from iFood’s voice AI tests in Brazil, while Floris highlights technical hurdles like turn detection and language processing. The episode covers broader applications in healthcare and customer service, emphasizing continuous learning and open-source innovation in Voice AI.
Guest speakers:
Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group
Floris Fok - AI Engineer at Prosus Group
Host:Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community
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The Agent Landscape - Lessons Learned Putting Agents Into Production
In Agents in Production Series - Episode One, Demetrios chats with Paul van der Boor and Floris Fok about the real-world challenges of deploying AI agents across @ProsusGroup of companies. They break down the evolution from simple LLMs to fully interactive systems, tackling scale, UX, and the harsh lessons from failed projects. Packed with insights on what works (and what doesn’t), this episode is a must-listen for anyone serious about AI in production.
Guest speakers: Paul van der Boor - VP AI at Prosus Group
Floris Fok - AI Engineer at Prosus Group
Host:Demetrios Brinkmann - Founder of MLOps Community
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Evolving Workflow Orchestration // Alex Milowski // #291
Alex Milowski is a researcher, developer, entrepreneur, mathematician, and computer scientist.Evolving Workflow Orchestration // MLOps Podcast #291 with Alex Milowski, Entrepreneur and Computer Scientist.// AbstractThere seems to be a shift from workflow languages to code - mostly annotation pythons - happening and getting us. It is a symptom of how complex workflow orchestration has gotten. Is it a dominant trend or will we cycle back to “DAG specifications”? At Stitchfix, we had our own DSL that “compiled” into airflow DAGs and at MicroByre, we used a external workflow langauge. Both had a batch task executor on K8s but at MicroByre, we had human and robot in the loop workflows.// BioDr. Milowski is a serial entrepreneur and computer scientist with experience in a variety of data and machine learning technologies. He holds a PhD in Informatics (Computer Science) from the University of Edinburgh, where he researched large-scale computation over scientific data. Over the years, he's spent many years working on various aspects of workflow orchestration in industry, standardization, and in research.// MLOps Swag/Merchhttps://shop.mlops.community/// Related LinksWebsite: https://www.milowski.com/ --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ -------------Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slackFollow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunitySign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/registerCatch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexmilowski/

Insights from Cleric: Building an Autonomous AI SRE // Willem Pienaar // #290
Willem Pienaar is the Co-Founder and CTO ofCleric. He previously worked at Tecton as a Principal Engineer. Willem Pienaar attended the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Insights from Cleric: Building an Autonomous AI SRE // MLOps Podcast #289 with Willem Pienaar, CTO & Co-Founder of Cleric.// AbstractIn this MLOps Community Podcast episode, Willem Pienaar, CTO of Cleric, breaks down how they built an autonomous AI SRE that helps engineering teams diagnose production issues. We explore how Cleric builds knowledge graphs for system understanding, and uses existing tools/systems during investigations. We also get into some gnarly challenges around memory, tool integration, and evaluation frameworks, and some lessons learned from deploying to engineering teams.// BioWillem Pienaar, CTO of Cleric, is a builder with a focus on LLM agents, MLOps, and open source tooling. He is the creator of Feast, an open source feature store, and contributed to the creation of both the feature store and MLOps categories.Before starting Cleric, Willem led the open-source engineering team at Tecton and established the ML platform team at Gojek, where he built high-scale ML systems for the Southeast Asian Decacorn.// MLOps Swag/Merchhttps://shop.mlops.community/// Related LinksWebsite: willem.co --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ -------------Join our slack community:https://go.mlops.community/slackFollow us on Twitter:@mlopscommunitySign up for the next meetup:https://go.mlops.community/registerCatch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more:https://mlops.community/Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/Connect with Willem on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/willempienaar/

Robustness, Detectability, and Data Privacy in AI // Vinu Sankar Sadasivan // #289
Vinu Sankar Sadasivan is a CS PhD ... Currently, I am working as a full-time Student Researcher at Google DeepMind on jailbreaking multimodal AI models. Robustness, Detectability, and Data Privacy in AI // MLOps Podcast #289 with Vinu Sankar Sadasivan, Student Researcher at Google DeepMind. // Abstract Recent rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made it widely applicable across various domains, from autonomous systems to multimodal content generation. However, these models remain susceptible to significant security and safety vulnerabilities. Such weaknesses can enable attackers to jailbreak systems, allowing them to perform harmful tasks or leak sensitive information. As AI becomes increasingly integrated into critical applications like autonomous robotics and healthcare, the importance of ensuring AI safety is growing. Understanding the vulnerabilities in today’s AI systems is crucial to addressing these concerns. // Bio Vinu Sankar Sadasivan is a final-year Computer Science PhD candidate at The University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Soheil Feizi. His research focuses on Security and Privacy in AI, with a particular emphasis on AI robustness, detectability, and user privacy. Currently, Vinu is a full-time Student Researcher at Google DeepMind, working on jailbreaking multimodal AI models. Previously, Vinu was a Research Scientist intern at Meta FAIR in Paris, where he worked on AI watermarking. Vinu is a recipient of the 2023 Kulkarni Fellowship and has earned several distinctions, including the prestigious Director’s Silver Medal. He completed a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Gandhinagar in 2020. Prior to their PhD, Vinu gained research experience as a Junior Research Fellow in the Data Science Lab at IIT Gandhinagar and through internships at Caltech, Microsoft Research India, and IISc. // MLOps Swag/Merch https://shop.mlops.community/ // Related Links Website: https://vinusankars.github.io/ --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vinusankars/

AI & Aliens: New Eyes on Ancient Questions // Richard Cloete // #288
Richard Cloete is a computer scientist and a Laukien-Oumuamua Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University. He is a member of the Galileo Project working under the supervision of Professor Avi, having recently held a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge, UK. AI & Aliens: New Eyes on Ancient Questions // MLOps Podcast #288 with Richard Cloete, Laukien-Oumuamua Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University. // Abstract Demetrios speaks with Dr. Richard Cloete, a Harvard computer scientist and founder of SEAQR Robotics, about his AI-driven work in tracking Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) through the Galileo Project. Dr. Cloete explains their advanced sensor setup and the challenges of training AI in this niche field, leading to the creation of AeroSynth, a synthetic data tool. He also discusses his collaboration with the Minor Planet Center on using AI to classify interstellar objects and upcoming telescope data. Additionally, he introduces Seeker Robotics, applying similar AI techniques to oceanic research with unmanned vehicles for marine monitoring. The conversation explores AI’s role in advancing our understanding of space and the ocean. // Bio Richard is a computer scientist and Laukien-Oumuamua Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University. As a member of the Galileo Project under Professor Avi Loeb's supervision, he develops AI models for detecting and tracking aerial objects, specializing in Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Beyond UAP research, he collaborates with astronomers at the Minor Planet Center to create AI models for identifying potential interstellar objects using the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Richard is also the CEO and co-founder of SEAQR Robotics, a startup developing advanced unmanned surface vehicles to accelerate the discovery of novel life and phenomena in Earth's oceans and atmosphere. Before joining Harvard, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Cambridge, UK, where his research explored the intersection of emerging technologies and law.Grew up in Cape Town, South Africa, where I used to build Tesla Coils, plasma globes, radio stethoscopes, microwave guns, AM radios, and bombs... // MLOps Swag/Merch https://shop.mlops.community/ // Related Links Website: www.seaqr.net https://itc.cfa.harvard.edu/people/richard-cloete --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Richard on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-cloete/

Real LLM Success Stories: How They Actually Work // Alex Strick van Linschoten // #287
A software engineer based in Delft, Alex Strick van Linschoten recently built Ekko, an open-source framework for adding real-time infrastructure and in-transit message processing to web applications. With years of experience in Ruby, JavaScript, Go, PostgreSQL, AWS, and Docker, I bring a versatile skill set to the table. I hold a PhD in History, have authored books on Afghanistan, and currently work as an ML Engineer at ZenML. Real LLM Success Stories: How They Actually Work // MLOps Podcast #287 with Alex Strick van Linschoten, ML Engineer at ZenML. // Abstract Alex Strick van Linschoten, a machine learning engineer at ZenML, joins the MLOps Community podcast to discuss his comprehensive database of real-world LLM use cases. Drawing inspiration from Evidently AI, Alex created the database to organize fragmented information on LLM usage, covering everything from common chatbot implementations to innovative applications across sectors. They discuss the technical challenges and successes in deploying LLMs, emphasizing the importance of foundational MLOps practices. The episode concludes with a call for community contributions to further enrich the database and collective knowledge of LLM applications. // Bio Alex is a Software Engineer based in the Netherlands, working as a Machine Learning Engineer at ZenML. He previously was awarded a PhD in History (specialism: War Studies) from King's College London and has authored several critically acclaimed books based on his research work in Afghanistan. // MLOps Swag/Merch https://shop.mlops.community/ // Related Links Website: https://mlops.systemshttps://www.zenml.io/llmops-databasehttps://www.zenml.io/llmops-databasehttps://www.zenml.io/blog/llmops-in-production-457-case-studies-of-what-actually-workshttps://www.zenml.io/blog/llmops-lessons-learned-navigating-the-wild-west-of-production-llmshttps://www.zenml.io/blog/demystifying-llmops-a-practical-database-of-real-world-generative-ai-implementationshttps://huggingface.co/datasets/zenml/llmops-database --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/strickvl

Navigating Machine Learning Careers: Insights from Meta to Consulting // Ilya Reznik // #286
In his 13 years of software engineering, Ilya Reznik has specialized in commercializing machine learning solutions and building robust ML platforms. He's held technical lead and staff engineering roles at premier firms like Adobe, Twitter, and Meta. Currently, Ilya channels his expertise into his travel startup, Jaunt, while consulting and advising emerging startups. Navigating Machine Learning Careers: Insights from Meta to Consulting // MLOps Podcast #286 with Ilya Reznik, ML Engineering Thought Leader at Instructed Machines, LLC. // Abstract Ilya Reznik's insights into machine learning and career development within the field. With over 13 years of experience at leading tech companies such as Meta, Adobe, and Twitter, Ilya emphasizes the limitations of traditional model fine-tuning methods. He advocates for alternatives like prompt engineering and knowledge retrieval, highlighting their potential to enhance AI performance without the drawbacks associated with fine-tuning. Ilya's recent discussions at the NeurIPS conference reflect a shift towards practical applications of Transformer models and innovative strategies like curriculum learning. Additionally, he shares valuable perspectives on navigating career progression in tech, offering guidance for aspiring ML engineers aiming for senior roles. His narrative serves as a blend of technical expertise and practical career advice, making it a significant resource for professionals in the AI domain. // Bio Ilya has navigated a diverse career path since 2011, transitioning from physicist to software engineer, data scientist, ML engineer, and now content creator. He is passionate about helping ML engineers advance their careers and making AI more impactful and beneficial for society. Previously, Ilya was a technical lead at Meta, where he contributed to 12% of the company’s revenue and managed approximately 30 production ML models. He also worked at Twitter, overseeing offline model evaluation, and at Adobe, where his team was responsible for all intelligent services within Adobe Analytics. Based in Salt Lake City, Ilya enjoys the outdoors, tinkering with Arduino electronics, and, most importantly, spending time with his family. // MLOps Swag/Merch https://shop.mlops.community/ // Related Links Website: mlepath.com --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Ilya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ibreznik/

Collective Memory for AI on Decentralized Knowledge Graph // Tomaž Levak // #285
Tomaž Levak is the Co-founder and CEO of Trace Labs – OriginTrail core developers. OriginTrail is a web3 infrastructure project combining a decentralized knowledge graph (DKG) and blockchain technologies to create a neutral, inclusive ecosystem. Collective Memory for AI on Decentralized Knowledge Graph // MLOps Podcast #285 with Tomaz Levak, Founder of Trace Labs, Core Developers of OriginTrail. // Abstract The talk focuses on how OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph serves as a collective memory for AI and enables neuro-symbolic AI. We cover the basics of OriginTrail’s symbolic AI fundamentals (i.e. knowledge graphs) and go over details how decentralization improves data integrity, provenance, and user control. We’ll cover the DKG role in AI agentic frameworks and how it helps with verifying and accessing diverse data sources, while maintaining compatibility with existing standards. We’ll explore practical use cases from the enterprise sector as well as latest integrations into frameworks like ElizaOS. We conclude by outlining the future potential of decentralized AI, AI becoming the interface to “eat” SaaS and the general convergence of AI, Internet and Crypto. // Bio Tomaz Levak, founder of OriginTrail, is active at the intersection of Cryptocurrency, the Internet, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). At the core of OriginTrail is a pursuit of Verifiable Internet for AI, an inclusive framework addressing critical challenges of the world in an AI era. To achieve the goal of Verifiable Internet for AI, OriginTrail's trusted knowledge foundation ensures the provenance and verifiability of information while incentivizing the creation of high-quality knowledge. These advancements are pivotal to unlock the full potential of AI as they minimize the technology’s shortfalls such as hallucinations, bias, issues of data ownership, and model collapse. Tomaz's contributions to OriginTrail span over a decade and across multiple fields. He is involved in strategic technical innovations for OriginTrail Decentralized Knowledge Graph (DKG) and NeuroWeb blockchain and was among the authors of all three foundational White Paper documents that defined how OriginTrail technology addresses global challenges. Tomaz contributed to the design of OriginTrail token economies and is driving adoption with global brands such as British Standards Institution, Swiss Federal Railways and World Federation of Haemophilia, among others. Committed to the ongoing expansion of the OriginTrail ecosystem, Tomaz is a regular speaker at key industry events. In his appearances, he highlights the significant value that the OriginTrail DKG brings to diverse sectors, including supply chains, life sciences, healthcare, and scientific research. In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, Tomaz and the OriginTrail ecosystem as a whole are playing an important role in ensuring a more inclusive, transparent and decentralized AI. // MLOps Swag/Merch https://shop.mlops.community/ // Related Links Website: https://origintrail.io
Song recommendation: https://open.spotify.com/track/5GGHmGNZYnVSdRERLUSB4w?si=ae744c3ad528424b --------------- ✌️Connect With Us ✌️ ------------- Join our slack community: https://go.mlops.community/slack Follow us on Twitter: @mlopscommunity Sign up for the next meetup: https://go.mlops.community/register Catch all episodes, blogs, newsletters, and more: https://mlops.community/ Connect with Demetrios on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dpbrinkm/ Connect with Tomaz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomazlevak/