Building Machine Learning Systems is More Debugging Than Development: Traditional software development requires meticulous planning. With machine learning, it's better to jump right in.
Technical Insights

Building Machine Learning Systems is More Debugging Than Development: Traditional software development requires meticulous planning. With machine learning, it's better to jump right in.

Internalizing this mental framework has made me a more efficient machine learning engineer: Most of the work of building a machine learning system is debugging rather than development.

July 12, 20233 min read
AI at the Speed of Prompting: Prompt-based development enables you to try out ideas quickly and cheaply — no need to scope projects carefully.
Technical Insights

AI at the Speed of Prompting: Prompt-based development enables you to try out ideas quickly and cheaply — no need to scope projects carefully.

Prompt-based development is making the machine learning development cycle much faster: Projects that used to take months now may take days. I wrote in an earlier letter that this rapid development is causing developers to do away with test sets.

July 5, 20233 min read
AI at the Speed of Prompting: Prompt-based development enables you to try out ideas quickly and cheaply — no need to scope projects carefully.
Technical Insights

AI at the Speed of Prompting: Prompt-based development enables you to try out ideas quickly and cheaply — no need to scope projects carefully.

Prompt-based development is making the machine learning development cycle much faster: Projects that used to take months now may take days. I wrote in an earlier letter that this rapid development is causing developers to do away with test sets.

July 5, 20233 min read
Breakthroughs on the Horizon?: Innovations in computer vision stole the spotlight at this year's CVPR conference.
Technical Insights

Breakthroughs on the Horizon?: Innovations in computer vision stole the spotlight at this year's CVPR conference.

I spent Sunday through Tuesday at the CVPR computer vision conference in Vancouver, Canada, along with over 4,000 other attendees. With the easing of the pandemic, it’s fantastic that large conferences are being held in person again!

June 22, 20233 min read
Breakthroughs on the Horizon?: Innovations in computer vision stole the spotlight at this year's CVPR conference.
Technical Insights

Breakthroughs on the Horizon?: Innovations in computer vision stole the spotlight at this year's CVPR conference.

I spent Sunday through Tuesday at the CVPR computer vision conference in Vancouver, Canada, along with over 4,000 other attendees. With the easing of the pandemic, it’s fantastic that large conferences are being held in person again!

June 22, 20233 min read
Existential Risk? I Don't Get It!: Prominent computer scientists fear that AI could trigger human extinction. It's time to have a real conversation about the realistic risks.
Technical Insights

Existential Risk? I Don't Get It!: Prominent computer scientists fear that AI could trigger human extinction. It's time to have a real conversation about the realistic risks.

Last week, safe.org asserted that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

June 7, 20232 min read
Existential Risk? I Don't Get It!: Prominent computer scientists fear that AI could trigger human extinction. It's time to have a real conversation about the realistic risks.
Technical Insights

Existential Risk? I Don't Get It!: Prominent computer scientists fear that AI could trigger human extinction. It's time to have a real conversation about the realistic risks.

Last week, safe.org asserted that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.

June 7, 20232 min read
Building AI Systems No Longer Requires Much Data: Pretrained models make it possible to build AI systems using very little additional data.
Technical Insights

Building AI Systems No Longer Requires Much Data: Pretrained models make it possible to build AI systems using very little additional data.

It’s time to move beyond the stereotype that machine learning systems need a lot of data. While having more data is helpful, large pretrained models make it practical to build viable systems using a very small labeled training set — perhaps just a handful of examples specific to your application.

May 24, 20232 min read
Building AI Systems No Longer Requires Much Data: Pretrained models make it possible to build AI systems using very little additional data.
Technical Insights

Building AI Systems No Longer Requires Much Data: Pretrained models make it possible to build AI systems using very little additional data.

It’s time to move beyond the stereotype that machine learning systems need a lot of data. While having more data is helpful, large pretrained models make it practical to build viable systems using a very small labeled training set — perhaps just a handful of examples specific to your application.

May 24, 20232 min read
Beyond Test Sets: How prompting is changing machine learning development
Technical Insights

Beyond Test Sets: How prompting is changing machine learning development

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my team at Landing AI’s work on visual prompting. With the speed of building machine learning applications through text prompting and visual prompting, I’m...

May 17, 20232 min read
Beyond Test Sets: How prompting is changing machine learning development
Technical Insights

Beyond Test Sets: How prompting is changing machine learning development

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my team at Landing AI’s work on visual prompting. With the speed of building machine learning applications through text prompting and visual prompting, I’m...

May 17, 20232 min read
"Visual Prompting” Builds Vision Models in Seconds: A new approach applies ideas from text prompting to computer vision
Technical Insights

"Visual Prompting” Builds Vision Models in Seconds: A new approach applies ideas from text prompting to computer vision

My team at Landing AI just announced a new tool for quickly building computer vision models, using a technique we call Visual Prompting. It’s a lot of fun! I invite you to try it.

April 26, 20232 min read
"Visual Prompting” Builds Vision Models in Seconds: A new approach applies ideas from text prompting to computer vision
Technical Insights

"Visual Prompting” Builds Vision Models in Seconds: A new approach applies ideas from text prompting to computer vision

My team at Landing AI just announced a new tool for quickly building computer vision models, using a technique we call Visual Prompting. It’s a lot of fun! I invite you to try it.

April 26, 20232 min read
When One Machine Learning Model Learns From Another: Was Google’s Bard trained on output from OpenAI's ChatGPT? The technique is legit, but it raises thorny questions.
Technical Insights

When One Machine Learning Model Learns From Another: Was Google’s Bard trained on output from OpenAI's ChatGPT? The technique is legit, but it raises thorny questions.

Last week, the tech news site The Information reported an internal controversy at Google. Engineers were concerned that Google’s Bard large language model was trained in part on output from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which would have violated OpenAI’s terms of use.

April 5, 20232 min read
When One Machine Learning Model Learns From Another: Was Google’s Bard trained on output from OpenAI's ChatGPT? The technique is legit, but it raises thorny questions.
Technical Insights

When One Machine Learning Model Learns From Another: Was Google’s Bard trained on output from OpenAI's ChatGPT? The technique is legit, but it raises thorny questions.

Last week, the tech news site The Information reported an internal controversy at Google. Engineers were concerned that Google’s Bard large language model was trained in part on output from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which would have violated OpenAI’s terms of use.

April 5, 20232 min read

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