
How AI Is Built (Nicolay Gerold)
Explore every episode of How AI Is Built
Pub. Date | Title | Duration | |
---|---|---|---|
28 Nov 2024 | RAG's Biggest Problems & How to Fix It (ft. Synthetic Data) | S2 E16 | 00:51:26 | |
RAG isn't a magic fix for search problems. While it works well at first, most teams find it's not good enough for production out of the box. The key is to make it better step by step, using good testing and smart data creation. Today, we are talking to Saahil Ognawala from Jina AI to start to understand RAG. To build a good RAG system, you need three things: ways to test it, methods to create training data, and plans to make it better over time. Testing starts with a set of example searches that users might make. These should include common searches that happen often, medium-rare searches, and rare searches that only happen now and then. This mix helps you measure if changes make your system better or worse. Creating synthetic data helps make the system stronger, especially in spotting wrong answers that look right. Think of someone searching for a "gluten-free chocolate cake." A "sugar-free chocolate cake" might look like a good answer because it shares many words, but it's wrong. These tricky examples help the system learn the difference between similar but different things. When creating synthetic data, you need rules. The best way is to show the AI a few real examples and give it a list of topics to work with. Most teams find that using half real data and half synthetic data works best. This gives you enough variety while keeping things real. Getting user feedback is hard with RAG. In normal search, you can see if users click on results. But with RAG, the system creates an answer from many pieces. A good answer might come from both good and bad pieces, making it hard to know which parts helped. This means you need smart ways to track which pieces of information actually helped make good answers. One key rule: don't make things harder than they need to be. If simple keyword search (called BM25) works well enough, adding fancy AI search might not be worth the extra work. Success with RAG comes from good testing, careful data creation, and steady improvements based on real use. It's not about using the newest AI models. It's about building good systems and processes that work reliably. "It isn’t a magic wand you can place on your catalog and expect results you didn’t get before." “Most of our users are enterprise users who have seen the most success in their RAG systems are the ones that very early implemented a continuous feedback mechanism.“ “If you can't tell in real time usage whether an answer is a bad answer or a right answer because the LLM just makes it look like the right answer then you only have your retrieval dataset to blame” Saahil Ognawala: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 00:29 Interview with Saahil Ognawala 00:52 Synthetic Data in Language Generation 01:14 Understanding the E5 Mistral Instructor Embeddings Paper 03:15 Challenges and Evolution in Synthetic Data 05:03 User Intent and Retrieval Systems 11:26 Evaluating RAG Systems 14:46 Setting Up Evaluation Frameworks 20:37 Fine-Tuning and Embedding Models 22:25 Negative and Positive Examples in Retrieval 26:10 Synthetic Data for Hard Negatives 29:20 Case Study: Marine Biology Project 29:54 Addressing Errors in Marine Biology Queries 31:28 Ensuring Query Relevance with Human Intervention 31:47 Few Shot Prompting vs Zero Shot Prompting 35:09 Balancing Synthetic and Real World Data 37:17 Improving RAG Systems with User Feedback 39:15 Future Directions for Jina and Synthetic Data 40:44 Building and Evaluating Embedding Models 41:24 Getting Started with Jina and Open Source Tools 51:25 The Importance of Hard Negatives in Embedding Models | |||
31 May 2024 | Building Robust AI and Data Systems, Data Architecture, Data Quality, Data Storage | ep 10 | 00:45:33 | |
In this episode of "How AI is Built", data architect Anjan Banerjee provides an in-depth look at the world of data architecture and building complex AI and data systems. Anjan breaks down the basics using simple analogies, explaining how data architecture involves sorting, cleaning, and painting a picture with data, much like organizing Lego bricks to build a structure. Summary by Section Introduction
Sources and Tools
Airflow and Orchestration
AI and Data Processing
Data Lakes and Storage
Data Quality and Standardization
Hot Takes and Wishes
Anjan Banerjee: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Understanding Data Architecture 12:36 Choosing the Right Tools 20:36 The Benefits of Serverless Functions 21:34 Integrating AI in Data Acquisition 24:31 The Trend Towards Single Node Engines 26:51 Choosing the Right Database Management System and Storage 29:45 Adding Additional Storage Components 32:35 Reducing Human Errors for Better Data Quality 39:07 Overhyped and Underutilized Tools Data architecture, AI, data systems, data sources, data extraction, data storage, multi-modal storage engines, data orchestration, Airflow, edge computing, batch processing, data lakes, Delta Lake, Iceberg, data quality, standardization, poka-yoke, compliance, entity resolution | |||
21 Nov 2024 | From Ambiguous to AI-Ready: Improving Documentation Quality for RAG Systems | S2 E15 | 00:46:37 | |
Documentation quality is the silent killer of RAG systems. A single ambiguous sentence might corrupt an entire set of responses. But the hardest part isn't fixing errors - it's finding them. Today we are talking to Max Buckley on how to find and fix these errors. Max works at Google and has built a lot of interesting experiments with LLMs on using them to improve knowledge bases for generation. We talk about identifying ambiguities, fixing errors, creating improvement loops in the documents and a lot more. Some Insights:
Max Buckley: (All opinions are his own and not of Google) Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Understanding LLM Hallucinations 00:02 Challenges with Temporal Inconsistencies 00:43 Issues with Document Structure and Terminology 01:05 Introduction to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) 01:49 Interview with Max Buckley 02:27 Anthropic's Approach to Document Chunking 02:55 Contextualizing Chunks for Better Retrieval 06:29 Challenges in Chunking and Search 07:35 LLMs in Internal Knowledge Management 08:45 Identifying and Fixing Documentation Errors 10:58 Using LLMs for Error Detection 15:35 Improving Documentation with User Feedback 24:42 Running Processes on Retrieved Context 25:19 Challenges of Terminology Consistency 26:07 Handling Definitions and Glossaries 30:10 Addressing Context Misinterpretation 31:13 Improving Documentation Quality 36:00 Future of AI and Search Technologies 42:29 Ensuring Documentation Readiness for AI | |||
07 Jun 2024 | Mastering Vector Databases: Product & Binary Quantization, Multi-Vector Search | 00:40:06 | |
Ever wondered how AI systems handle images and videos, or how they make lightning-fast recommendations? Tune in as Nicolay chats with Zain Hassan, an expert in vector databases from Weaviate. They break down complex topics like quantization, multi-vector search, and the potential of multimodal search, making them accessible for all listeners. Zain even shares a sneak peek into the future, where vector databases might connect our brains with computers! Zain Hasan: Nicolay Gerold: Key Insights:
Key Quotes:
Chapters 00:00 - 01:24 Introduction 01:24 - 03:48 Underappreciated aspects of vector databases 03:48 - 06:06 Quantization trade-offs and techniques
06:06 - 08:24 Binary quantization
08:24 - 10:44 Product quantization and other techniques
10:44 - 13:08 Quantization as a "superpower" to reduce costs 13:08 - 15:34 Comparing quantization approaches 15:34 - 17:51 Placing vector databases in the database landscape 17:51 - 20:12 Pruning unused vectors and nodes 20:12 - 22:37 Improving precision beyond similarity thresholds 22:37 - 25:03 Multi-vector search 25:03 - 27:11 Impact of vector databases on data interaction 27:11 - 29:35 Interesting and weird use cases 29:35 - 32:00 Future of multimodal search and recommendations 32:00 - 34:22 Extending recommendations to user data 34:22 - 36:39 What's next for Weaviate 36:39 - 38:57 Exciting technologies beyond vector databases and LLMs vector databases, quantization, hybrid search, multi-vector support, representation learning, cost reduction, memory optimization, multimodal recommender systems, brain-computer interfaces, weather prediction models, AI applications | |||
17 Apr 2024 | Supabase acquires OrioleDB, A New Database Engine for PostgreSQL | changelog 1 | 00:13:37 | |
Supabase just acquired OrioleDB, a storage engine for PostgreSQL. Oriole gets creative with MVCC! It uses an UNDO log rather than keeping multiple versions of an entire data row (tuple). This means when you update data, Oriole tracks the changes needed to "undo" the update if necessary. Think of this like the "undo" function in a text editor. Instead of keeping a full copy of the old text, it just remembers what changed. This can be much smaller. This also saves space by eliminating the need for a garbage collection process. It also has a bunch of additional performance boosters like data compression, easy integration with data lakes, and index-organized tables. Show notes: Chris Gwilliams: Nicolay Gerold: 00:42 Introduction to OrioleDB 04:38 The Undo Log Approach 08:39 Improving Performance for High Throughput Databases 11:08 My take on OrioleDB OrioleDB, storage engine, Postgres, table access methods, undo log, high throughput databases, automated features, new use cases, S3, data migration | |||
07 Nov 2024 | Vector Search at Scale: Why One Size Doesn't Fit All | S2 E13 | 00:36:26 | |
Ever wondered why your vector search becomes painfully slow after scaling past a million vectors? You're not alone - even tech giants struggle with this. Charles Xie, founder of Zilliz (company behind Milvus), shares how they solved vector database scaling challenges at 100B+ vector scale: Key Insights:
Perfect for teams hitting scaling walls with their current vector search implementation or planning for future growth. Worth watching if you're building production search systems or need to optimize costs vs performance. Charles Xie: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Search System Challenges 00:26 Introducing Milvus: The Open Source Vector Database 00:58 Interview with Charles: Founder of Zilliz 02:20 Scalability and Performance in Vector Databases 03:35 Challenges in Distributed Systems 05:46 Data Consistency and Real-Time Search 12:12 Hierarchical Storage and GPU Acceleration 18:34 Emerging Technologies in Vector Search 23:21 Self-Learning Indexes and Future Innovations 28:44 Key Takeaways and Conclusion | |||
14 Jun 2024 | Serverless Data Orchestration, AI in the Data Stack, AI Pipelines | ep 12 | 00:28:06 | |
In this episode, Nicolay sits down with Hugo Lu, founder and CEO of Orchestra, a modern data orchestration platform. As data pipelines and analytics workflows become increasingly complex, spanning multiple teams, tools and cloud services, the need for unified orchestration and visibility has never been greater. Orchestra is a serverless data orchestration tool that aims to provide a unified control plane for managing data pipelines, infrastructure, and analytics across an organization's modern data stack. The core architecture involves users building pipelines as code which then run on Orchestra's serverless infrastructure. It can orchestrate tasks like data ingestion, transformation, AI calls, as well as monitoring and getting analytics on data products. All with end-to-end visibility, data lineage and governance even when organizations have a scattered, modular data architecture across teams and tools. Key Quotes:
Hugo Lu: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Orchestra and its Focus on Data Products 08:03 Unified Control Plane for Data Stack and End-to-End Control 14:42 Use Cases and Unique Applications of Orchestra 19:31 Retaining Existing Dev Workflows and Best Practices in Orchestra 22:23 Event-Driven Architectures and Monitoring in Orchestra 23:49 Putting Data Products First and Monitoring Health and Usage 25:40 The Future of Data Orchestration: Stream-Based and Cost-Effective data orchestration, Orchestra, serverless architecture, versatility, use cases, maturity levels, challenges, AI workloads | |||
31 Oct 2024 | Search Systems at Scale: Avoiding Local Maxima and Other Engineering Lessons | S2 E12 | 00:54:47 | |
Modern search systems face a complex balancing act between performance, relevancy, and cost, requiring careful architectural decisions at each layer. While vector search generates buzz, hybrid approaches combining traditional text search with vector capabilities yield better results. The architecture typically splits into three core components:
Critical but often overlooked aspects include query understanding depth, systematic relevancy testing (avoid anecdote-driven development), and data governance as search systems naturally evolve into organizational data hubs. Performance optimization requires careful tradeoffs between index-time vs query-time computation, with even 1-2% improvements being significant in mature systems. Success requires testing against production data (staging environments prove unreliable), implementing proper evaluation infrastructure (golden query sets, A/B testing, interleaving), and avoiding the local maxima trap where improving one query set unknowingly damages others. The end goal is finding an acceptable balance between corpus size, latency requirements, and cost constraints while maintaining system manageability and relevance quality. "It's quite easy to end up in local maxima, whereby you improve a query for one set and then you end up destroying it for another set." "A good marker of a sophisticated system is one where you actually see it's getting worse... you might be discovering a maxima." "There's no free lunch in all of this. Often it's a case that, to service billions of documents on a vector search, less than 10 millis, you can do those kinds of things. They're just incredibly expensive. It's really about trying to manage all of the overall system to find what is an acceptable balance." Search Pioneers: Stuart Cam: Russ Cam: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Search Systems 00:13 Challenges in Search: Relevancy vs Latency 00:27 Insights from Industry Experts 01:00 Evolution of Search Technologies 03:16 Storage and Compute in Search Systems 06:22 Common Mistakes in Building Search Systems 09:10 Evaluating and Improving Search Systems 19:27 Architectural Components of Search Systems 29:17 Understanding Search Query Expectations 29:39 Balancing Speed, Cost, and Corpus Size 32:03 Trade-offs in Search System Design 32:53 Indexing vs Querying: Key Considerations 35:28 Re-ranking and Personalization Challenges 38:11 Evaluating Search System Performance 44:51 Overrated vs Underrated Search Techniques 48:31 Final Thoughts and Contact Information | |||
26 Apr 2024 | Unlocking AI with Supabase: Postgres Configuration, Real-Time Processing, and Extensions | ep 4 | 00:31:57 | |
Had a fantastic conversation with Christopher Williams, Solutions Architect at Supabase, about setting up Postgres the right way for AI. We dug deep into Supabase, exploring:
Had a fantastic conversation with Christopher Williams, Solutions Architect at Supabase, about setting up Postgres the right way for AI. We dug deep into Supabase, exploring:
| |||
27 Jun 2024 | Building Predictable Agents: Prompting, Compression, and Memory Strategies | ep 14 | 00:32:14 | |
In this conversation, Nicolay and Richmond Alake discuss various topics related to building AI agents and using MongoDB in the AI space. They cover the use of agents and multi-agents, the challenges of controlling agent behavior, and the importance of prompt compression. When you are building agents. Build them iteratively. Start with simple LLM calls before moving to multi-agent systems. Main Takeaways:
Richmond Alake:
Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Reducing the Scope of AI Agents 01:55 Seamless Data Ingestion 03:20 Challenges and Considerations in Implementing Multi-Agents 06:05 Memory Modeling for Robust Agents with MongoDB 15:05 Performance Optimization in AI Agents 18:19 RAG Setup AI agents, multi-agents, prompt compression, MongoDB, data storage, data ingestion, performance optimization, tooling, generative AI | |||
15 Nov 2024 | BM25 is the workhorse of search; vectors are its visionary cousin | S2 E14 | 00:54:05 | |
Ever wondered why vector search isn't always the best path for information retrieval? Join us as we dive deep into BM25 and its unmatched efficiency in our latest podcast episode with David Tippett from GitHub. Discover how BM25 transforms search efficiency, even at GitHub's immense scale. BM25, short for Best Match 25, use term frequency (TF) and inverse document frequency (IDF) to score document-query matches. It addresses limitations in TF-IDF, such as term saturation and document length normalization. Search Is About User Expectations
The Challenge of Vector Search at Scale
Vector Search vs. BM25: A Trade-off of Precision vs. Cost
David Tippett: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to RAG and Vector Search Challenges 00:28 Introducing BM25: The Efficient Search Solution 00:43 Guest Introduction: David Tippett 01:16 Comparing Search Engines: Vespa, Weaviate, and More 07:53 Understanding BM25 and Its Importance 09:10 Deep Dive into BM25 Mechanics 23:46 Field-Based Scoring and BM25F 25:49 Introduction to Zero Shot Retrieval 26:03 Vector Search vs BM25 26:22 Combining Search Techniques 26:56 Favorite BM25 Adaptations 27:38 Postgres Search and Term Proximity 31:49 Challenges in GitHub Search 33:59 BM25 in Large Scale Systems 40:00 Technical Deep Dive into BM25 45:30 Future of Search and Learning to Rank 47:18 Conclusion and Future Plans | |||
12 Sep 2024 | RAG at Scale: The problems you will encounter and how to prevent (or fix) them | S2 E4 | 00:50:09 | |
Hey! Welcome back. Today we look at how we can get our RAG system ready for scale. We discuss common problems and their solutions, when you introduce more users and more requests to your system. For this we are joined by Nirant Kasliwal, the author of fastembed. Nirant shares practical insights on metadata extraction, evaluation strategies, and emerging technologies like Colipali. This episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to level up their RAG implementations. "Naive RAG has a lot of problems on the retrieval end and then there's a lot of problems on how LLMs look at these data points as well." "The first 30 to 50% of gains are relatively quick. The rest 50% takes forever." "You do not want to give the same answer about company's history to the co-founding CEO and the intern who has just joined." "Embedding similarity is the signal on which you want to build your entire search is just not quite complete." Key insights:
Nirant Kasliwal: Nicolay Gerold: query understanding, AI-powered search, Lambda Mart, e-commerce ranking, networking, experts, recommendation, search | |||
16 Jul 2024 | Unlocking Value from Unstructured Data, Real-World Applications of Generative AI | ep 17 | 00:36:28 | |
In this episode of "How AI is Built," host Nicolay Gerold interviews Jonathan Yarkoni, founder of Reach Latent. Jonathan shares his expertise in extracting value from unstructured data using AI, discussing challenging projects, the impact of ChatGPT, and the future of generative AI. From weather prediction to legal tech, Jonathan provides valuable insights into the practical applications of AI across various industries. Key Takeaways
Key Quotes "I think we're going to see another wave in 2024 and another one in 2025. And people are familiarized. That's kind of the wave of 2023. 2024 is probably still going to be a lot of internal use cases because it's a low risk environment and there was a lot of opportunity to be had." "To really get to production reliably, we have to have these tools evolve further and get more standardized so people can still use the old ways of doing production with the new technology." Jonathan Yarkoni Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Introduction: Extracting Value from Unstructured Data unstructured data, textual data, automation, weather prediction, data cleaning, chat GPT, AI disruption, legal, education, software engineering, marketing, biotech, immediate results, cutting-edge solutions, tech stack | |||
10 Oct 2024 | Numbers, categories, locations, images, text. How to embed the world? | S2 E9 | 00:46:44 | |
Today’s guest is Mór Kapronczay. Mór is the Head of ML at superlinked. Superlinked is a compute framework for your information retrieval and feature engineering systems, where they turn anything into embeddings. When most people think about embeddings, they think about ada, openai. You just take your text and throw it in there. But that’s too crude. OpenAI embeddings are trained on the internet. But your data set (most likely) is not the internet. You have different nuances. And you have more than just text. So why not use it. Some highlights:
➡️ Pouring everything into a text embedding model won't yield magical results ➡️ Language is lossy - it's a poor compression method for complex information
➡️ Direct number embeddings don't work well for vector search ➡️ Consider projecting number ranges onto a quarter circle ➡️ Apply logarithmic transforms for skewed distributions
➡️ Create separate vector parts for different data aspects ➡️ Normalize individual parts ➡️ Weight vector parts based on importance A Multi-Vector approach can help you understand the contributions of each modality or embedding and give you an easier time to fine-tune your retrieval system without fine-tuning your embedding models by tuning your vector database like you would a search database (like Elastic). Mór Kapronczay Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Embeddings 00:30 Beyond Text: Expanding Embedding Capabilities 02:09 Challenges and Innovations in Embedding Techniques 03:49 Unified Representations and Vector Computers 05:54 Embedding Complex Data Types 07:21 Recommender Systems and Interaction Data 08:59 Combining and Weighing Embeddings 14:58 Handling Numerical and Categorical Data 20:35 Optimizing Embedding Efficiency 22:46 Dynamic Weighting and Evaluation 24:35 Exploring AB Testing with Embeddings 25:08 Joint vs Separate Embedding Spaces 27:30 Understanding Embedding Dimensions 29:59 Libraries and Frameworks for Embeddings 32:08 Challenges in Embedding Models 33:03 Vector Database Connectors 34:09 Balancing Production and Updates 36:50 Future of Vector Search and Modalities 39:36 Building with Embeddings: Tips and Tricks 42:26 Concluding Thoughts and Next Steps | |||
29 Apr 2024 | Lance v2: Rethinking Columnar Storage for Faster Lookups, Nulls, and Flexible Encodings | changelog 2 | 00:21:33 | |
In this episode of Changelog, Weston Pace dives into the latest updates to LanceDB, an open-source vector database and file format. Lance's new V2 file format redefines the traditional notion of columnar storage, allowing for more efficient handling of large multimodal datasets like images and embeddings. Weston discusses the goals driving LanceDB's development, including null value support, multimodal data handling, and finding an optimal balance for search performance. Sound Bites "A little bit more power to actually just try." "We're becoming a little bit more feature complete with returns of arrow." "Weird data representations that are actually really optimized for your use case." Key Points
Conversation Highlights
LanceDB: Weston Pace: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Introducing Lance: A New File Format 06:46 Enabling Custom Encodings in Lance 11:51 Exploring the Relationship Between Lance and Arrow 20:04 New Chapter Lance file format, nulls, round-tripping data, optimized data representations, full-text search, encodings, downsides, multimodal data, compression, point lookups, full scan performance, non-contiguous columns, custom encodings | |||
24 May 2024 | Modern Data Infrastructure for Analytics and AI, Lakehouses, Open Source Data Stack | ep 9 | 00:27:53 | |
Jorrit Sandbrink, a data engineer specializing on open table formats, discusses the advantages of decoupling storage and compute, the importance of choosing the right table format, and strategies for optimizing your data pipelines. This episode is full of practical advice for anyone looking to build a high-performance data analytics platform.
Key Takeaways:
Sound Bites "The Lake house is sort of a modular setup where you decouple the storage and the compute." "A lake house is an architecture, an architecture for data analytics platforms." "The most popular table formats for a lake house are Delta, Iceberg, and Apache Hoodie." Jorrit Sandbrink: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Lake House Architecture 03:59 Choosing Storage and Table Formats 06:19 Comparing Compute Engines 21:37 Simplifying Data Ingress 25:01 Building a Preferred Data Stack lake house, data analytics, architecture, storage, table format, query execution engine, document store, DuckDB, Polars, orchestration, Airflow, Dexter, DLT, data ingress, data processing, data storage | |||
25 Jun 2024 | Data Integration and Ingestion for AI & LLMs, Architecting Data Flows | changelog 3 | 00:14:53 | |
In this episode, Kirk Marple, CEO and founder of Graphlit, shares his expertise on building efficient data integrations. Kirk breaks down his approach using relatable concepts:
Kirk Marple: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Building Integrations into Different Tools 00:44 The Two-Sided Funnel Model for Data Flow 04:07 Using Well-Defined Interfaces for Faster Integration 04:36 Managing Feeds and State with Actor Models 06:05 The Importance of Data Normalization 10:54 Tech Stack for Data Flow 11:52 Progression towards a Kappa Architecture 13:45 Reusability of Patterns for Faster Integration data integration, data sources, data flow, two-sided funnel model, canonical format, stream of ingestible objects, competing consumer model, well-defined interfaces, actor model, data normalization, tech stack, Kappa architecture, reusability of patterns | |||
03 May 2024 | Building Reliable LLM Applications, Production-Ready RAG, Data-Driven Evals | ep 5 | 00:29:40 | |
In this episode of "How AI is Built", we learn how to build and evaluate real-world language model applications with Shahul and Jithin, creators of Ragas. Ragas is a powerful open-source library that helps developers test, evaluate, and fine-tune Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) applications, streamlining their path to production readiness. Main Insights
Practical Takeaways
Interesting Quotes
Ragas: Jithin James: Shahul ES: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction 02:03 Introduction to Open Assistant project 04:05 Creating Customizable and Fine-Tunable Models 06:07 Ragas and the LLM Use Case 08:09 Introduction to Language Model Metrics (LLMs) 11:12 Reducing the Cost of Data Generation 13:19 Evaluation of Components at Melvess 15:40 Combining Ragas Metrics with AutoML Providers 20:08 Improving Performance with Fine-tuning and Reranking 22:56 End-to-End Metrics and Component-Specific Metrics 25:14 The Importance of Deep Knowledge and Understanding 25:53 Robustness vs Optimization 26:32 Challenges of Evaluating Models 27:18 Creating a Dream Tech Stack 27:47 The Future Roadmap for Ragas 28:02 Doubling Down on Grid Data Generation 28:12 Open-Source Models and Expanded Support 28:20 More Metrics for Different Applications RAG, Ragas, LLM, Evaluation, Synthetic Data, Open-Source, Language Model Applications, Testing. | |||
04 Oct 2024 | Building Taxonomies: Data Models to Remove Ambiguity from AI and Search | S2 E8 | 00:58:40 | |
Today we have Jessica Talisman with us, who is working as an Information Architect at Adobe. She is (in my opinion) the expert on taxonomies and ontologies. That’s what you will learn today in this episode of How AI Is Built. Taxonomies, ontologies, knowledge graphs. Everyone is talking about them no-one knows how to build them. But before we look into that, what are they good for in search? Imagine a large corpus of academic papers. When a user searches for "machine learning in healthcare", the system can:
So we are building the plumbing, the necessary infrastructure for tagging, categorization, query expansion and relexation, filtering. So how can we build them? 1️⃣ Start with Industry Standards • Leverage established taxonomies (e.g., Google, GS1, IAB) • Audit them for relevance to your project • Use as a foundation, not a final solution 2️⃣ Customize and Fill Gaps • Adapt industry taxonomies to your specific domain • Create a "coverage model" for your unique needs • Mine internal docs to identify domain-specific concepts 3️⃣ Follow Ontology Best Practices • Use clear, unique primary labels for each concept • Include definitions to avoid ambiguity • Provide context for each taxonomy node Jessica Talisman: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Taxonomies and Knowledge Graphs 02:03 Building the Foundation: Metadata to Knowledge Graphs 04:35 Industry Taxonomies and Coverage Models 06:32 Clustering and Labeling Techniques 11:00 Evaluating and Maintaining Taxonomies 31:41 Exploring Taxonomy Granularity 32:18 Differentiating Taxonomies for Experts and Users 33:35 Mapping and Equivalency in Taxonomies 34:02 Best Practices and Examples of Taxonomies 40:50 Building Multilingual Taxonomies 44:33 Creative Applications of Taxonomies 48:54 Overrated and Underappreciated Technologies 53:00 The Importance of Human Involvement in AI 53:57 Connecting with the Speaker 55:05 Final Thoughts and Takeaways | |||
19 Apr 2024 | AI Inside Your Database, Real-Time AI, Declarative ML/AI | ep 3 | 00:36:04 | |
If you've ever wanted a simpler way to integrate AI directly into your database, SuperDuperDB might be the answer. SuperDuperDB lets you easily apply AI processes to your data while keeping everything up-to-date with real-time calculations. It works with various databases and aims to make AI development less of a headache. In this podcast, we explore:
Takeaways
Duncan Blythe: SuperDuperDB: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Introduction to SuperDuperDB 04:19 Real-time Computation and Data Deployment 13:46 Bringing Compute and Database Closer Together 29:30 Declarative Machine Learning with SuperDuperDB 35:09 Future Plans for SuperDuperDB SuperDuperDB, AI, databases, embeddings, classifications, data deployment, operational databases, analytical databases, AI development, data science | |||
15 Aug 2024 | Query Understanding: Doing The Work Before The Query Hits The Database | S2 E1 | 00:53:02 | |
Welcome back to How AI Is Built. We have got a very special episode to kick off season two. Daniel Tunkelang is a search consultant currently working with Algolia. He is a leader in the field of information retrieval, recommender systems, and AI-powered search. He worked for Canva, Algolia, Cisco, Gartner, Handshake, to pick a few. His core focus is query understanding. **Query understanding is about focusing less on the results and more on the query.** The query of the user is the first-class citizen. It is about figuring out what the user wants and than finding, scoring, and ranking results based on it. So most of the work happens before you hit the database. **Key Takeaways:** - The "bag of documents" model for queries and "bag of queries" model for documents are useful approaches for representing queries and documents in search systems. **Daniel Tunkelang** - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dtunkelang/) **Nicolay Gerold:** - [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolay-gerold/) Query understanding, search relevance, bag of documents, bag of queries, query specificity, query classification, named entity recognition, pre-retrieval processing, caching, large language models (LLMs), embeddings, offline processing, metadata enhancement, FastText, MiniLM, sentence transformers, visualization, precision, recall [00:00:00] 1. Introduction to Query Understanding
[00:05:30] 2. Query Representation Models
[00:12:00] 3. Query Specificity and Classification
[00:19:30] 4. Named Entity Recognition in Query Understanding
[00:24:00] 5. Pre-Retrieval Query Processing
[00:28:30] 6. Performance Optimization Techniques
[00:33:00] 7. Advanced Techniques: Embeddings and Language Models
[00:39:00] 8. Practical Implementation Strategies
[00:44:00] 9. Visualization and Analysis of Query Spaces
[00:47:00] 10. Future Directions and Closing Thoughts - Emerging trends in query understanding - Key takeaways for search system engineers [00:53:00] End of Episode | |||
05 Apr 2024 | Multimodal AI, Storing 1 Billion Vectors, Building Data Infrastructure | ep 1 | 00:34:04 | |
Imagine a world where data bottlenecks, slow data loaders, or memory issues on the VM don't hold back machine learning. Machine learning and AI success depends on the speed you can iterate. LanceDB is here to to enable fast experiments on top of terabytes of unstructured data. It is the database for AI. Dive with us into how LanceDB was built, what went into the decision to use Rust as the main implementation language, the potential of AI on top of LanceDB, and more. "LanceDB is the database for AI...to manage their data, to do a performant billion scale vector search." “We're big believers in the composable data systems vision." "You can insert data into LanceDB using Panda's data frames...to sort of really large 'embed the internet' kind of workflows." "We wanted to create a new generation of data infrastructure that makes their [AI engineers] lives a lot easier." "LanceDB offers up to 1,000 times faster performance than Parquet." Change She: LanceDB: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters: 00:00 Introduction to LanceDB 02:16 Building LanceDB in Rust 12:10 Optimizing Data Infrastructure 26:20 Surprising Use Cases for LanceDB 32:01 The Future of LanceDB LanceDB, AI, database, Rust, multimodal AI, data infrastructure, embeddings, images, performance, Parquet, machine learning, model database, function registries, agents. | |||
04 Jul 2024 | Building AI Agents for the Enterprise: Realistic Use Cases, Cost Controls, Seamless UX | ep 15 | 00:35:12 | |
In this episode, Nicolay talks with Rahul Parundekar, founder of AI Hero, about the current state and future of AI agents. Drawing from over a decade of experience working on agent technology at companies like Toyota, Rahul emphasizes the importance of focusing on realistic, bounded use cases rather than chasing full autonomy. They dive into the key challenges, like effectively capturing expert workflows and decision processes, delivering seamless user experiences that integrate into existing routines, and managing costs through techniques like guardrails and optimized model choices. The conversation also explores potential new paradigms for agent interactions beyond just chat. Key Takeaways:
Key Quotes:
Rahul Parundekar: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Exploring the Potential of Autonomous Agents 02:23 Challenges of Accuracy and Repeatability in Agents 08:31 Capturing User Workflows and Improving Prompts 13:37 Tech Stack for Implementing Agents in the Enterprise agent development, determinism, user experience, agent paradigms, private use, human-agent interaction, user workflows, agent deployment, human-in-the-loop, LLMs, declarative ways, scalability, AI Hero | |||
19 Sep 2024 | Limits of Embeddings: Out-of-Domain Data, Long Context, Finetuning (and How We're Fixing It) | S2 E5 | 00:46:06 | |
Text embeddings have limitations when it comes to handling long documents and out-of-domain data. Today, we are talking to Nils Reimers. He is one of the researchers who kickstarted the field of dense embeddings, developed sentence transformers, started HuggingFace’s Neural Search team and now leads the development of search foundational models at Cohere. Tbh, he has too many accolades to count off here. We talk about the main limitations of embeddings:
Are you still not sure whether to listen? Here are some teasers:
Nils Reimers: Nicolay Gerold: text embeddings, limitations, long documents, interpretation, fine-tuning, re-ranking, future research 00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction 00:43 Early Work with BERT and Argument Mining 02:24 Evolution and Innovations in Embeddings 03:39 Constructive Learning and Hard Negatives 05:17 Training and Fine-Tuning Embedding Models 12:48 Challenges and Limitations of Embeddings 18:16 Adapting Embeddings to New Domains 22:41 Handling Long Documents and Re-Ranking 31:08 Combining Embeddings with Traditional ML 45:16 Conclusion and Upcoming Episodes | |||
23 Oct 2024 | Building the database for AI, Multi-modal AI, Multi-modal Storage | S2 E10 | 00:44:54 | |
Imagine a world where data bottlenecks, slow data loaders, or memory issues on the VM don't hold back machine learning. Machine learning and AI success depends on the speed you can iterate. LanceDB is here to to enable fast experiments on top of terabytes of unstructured data. It is the database for AI. Dive with us into how LanceDB was built, what went into the decision to use Rust as the main implementation language, the potential of AI on top of LanceDB, and more. "LanceDB is the database for AI...to manage their data, to do a performant billion scale vector search." “We're big believers in the composable data systems vision." "You can insert data into LanceDB using Panda's data frames...to sort of really large 'embed the internet' kind of workflows." "We wanted to create a new generation of data infrastructure that makes their [AI engineers] lives a lot easier." "LanceDB offers up to 1,000 times faster performance than Parquet."
LanceDB: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Multimodal Embeddings | |||
25 Oct 2024 | Training Multi-Modal AI: Inside the Jina CLIP Embedding Model | S2 E11 | 00:49:22 | |
Today we are talking to Michael Günther, a senior machine learning scientist at Jina about his work on JINA Clip. Some key points:
Types of Text-Image Models
Training Insights from Jina CLIP
Practical Considerations
Future Directions
Practical Applications
Key Takeaways for Engineers
Michael Guenther Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction to Uni-modal and Multimodal Embeddings 00:16 Exploring Multimodal Embeddings and Their Applications 01:06 Training Multimodal Embedding Models 02:21 Challenges and Solutions in Embedding Models 07:29 Advanced Techniques and Future Directions 29:19 Understanding Model Interference in Search Specialization 30:17 Fine-Tuning Jina CLIP for E-Commerce 32:18 Synthetic Data Generation and Pseudo-Labeling 33:36 Challenges and Learnings in Embedding Models 40:52 Future Directions and Takeaways | |||
27 Sep 2024 | From PDFs to Pixels: How ColPali is Changing Information Retrieval | S2 E7 | 00:54:57 | |
ColPali makes us rethink how we approach document processing. ColPali revolutionizes visual document search by combining late interaction scoring with visual language models. This approach eliminates the need for extensive text extraction and preprocessing, handling messy real-world data more effectively than traditional methods. In this episode, Jo Bergum, chief scientist at Vespa, shares his insights on how ColPali is changing the way we approach complex document formats like PDFs and HTML pages. Introduction to ColPali:
Advantages of ColPali:
Jo Bergum:
Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Messy Data in AI 01:19 Challenges in Search Systems 03:41 Understanding Representational Approaches 08:18 Dense vs Sparse Representations 19:49 Advanced Retrieval Models and ColPali 30:59 Exploring Image-Based AI Progress 32:25 Challenges and Innovations in OCR 33:45 Understanding ColPali and MaxSim 38:13 Scaling and Practical Applications of ColPali 44:01 Future Directions and Use Cases | |||
20 May 2024 | Knowledge Graphs for Better RAG, Virtual Entities, Hybrid Data Models | ep 8 | 00:36:40 | |
Kirk Marple, CEO and founder of Graphlit, discusses the evolution of his company from a data cataloging tool to an platform designed for ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) and knowledge retrieval for Large Language Models (LLMs). Graphlit empowers users to build custom applications on top of its API that go beyond naive RAG. Key Points:
Notable Quotes:
Kirk Marple: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Graphlit’s Hybrid Approach 02:23 Use Cases and Transition to Graphlit 04:19 Knowledge Graphs as a Filtering Mechanism 13:23 Using Gremlin for Querying the Graph 32:36 XML in Prompts for Better Segmentation 35:04 The Future of LLMs and Graphlit 36:25 Getting Started with Graphlit Graphlit, knowledge graphs, AI, document store, graph database, search index co-pilot, entity extraction, Azure Cognitive Services, XML, event-driven architecture, serverless architecture graph rag, developer portal | |||
10 May 2024 | Data Orchestration Tools: Choosing the right one for your needs | ep 6 | 00:32:37 | |
In this episode, Nicolay Gerold interviews John Wessel, the founder of Agreeable Data, about data orchestration. They discuss the evolution of data orchestration tools, the popularity of Apache Airflow, the crowded market of orchestration tools, and the key problem that orchestrators solve. They also explore the components of a data orchestrator, the role of AI in data orchestration, and how to choose the right orchestrator for a project. They touch on the challenges of managing orchestrators, the importance of monitoring and optimization, and the need for product people to be more involved in the orchestration space. They also discuss data residency considerations and the future of orchestration tools. Sound Bites "The modern era, definitely airflow. Took the market share, a lot of people running it themselves." "It's like people are launching new orchestrators every day. This is a funny one. This was like two weeks ago, somebody launched an orchestrator that was like a meta-orchestrator." "The DAG introduced two other components. It's directed acyclic graph is what DAG means, but direct is like there's a start and there's a finish and the acyclic is there's no loops." Key Topics
John Wessel: Nicolay Gerold: Data orchestration, data movement, Apache Airflow, orchestrator selection, DAG, AI in orchestration, serverless, Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, monitoring, optimization, data residency, product involvement, generative AI. Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Overview 00:34 The Evolution of Data Orchestration Tools 04:54 Components and Flow of Data in Orchestrators 08:24 Deployment Options: Serverless vs. Kubernetes 11:14 Considerations for Data Residency and Security 13:02 The Need for a Clear Winner in the Orchestration Space 20:47 Optimization Techniques for Memory and Time-Limited Issues 23:09 Integrating Orchestrators with Infrastructure-as-Code 24:33 Bridging the Gap Between Data and Engineering Practices 27:2 2Exciting Technologies Outside of Data Orchestration 30:09 The Feature of Dagster | |||
17 May 2024 | Navigating the Modern Data Stack, Choosing the Right OSS Tools, From Problem to Requirements to Architecture | ep 7 | 00:38:12 | |
From Problem to Requirements to Architecture. In this episode, Nicolay Gerold and Jon Erich Kemi Warghed discuss the landscape of data engineering, sharing insights on selecting the right tools, implementing effective data governance, and leveraging powerful concepts like software-defined assets. They discuss the challenges of keeping up with the ever-evolving tech landscape and offer practical advice for building sustainable data platforms. Tune in to discover how to simplify complex data pipelines, unlock the power of orchestration tools, and ultimately create more value from your data.
Key Takeaways:
Jon Erik Kemi Warghed: Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 The Problem with the Modern Data Stack: Too many tools and buzzwords 00:57 How to Choose the Right Tools: Considerations for startups and large companies 03:13 Evaluating Open Source Tools: Background checks and due diligence 07:52 Defining Data Governance: Transparency and understanding of data 10:15 The Importance of Data Governance: Challenges and solutions 12:21 Data Governance Tools: dbt and Dagster 17:05 The Impact of Dagster: Software-defined assets and declarative thinking 19:31 The Power of Software Defined Assets: How Dagster differs from Airflow and Mage 21:52 State Management and Orchestration in Dagster: Real-time updates and dependency management 26:24 Why Use Orchestration Tools?: The role of orchestration in complex data pipelines 28:47 The Importance of Tool Selection: Thinking about long-term sustainability 31:10 When to Adopt Orchestration: Identifying the need for orchestration tools | |||
12 Jul 2024 | Data Processing for AI, Integrating AI into Data Pipelines, Spark | ep 16 | 00:46:26 | |
This episode of "How AI Is Built" is all about data processing for AI. Abhishek Choudhary and Nicolay discuss Spark and alternatives to process data so it is AI-ready. Spark is a distributed system that allows for fast data processing by utilizing memory. It uses a dataframe representation "RDD" to simplify data processing. When should you use Spark to process your data for your AI Systems? → Use Spark when:
→ Consider alternatives when:
Spark isn't always necessary. Evaluate your specific needs and resources before committing to a Spark-based solution for AI data processing. In today’s episode of How AI Is Built, Abhishek and I discuss data processing:
Abhishek Choudhary: Nicolay Gerold: | |||
30 Aug 2024 | Data-driven Search Optimization, Analysing Relevance | S2 E2 | 00:51:14 | |
In this episode, we talk data-driven search optimizations with Charlie Hull. Charlie is a search expert from Open Source Connections. He has built Flax, one of the leading open source search companies in the UK, has written “Searching the Enterprise”, and is one of the main voices on data-driven search. We discuss strategies to improve search systems quantitatively and much more. Key Points:
Resources mentioned:
Charlie Hull: Nicolay Gerold: search results, search systems, assessing, evaluation, improvement, data quality, user behavior, proactive, test dataset, search engine optimization, SEO, search quality, metadata, query classification, user intent, search results, metrics, business objectives, user objectives, experimentation, continuous improvement, data modeling, embeddings, machine learning, information retrieval 00:00 Introduction | |||
12 Apr 2024 | AI Powered Data Transformation, Combining gen & trad AI, Semantic Validation | ep 2 | 00:37:09 | |
Today’s guest is Antonio Bustamante, a serial entrepreneur who previously built Kite and Silo and is now working to fix bad data. He is building bem, the data tool to transform any data into the schema your AI and software needs. bem.ai is a data tool that focuses on transforming any data into the schema needed for AI and software. It acts as a system's interoperability layer, allowing systems that couldn't communicate before to exchange information. Learn what place LLMs play in data transformation, how to build reliable data infrastructure and more. "Surprisingly, the hardest was semi-structured data. That is data that should be structured, but is unreliable, undocumented, hard to work with." "We were spending close to four or five million dollars a year just in integrations, which is no small budget for a company that size. So I was pretty much determined to fix this problem once and for all." "bem focuses on being the system's interoperability layer." "We basically take in anything you send us, we transform it exactly into your internal data schema so that you don't have to parse, process, transform anything of that sort." "LLMs are a 30% of it... A lot of it is very, very like thorough validation layers, great infrastructure, just ensuring reliability and connection to our user systems.” "You can use a million token context window and feed an entire document to an LLM. I can guarantee you if you don't, semantically chunk it out before you're not going to get the right results.” "We're obsessed with time to value... Our milestone is basically five minute onboarding max, and then you're ready to go." Antonio Bustamante Nicolay Gerold: Semi-structured data, Data integrations, Large language models (LLMs), Data transformation, Schema interoperability, Fault tolerance, Validation layers, System reliability, Schema evolution, Enterprise software, Data pipelines. Chapters 00:00 The Problem of Integrations 05:58 Building Fault Tolerant Systems 13:51 Versioning and Semantic Validation 27:33 BEM in the Data Ecosystem 34:40 Future Plans and Onboarding | |||
08 Aug 2024 | Season 2 Trailer: Mastering Search | 00:04:16 | |
Today we are launching the season 2 of How AI Is Built. The last few weeks, we spoke to a lot of regular listeners and past guests and collected feedback. Analyzed our episode data. And we will be applying the learnings to season 2. This season will be all about search. We are trying to make it better, more actionable, and more in-depth. The goal is that at the end of this season, you have a full-fleshed course on search in podcast form, which mini-courses on specific elements like RAG. We will be talking to experts from information retrieval, information architecture, recommendation systems, and RAG; from academia and industry. Fields that do not really talk to each other. We will try to unify and transfer the knowledge and give you a full tour of search, so you can build your next search application or feature with confidence. We will be talking to Charlie Hull on how to systematically improve search systems, with Nils Reimers on the fundamental flaws of embeddings and how to fix them, with Daniel Tunkelang on how to actually understand the queries of the user, and many more.
We will be using two types of episodes:
We will be starting with episodes next week, looking at the first, last, and overarching action in search: understanding user intent and understanding the queries with Daniel Tunkelang. I am really excited to kick this off. I would love to hear from you:
Yeah, let me know in the comments or just slide into my DMs on Twitter or LinkedIn. I am looking forward to hearing from you guys. I want to try to be more interactive. So anytime you encounter anything unclear or any question pops up in one of the episode, give me a shout and I will try to answer it to you and to everyone. Enough of me rambling. Let’s kick this off. I will see you next Thursday, when we start with query understanding. Shoot me a message and stay up to date: | |||
19 Jun 2024 | ETL for LLMs, Integrating and Normalizing Unstructured Data | ep 13 | 00:36:48 | |
In our latest episode, we sit down with Derek Tu, Founder and CEO of Carbon, a cutting-edge ETL tool designed specifically for large language models (LLMs). Carbon is streamlining AI development by providing a platform for integrating unstructured data from various sources, enabling businesses to build innovative AI applications more efficiently while addressing data privacy and ethical concerns.
Derek Tu: Nicolay Gerold: Key Takeaways:
00:00 Introduction and Optimizing Embedding Models 03:00 The Evolution of Carbon and Focus on Unstructured Data 06:19 Customer Progression and Target Group 09:43 Interesting Use Cases and Handling Different Data Representations 13:30 Chunking Strategies and Normalization 20:14 Approach to Chunking and Choosing a Vector Database 23:06 Tech Stack and Recommended Tools 28:19 Future of Carbon: Multimodal Models and Building a Platform Carbon, LLMs, RAG, chunking, data processing, global customer base, GDPR compliance, AI founders, AI agents, enterprises | |||
05 Sep 2024 | From Keywords to AI (to GAR): The Evolution of Search, Finding Search Signals | S2 E3 | 00:52:16 | |
In this episode of How AI is Built, Nicolay Gerold interviews Doug Turnbull, a search engineer at Reddit and author on “Relevant Search”. They discuss how methods and technologies, including large language models (LLMs) and semantic search, contribute to relevant search results. Key Highlights:
Key Quotes: "There's not like a perfect measure or definition of what a relevant search result is for a given application. There are a lot of really good proxies, and a lot of really good like things, but you can't just like blindly follow the one objective, if you want to build a good search product." - Doug Turnbull "I think 10 years ago, what people would do is they would just put everything in Solr, Elasticsearch or whatever, and they would make the query to Elasticsearch pretty complicated to rank what they wanted... What I see people doing more and more these days is that they'll use each retrieval source as like an independent piece of infrastructure." - Doug Turnbull on the evolution of search architecture "Honestly, I feel like that's a very practical and underappreciated thing. People talk about RAG and I talk, I call this GAR - generative AI augmented retrieval, so you're making search smarter with generative AI." - Doug Turnbull on using LLMs to enhance search "LambdaMART and gradient boosted decision trees are really powerful, especially for when you're expressing your re-ranking as some kind of structured learning problem... I feel like we'll see that and like you're seeing papers now where people are like finding new ways of making BM25 better." - Doug Turnbull on underappreciated techniques Doug Turnbull Nicolay Gerold: Chapters 00:00 Introduction and Guest Introduction 00:52 Understanding Relevant Search Results 01:18 Search Behavior on Social Media 02:14 Challenges in Defining Relevance 05:12 Query Understanding and Ranking Signals 10:57 Evolution of Search Technologies 15:15 Combining Search Techniques 21:49 Leveraging LLMs and Embeddings 25:49 Operational Considerations in Search Systems 39:09 Concluding Thoughts and Future Directions | |||
26 Sep 2024 | Beyond Embeddings: The Power of Rerankers in Modern Search | S2 E6 | 00:42:29 | |
Today, we're talking to Aamir Shakir, the founder and baker at mixedbread.ai, where he's building some of the best embedding and re-ranking models out there. We go into the world of rerankers, looking at how they can classify, deduplicate documents, prioritize LLM outputs, and delve into models like ColBERT. We discuss:
Still not sure whether to listen? Here are some teasers:
Aamir Shakir: Nicolay Gerold: 00:00 Introduction and Overview 00:25 Understanding Rerankers 01:46 Maxsim and Token-Level Embeddings 02:40 Setting Thresholds and Similarity 03:19 Guest Introduction: Aamir Shakir 03:50 Training and Using Rerankers (Episode Start) 04:50 Challenges and Solutions in Reranking 08:03 Future of Retrieval and Recommendation 26:05 Multimodal Retrieval and Reranking 38:04 Conclusion and Takeaways |