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ABOUT THE TALK: The emergence of generative AI models such as GTP-3, DALL•E, and Stable Diffusion has the potential to fundamentally change knowledge and creative work. This talk highlight the ways generative AI can enhance products, accelerating workflows and unlocking creativity. It also discusses some of the technical challenges involved in building generative AI products, including prompt chaining, data privacy, learning from human and AI feedback, and AI-human interaction.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Tristan Zajonc is the co-founder and CEO of Continual, an ML delivery platform that provides lifecycle management for production machine learning. He was previously CTO for Machine Learning at Cloudera and co-founder of Sense, a data science platform acquired by Cloudera in 2016. He has spent over 10 years in the trenches of machine learning infrastructure and operations.

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Summary Building, scaling, and maintaining the operational components of a machine learning workflow are all hard problems. Add the work of creating the model itself, and it’s not surprising that a majority of companies that could greatly benefit from machine learning have yet to either put it into production or see the value. Tristan Zajonc recognized the complexity that acts as a barrier to adoption and created the Continual platform in response. In this episode he shares his perspective on the benefits of declarative machine learning workflows as a means of accelerating adoption in businesses that don’t have the time, money, or ambition to build everything from scratch. He also discusses the technical underpinnings of what he is building and how using the data warehouse as a shared resource drastically shortens the time required to see value. This is a fascinating episode and Tristan’s work at Continual is likely to be the catalyst for a new stage in the machine learning community.

Announcements

Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management When you’re ready to build your next pipeline, or want to test out the projects you hear about on the show, you’ll need somewhere to deploy it, so check out our friends at Linode. With their managed Kubernetes platform it’s now even easier to deploy and scale your workflows, or try out the latest Helm charts from tools like Pulsar and Pachyderm. With simple pricing, fast networking, object storage, and worldwide data centers, you’ve got everything you need to run a bulletproof data platform. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/linode today and get a $100 credit to try out a Kubernetes cluster of your own. And don’t forget to thank them for their continued support of this show! Schema changes, missing data, and volume anomalies caused by your data sources can happen without any advanced notice if you lack visibility into your data-in-motion. That leaves DataOps reactive to data quality issues and can make your consumers lose confidence in your data. By connecting to your pipeline orchestrator like Apache Airflow and centralizing your end-to-end metadata, Databand.ai lets you identify data quality issues and their root causes from a single dashboard. With Databand.ai, you’ll know whether the data moving from your sources to your warehouse will be available, accurate, and usable when it arrives. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/databand to sign up for a free 30-day trial of Databand.ai and take control of your data quality today. Atlan is a collaborative workspace for data-driven teams, like Github for engineering or Figma for design teams. By acting as a virtual hub for data assets ranging from tables and dashboards to SQL snippets & code, Atlan enables teams to create a single source of truth for all their data assets, and collaborate across the modern data stack through deep integrations with tools like Snowflake, Slack, Looker and more. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/atlan today and sign up for a free trial. If you’re a data engineering podcast listener, you get credits worth $3000 on an annual subscription Your host is Tobias Macey and today I’m interviewing Tristan Zajonc about Continual, a platform for automating the creation and application of operational AI on top of your data warehouse

Interview

Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what Continual is and the story behind it?

What is your definition for "operational AI" and how does it differ from other applications of ML/AI?

What are some example use cases for AI in an operational capacity?

What are the barriers to adoption for organizations that want to take advantage of predictive analytics?

Who are the target users of Continual? Can you describe how the Continual platform is implemented?

How has the design and infrastructure changed or evolved since you first began working on it?

What is the workflow for