AI Stories

Hosted by Neil Leiser

Technology CareersInterviews guests

Website RSS feed

Episodes

Latest episode

Jun 2025

Language

EN-GB

About the show

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science and Deep Learning are completely changing the world we live in today. Companies around the world start to make sensible use of big data to influence business decisions and create our future. From video recommendations to autonomous driving, from stock prediction to weather forecasting, the AI revolution is everywhere. The AI stories podcast brings together some of the best Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Business leaders and researchers that are at the front of this revolution. They are here to talk about their career, how they arrive where they are, give advice and share their vision. They explain how they make use of AI in their daily routine, how they use algorithms to solve business problems and make the world a better place. They are here to share their stories: their AI stories. Hosted by Neil Leiser, Data Scientist at Iwoca. Follow Neil to learn more about career, Data Science, AI and Machine Learning. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeiserNeil

Listen to episodes

60 recent

June 26, 2025Episode 1254 min

Why Data Scientists Don’t Get Hired — And How to Fix It with Dawn Choo #61

Our guest today is Dawn Choo, founder of Interview Master and ex Data Scientist from Amazon and Meta. In our conversation, we first dive into Dawn's past Data Science projects at Amazon and Instagram. She explains how a pet project skyrocketed her career at Amazon and also shares details on the most impactful project that she worked on at Instagram. We then discuss Dawn's experience living in a van for a year before digging into Interview Master: a platform to help Data Scientists and Data Analysts land their dream job while leveraging AI agents to provide instant feedback! If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3Link to Interview Master: https://www.interviewmaster.ai/Follow Dawn on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/data-dawn/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro(02:30) How Dawn Got Into Data and AI(04:25) Why Dawn Left Finance(06:56) Automating Work at Amazon(10:22) How a Pet Project Changed her Career(15:24) Joining Instagram(17:30) Instagram Shopping(20:52) Improving Performance and Revenue at Instagram(29:56) Living and Working from a Van(37:34) Launching Interview Master(45:53) Why Data Scientists Don’t Get Hired(53:27) Career Advice

April 24, 2025Episode 1142 min

Polars: Fast & Efficient Data Manipulation with Ritchie Vink #60

Our guest today is Ritchie Vink, CEO & Founder of Polars: an open source data manipulation library known for being extremely fast. As of today, polars has over 32k stars on github. In our conversation, Ritchie first explains how Polar which started as a side project evolved to what it is today. We then discuss the differences between Polars and Pandas, why Polars is fast and optimised and dig into Polars cloud: a platform which manages the compute infrastructure, allowing users to focus solely on writing queries. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3Link to Polars: https://pola.rs/Follow Ritchie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ritchievink/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro(02:23) How Ritchie got into Data & AI(08:00) How Polars started(12:02) Query Optimization(14:38) Polars vs. Pandas(22:16) Why Pandas is still popular(27:52) Polars Cloud(34:45) Polars’ Challenges & Future Roadmap(40:57) Career Advice

April 3, 2025Episode 1056 min

How He Developed the World's Best Search Agent with Philippe Mizrahi #59

Our guest is Philippe Mizrahi, CEO of Linkup: a french startup building the world's best search agents. In our conversation, Philippe first shares how he got into search by building an internal dataset search tool at Lyft. We then dive into Linkup where Phil explains how linkup started, how it evolved and how they managed to build the best search agents achieving state-of-the-art results on OpenAI SimpleQA dataset. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3Link to Linkup: https://www.linkup.so/Follow Philippe on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippe-mizrahi/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro(03:13) How Philippe Got into AI (06:03) Building Lyft’s Internal Search Tool(11:40) How Linkup Started(16:10) How to use Linkup(21:55) Search Agents(31:58) Competing with OpenAI Operator(36:47) Use Cases of Linkup(42:28) Phil's Challenges as a CEO(51:06) Career Advice

March 20, 2025Episode 949 min

Building Production Grade Agents with Samuel Colvin #58

Our guest is Samuel Colvin, Co-Founder and CEO of pydantic: a data validation library with millions of downloads per month. In our conversation, we first discuss Pydantic and their observability platform: logfire. We then dive into agents where Samuel shares his vision on how to build production ready agents and what makes PydanticAI different than other frameworks. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3👉 8-hour GenAI Primer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/8-hour-genai-primer?ref=63e5e3Follow Samuel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-colvin/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro(02:10) How Samuel Got into AI(04:06) What is Pydantic?(06:44) Observability with Logfire(13:28) PydanticAI(17:33) Agent Frameworks(24:40) PydanticAI vs Other Agent Frameworks(32:06) Strengths and Weaknesses of Agents(36:43) Future Challenges with AI Agents(46:45) Career Advice

February 27, 2025Episode 856 min

11 years at Google with Max Buckley #57

👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3👉 8-hour GenAI Primer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/8-hour-genai-primer?ref=63e5e3Our guest today is Max Buckley, Senior Software Engineer at Google. From business analyst intern to Senior LLM engineer at Google! Max has been at Google for 11+ years and what a great career he’s had! Max probably knows Google better than anyone else. In our conversation, we go through Max's career with over 11 years of experience working at Google. We start with his first internship as a business analyst before he transitioned to software and then data engineering roles. In 2022, Max transitioned again and started building AI projects for Google including an Anti Money Laundering algorithm and internal RAG systems. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.Follow Max on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxbuckley/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro(05:37) Internship to Full-Time Job at Google(07:20) Career Evolution Across 10+ Teams(10:30) Learning Through Side Projects(18:22) Joining Google Cloud AI(25:58) First AI Project(31:14) AML AI Project Breakdown(37:34) Shifting to LLMs(42:33) Retrieval & Contextual Chunking(47:28) Limitations of RAG(50:44) Google’s Evolution Over 10 Years(54:46) Career Advice

February 13, 2025Episode 748 min

Post Deployment Data Science with Wojtek Kuberski #56

👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3👉 8-hour GenAI Primer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/8-hour-genai-primer?ref=63e5e3Our guest today is Wojtek Kuberski, Co-Founder and CTO at NannyML. In our conversation, we first discuss Wojtek's experience working as a freelancer. We then talk about NannyML: the platform for post deployment Data Science. We dive deep into model monitoring and discuss the key causes of model failure including covariate shift, concept drift and bad data quality. Wojtek also explains how NannyML's algorithms can estimate model performance without access to labels. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.Check out NannyML: https://www.nannyml.com/Follow Wojtek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wojtek-kuberski/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro(02:36) How Wojtek got into AI(04:48) Early Projects & Learnings in Freelance(13:40) Building NannyML(16:20) Model Monitoring(18:32) Covariate Shift vs Concept Drift(24:57) Technical Insights into Model Monitoring(27:56) NannyML’s Platform & Workflow (35:50) Retraining Model & Model Failures(41:39) Future of NannyML (47:09) Career Advice

January 23, 2025Episode 651 min

Llama 2, Llama 3, Agents & AGI with Thomas Scialom #55

Our guest today is Thomas Scialom, Senior Staff Research Scientist at Meta. In our conversation, we first discuss Thomas' PhD where he explains how he managed to publish around 20 academic papers. We then dive into several LLMs that Thomas built at Meta including Galactica, Llama 2 and Llama 3. We finally dig into AI Agents, their limitations and how close we are to AGI and ASI. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.👉 From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3👉 8-hour GenAI Primer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/8-hour-genai-primer?ref=63e5e3ToolFormer paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.04761To learn more about Llama 2: https://www.llama.com/llama2/ To learn more about Llama 3: https://www.llama.com/ Follow Thomas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tscialom/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro (02:28) How Thomas got into AI & ML(07:20) Publishing Academic Papers(14:48) Joining Meta(16:09) About Toolformer, ChatGPT & Galactica(19:20) Meta’s Response to ChatGPT(23:53) Scaling and Building LLMs(31:38) Why Open Source Matters(33:33) Thomas’ role in building Llama 3(37:22) AI Agents (42:13) AGI (46:34) Current challenges faced with AI Agents(51:03) Career Advice

January 9, 2025Episode 551 min

End To End MLOps with Başak Eskili #54

Our guest today is Başak Eskili, Machine Learning Engineer at Booking.com and C-Founder of Marvelous MLOps. In our conversation, we first dive into MLOps, its key components and how Başak got into the field. We then talk about Marvelous MLOps and her new course: "End to end MLOps with Databricks". Başak finally shares more about her current role at Booking with a focus on building feature stores. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.From beginner to advanced LLM developer course by Towards AI (use the code AISTORIES10 to get a 10% discount): https://academy.towardsai.net/courses/beginner-to-advanced-llm-dev?ref=63e5e3To learn more about Marvelous MLOps: https://www.marvelousmlops.io/End to End MLOps course with Databricks: https://maven.com/marvelousmlops/mlops-with-databricksFollow Başak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ba%C5%9Fak-tu%C4%9F%C3%A7e-eskili-61511b58/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) Intro (02:18) How Başak Got into AI & MLOps (06:55) Key Components of MLOps (12:05) Deploying First ML Model (15:58) Joining Booking.com (18:11) Best Practices for Building Scalable and Reliable ML Systems (23:01) Databricks (27:50) Batch vs. Real-Time Predictions (31:15) Marvelous MLOps (33:52) Role at Booking.com (35:45) Feature Stores (45:45) Career Advice

December 10, 2024Episode 458 min

TimeGPT, Nixtla & Forecasting with Max Mergenthaler #53

Our guest today is Max Mergenthaler, Co-Founder and CEO of Nixtla: one of the most popular libraries for time series forecasting. In this conversation, Max first explains how he got into AI and the lessons he learned from building a couple of tech startups. We then dive into Nixtla and forecasting. Max explains how he founded Nixtla and the different libraries available to build stats, ml and deep learning forecasting algorithms. We also tallk about TimeGPT, Nixtla's closed-source foundation model for time series. We finally discuss the future of the field along with mistakes and best practices when working on forecasting projects. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.To learn more about Nixtla: https://www.nixtla.io/ Open source librairies (StatsForecast, MLForecast, NeuralForecast): https://www.nixtla.io/open-source TimeGPT: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtlaFollow Max on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mergenthaler/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) - Intro(02:00) - How Max got into Data & AI(03:44) - Combining Philosophy with Analytics(09:49) - Lessons from building Startups(14:00) - Founding Nixtla(16:23) - Time Series Forecasting(19:25) - StatsForecast, MLForecast, and NeuralForecast(26:16) - TimeGPT & LLMs for Forecasting(34:30) - Why people love Nixtla(42:34) - Future of Forecasting(45:51) - Mistakes & Best Practices in Forecasting(52:12) - Max’s role as CEO (56:09) - Career Advice

November 21, 2024Episode 31 hr 6 min

Build LLMs From Scratch with Sebastian Raschka #52

Our guest today is Sebastian Raschka, Senior Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI and bestselling book author.In our conversation, we first talk about Sebastian's role at Lightning AI and what the platform provides. We also dive into two great open source libraries that they've built to train, finetune, deploy and scale LLMs.: pytorch lightning and litgpt. In the second part of our conversation, we dig into Sebastian's new book: "Build and LLM from Scratch". We discuss the key steps needed to train LLMs, the differences between GPT-2 and more recent models like Llama 3.1, multimodal LLMs and the future of the field. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.Build a Large Language Model From Scratch Book: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Large-Language-Model-Scratch/dp/1633437167Blog post on Multimodal LLMs: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-multimodal-llmsLightning AI (with pytorch lightning and litgpt repos): https://github.com/Lightning-AIFollow Sebastian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianraschka/Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ ---(00:00) - Intro(02:27) - How Sebastian got into Data & AI(06:44) - Regressions and loss functions(13:32) - Academia to joining LightningAI(21:14) - Lightning AI VS other cloud providers(26:14) - Building PyTorch Lightning & LitGPT(30:48) - Sebastian’s role as Staff Research Engineer(34:35) - Build an LLM From Scratch(45:00) - From GPT2 to Llama 3.1(48:34) - Long Context VS RAG(56:15) - Multimodal LLMs(01:03:27) - Career Advice