Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / Bringing DevOps Agility to ML// Luis Ceze // Coffee Sessions #121
Transcript
- 0:00I'm really says, I'm co-founder and CEO.
- 0:02A doctor Mao and I drink french press coffee black.
- 0:06I'm not espresso drink ourselves, dude.
- 0:09I just gotta say it. We're matching today and we did
- 0:11not plan this at all. You said that I didn't notice,
- 0:16but you're absolutely right. Oh my God.
- 0:17We are, that's literally the same shade of green that's
- 0:20embarrassing. And it's not the most common
- 0:23shade of green. And so for those that are just
- 0:25listening, me, Kyle and I are both wearing t-shirts and it's
- 0:28both like this mint. Green color and we just talked
- 0:33with Lewis says a who wow, he was special, man.
- 0:39This was really cool and I love how everything like he just must
- 0:43see the world and bring everything back to like
- 0:46Computing. It feels like everything he
- 0:49sees. He's like oh yeah that's like
- 0:51the same as when we're doing that with computers.
- 0:54Yeah, yeah. Yeah I love it.
- 0:55I love it. I thought it was fantastic.
- 0:58I always I was totally nerding out.
- 1:00Things and have a conversation just as he was going down these
- 1:02you know, these rabbit holes of like talking there's Hardware
- 1:05targets and how that relates to you know, their efforts at
- 1:07optimal tying that into the broader vision of what we should
- 1:11do. What's the next Frontier
- 1:13basically? Bio bio based computation and
- 1:17how we can leverage different, you know that for doing solving
- 1:22computational problems. And then of course, yeah how it
- 1:24tied into at the very end, you know, just talking about books
- 1:28that he reads. And how that also Is is a
- 1:30metaphor for computing. One thing that I absolutely
- 1:33loved from him and his vision, I feel like he's got a really
- 1:38strong Vision. He's got a really great way to
- 1:39articulate things. I was geeking out listening to
- 1:42you all seeking out and how he mentioned you don't he like he
- 1:49sees a future where you don't need to think about
- 1:51infrastructure. You should just be able to do
- 1:54what you got to do and infrastructure happens.
- 1:58And this is interesting because Kate on who is also in
- 2:02Washington and has he's leading Union dot AI.
- 2:07He told me that same vision and it feels like that.
- 2:11If there's something there, if he's seeing it, Lois is seeing
- 2:15it. People are understanding that
- 2:18there is a lot of complexity underneath the hood and that
- 2:22most data scientists or machine learning Engineers when they
- 2:25start deploying things or even when there before.
- 2:30Deployment process. They shouldn't have to be
- 2:32worrying about. What's the most efficient way
- 2:34for me to do this? That's absolutely right.
- 2:39And and that is a trend, I think in a lot of technological
- 2:43Paradigm shifts birth starts with, everyone needs to know
- 2:46everything and then as the number of options and things
- 2:52that you have to keep track of, right?
- 2:54In terms of how many different hardware systems, you need to
- 2:57accommodate how many different software systems you need to
- 2:59calm down. Wait, how many of them modeling?
- 3:01Framers means accommodate. There comes this question of
- 3:03that's like the unbundling of the ecosystem right where
- 3:06everything is just going all over the place.
- 3:09And there's this re bundling that happens when someone
- 3:11decides wait a second. Like I don't feel that random
- 3:14person starting as an Emily tomorrow should have to worry
- 3:17about. Oh do I have to make applying an
- 3:19x86 computation architecture? Or is this, you know, this is
- 3:22something else or am I using a and Nvidia GPU or am I gonna you
- 3:27know Intel CPU vs. XYZ thing?
- 3:30That makes a ton of sense to me that that's just something that
- 3:33we shouldn't have to deal with. And most practitioners should
- 3:36focus on the things that they want that.
- 3:37They really need to be focusing on which for a lot of purposes.
- 3:40Just the modeling, the data concerns, right?
- 3:44And I'm all in favor one favor of this movement.
- 3:47So what else is interesting about that is we had on the
- 3:51podcast? I think like two months ago,
- 3:53this guy named David and he works at LexisNexis and he had
- 3:58around 12 p.m. HDs really working on low level
- 4:02things in the company to help with these with speed and
- 4:07compiling and especially when it comes to data and he was talking
- 4:11about how he does not want a machine-learning engineer, doing
- 4:15those kind of tasks. And he also really wants it to
- 4:19be the most efficient. And so what it feels like Louis
- 4:23is doing and Caton and I'm sure there's probably others out
- 4:26there that I don't know about. Is they're trying to bring That
- 4:31benefit to the world without you needing the 12 phds to be
- 4:36working on it. So I love that he's doing it.
- 4:40I love that. We got to speak a little
- 4:41Portuguese with him. Well I got to speak a little
- 4:45Portuguese. I got the airport from you say.
- 4:46I was listening to Portuguese. I was there you go.
- 4:49I enjoyed that very nice language.
- 4:52Very nice. So last thing that I will
- 4:55mention is we're doing all kinds of local meetups.
- 5:00So if you are interested in doing a local meet up, get a
- 5:05hold of us, Mikael is organizing the local meetups in San
- 5:09Francisco. We got all over the US, they're
- 5:13happening all over Europe, they're happening in India,
- 5:16they're happening and super cool.
- 5:18Which I think we should just do it.
- 5:21Have a little Excursion to the first one in Australia.
- 5:25It's happening there in Sydney. So wow dude.
- 5:29Yeah, actually in Africa to I think they're going to start
- 5:31doing it in Nigeria and potentially South Africa so.
- 5:36Wow, yeah we're having it happen, man.
- 5:39This is worldwide man. Yeah that's it.
- 5:44That's what we're trying to do. Here.
- 5:45You in simple mr. Worldwide.
- 5:50That's the only sentence. The only way that I can be
- 5:53compared to that that guy not as cool.
- 5:57Well, as him in any other way, but in your community, you are
- 6:01as cool in your small Niche. There it is.
- 6:04There it is. So yeah, so get out us.
- 6:07And without further Ado, let's jump into the conversation that
- 6:10we just had with Louis. If you want to find out more
- 6:13about the local, meetups you can find us on meetup.com or just
- 6:18jump in the slack and there's probably a city Channel named
- 6:22after the city that you're in. Alright.
- 6:24That's all. We're just talking about how we
- 6:30got to keep this fun and fresh and make it interesting because
- 6:34there is boring content out there.
- 6:36So I got to ask you at least I did a little research before we
- 6:39hopped on this and you were on a podcast not too long ago and you
- 6:43professed that ml else does not exist.
- 6:45So I gotta stay like I took that personally, you coming out of my
- 6:49life blood man, what's going on here?
- 6:53Explain yourself. Thank you.
- 6:59Well, you see when you said that it's just so true that the
- 7:02internet, you know, confirmed it broke.
- 7:07Yeah, you're back. You're back.
- 7:08Your voice. All right, so CeCe said that
- 7:29like I everyone you know thanks for having me the podcast.
- 7:32You know I can tell this is gonna be fun and interesting so
- 7:35I want to qualify that what I mean.
- 7:37Now let's let me put my academic hat.
- 7:39Like we're talking about just anything about this for a while,
- 7:42right? So just a bit of a bit of my
- 7:43history that's relevant to our discussion here.
- 7:45I've been doing work in the context of, you know, high
- 7:48performance Computing, various forms as started in the blue
- 7:51jean project doing linear algebra and Hardware
- 7:54accelerators and you know how to design for life.
- 7:57Sciences, you know. And then, you know, for most of
- 8:00my academic career of done, working hard, or soft with cool
- 8:02design for emerging applications.
- 8:05And I think using machine learning as a workloads to
- 8:08motivate this, this research for for a while, right?
- 8:12So now that means that, of course, as an academic, I'm
- 8:15going to have strong opinions, you know?
- 8:17But now as a start-up CEO, breeding a product, I'm also
- 8:19going to have strong opinions about what I think, you know,
- 8:21this is a market opportunity and and how we actually get machine
- 8:25learning which has proven too. Sure that he can solve a lot of
- 8:28awesome problems section. Permeating in all of the
- 8:31interesting applications. We can think of involving
- 8:33computers today. Have a machine learning
- 8:34components, right? So give me this ring reaching
- 8:36the level of maturity that we have to be very principled about
- 8:39how we deal with it. How we deployed, how do we make
- 8:41machine learning models and integral parts of our
- 8:45applications, right? So I've been challenging
- 8:47applications and how to qualify with Dimitri started with the ml
- 8:50abscess that. So but Wednesday, the here's how
- 8:52I think about it, right? So machine learning models, they
- 8:56have code and they have Data, right?
- 8:58So in together you know date perform you know computations
- 9:01that honestly we didn't even know how to express with just
- 9:03code in the past. This is the magic of this is
- 9:06using a ton of data to guide. How a blob of code behaves to do
- 9:09amazing, things like computer vision.
- 9:11That's natural language processing and so on.
- 9:14Now when I say the no Lobster, is it should not exist.
- 9:17What I really mean is that a lot of what people call in a lobster
- 9:21today, and we should talk about it, because there's so many
- 9:23definitions of I'm a lapsed that can make it confusing.
- 9:27Exist. Just because we cannot treat
- 9:29machine learning models. As if you were, were any other
- 9:32piece of code. Once the mold is ready to be
- 9:34deployed. I fundamentally believe that for
- 9:37machine learning deployments reach a level of maturity that I
- 9:40think he needs to get were to continue permeating all
- 9:43applications. We need to be able to treat
- 9:44machine learning models, as if you were in the other piece of
- 9:47code, okay? Once you're at that point, why
- 9:49not call it that valves? Like if you do it right and you
- 9:52make a machine learning model, once it's ready for deployment
- 9:55like an integral part of applications.
- 9:57And Is devops. I think we're in a good place.
- 9:59So that's that's what I really mean.
- 10:00All that said the process of getting from a problem you want
- 10:05to solve collecting the data and producing machine learning
- 10:07model. That is actually ready to be
- 10:10deployed. That needs the flow that special
- 10:13we can call that analog. So that would be okay with me.
- 10:16I just don't want to confuse the model creation Parts with once
- 10:20you deploy them all this partying application with MLS.
- 10:23Does that make sense now our do that?
- 10:26Yeah yeah, yeah. Breathing easier.
- 10:28Now the meters are you reading easier now, having he's
- 10:31unfrozen, right? So now he's okay.
- 10:33That's right. Yeah, he unfroze.
- 10:39Yeah. It sounds like what you're
- 10:43saying here is that it's more about like the semantics.
- 10:45It's kind of like semantics argument.
- 10:47Like there's still the devops, which is a devops piece but, but
- 10:52but fundamentally there's this additional component.
- 10:55Maybe, maybe we're conflating the term ml.
- 10:57Ops to Encompass more than it really should be.
- 11:00Should be subsuming. Namely, some of this more, like
- 11:02operationalization of just resources and things like that,
- 11:06which is more of a traditional software, engineering problem.
- 11:09Yeah, and also operation station, but also integration
- 11:12with the application, right? So remember that.
- 11:15We have to be careful. Not to think that the machine
- 11:17learning model is entire application, right?
- 11:19So of course, Machinery Engineers, they are at a
- 11:22premium. They're doing awesome.
- 11:23Things is what we cannot forget that what makes machine learning
- 11:26model, amazing? Is when it's embedded in
- 11:28application that people use and pay money for, and creating the
- 11:32businesses around it as well on machine.
- 11:34Learning model, does not exist in isolation.
- 11:36There's a bunch of stuff around it.
- 11:37That makes it useful enriches people's hands, right?
- 11:39So, and I think that's the parks.
- 11:41That is a huge opportunity today.
- 11:43Because the way I think about in part of this is obvious is that
- 11:47there's all this wonderful machine learning Innovation to
- 11:49happen, like it's just incredible to see every day.
- 11:51We see a new machine learning model, that does amazing things,
- 11:53right? So but then you have this
- 11:55application to the other hand. If people actually use this It's
- 11:57a huge gap between those. And then this Gap involves a lot
- 12:01of manual, engineering, involves a lot of work to actually put
- 12:04them all into production, right? So, and we should improve both
- 12:08sides, of course, we should continue making the process of
- 12:10creating machine learning models easier.
- 12:12So, we continue to accelerate Innovation there and create sort
- 12:16of like this pool of awesome things that you can put into
- 12:18applications. But also you need to work on
- 12:20putting a very systematic process to turning that into
- 12:22application. So you know, it actually reaches
- 12:25a broad audience, right? So And if you don't mind like I
- 12:28love to go a bit deeper on the deployment side, you know?
- 12:31So I in terms of my background like I can talk for longer than
- 12:35you probably want me to about mother deployment.
- 12:38We can, we can talk a lot about the machine learnt core machine
- 12:41learning side as well because they have some passions there,
- 12:43we can discuss. But let's let's talk a bit about
- 12:45the deployment side. So, you know, it's it's
- 12:48interesting to go through the exercise of thinking about what,
- 12:51why are we not treating machine learning models as if you were
- 12:54any other piece of code today? First is, it's highly dependent
- 12:58on the hardware, right? So you know, naturally, you
- 13:02know, machine learning models, fundamentally become high
- 13:05performance, linear, algebra code that links to run well and
- 13:08that involves using the hardware to the maximum extent possible,
- 13:12right? So that the way it's being done
- 13:14so far, basically, boils down to very talented, programmers
- 13:18writing, low-level code, to make very tight Loops using, you
- 13:22know, specific data types, and uses Specific Instructions in
- 13:25processors, or in GP. They're in accelerators to keep
- 13:28it has a Sheen that, you know, added Peak as or as as high as
- 13:32possible, then he goes. A lot of Arts is encode, right?
- 13:34So and that typically, if needs to evolve with the model, right?
- 13:40So as new models, do new things, there's new operators that have
- 13:43to go and generate new very hard, independent code.
- 13:45So, to pop pop, what does this mean from?
- 13:49Let's almost like from an industry perspective, we saw
- 13:52really tight coupling between the hardware and the software
- 13:55stack on top of it. So our Probably, you know,
- 13:57Nvidia is where it is today in machine learning, because they
- 14:01did a fantastic job with Cuda Cuda made it a lot easier for
- 14:04folks to go and program. A parallel machine that a GPU
- 14:08is, you know, parallel computers have been notoriously hard to
- 14:10program, right? So this is a decades-old problem
- 14:13in Academia in a decades-old opportunity in Industry to,
- 14:17right. So starting from the
- 14:18supercomputing days all the way to machine learning today,
- 14:21right? So and this tight coupling is so
- 14:24is so strong that I like to make an analogy.
- 14:26It looks like the Mainframe industry in the 70s and 80s.
- 14:31Like, if you bought IBM software, if you wanted IBM
- 14:33software, you had to buy IBM hardware.
- 14:35And if you want an IBM Hardware, you had to buy it be insulted
- 14:39because it's the only thing that was available for that harder,
- 14:41right? So unfortunate to a large extent
- 14:43that exists in in machine learning today, right?
- 14:47So, every harder vendor has its own set of system.
- 14:49Software for machine learning, they have to maintain and I quit
- 14:53a lot of fragmentation. The industry created a major
- 14:55complexity in deploy, Machine learning models, right?
- 14:58So once you put it in production to, that was going to put them
- 15:01all into production today. You have to go and figure out
- 15:04what is the target that's going to run, which libraries are
- 15:06going to use? Or maybe if there's a compiler
- 15:08available, you're going to go and use that compiled and try
- 15:10it. Is it run?
- 15:11Faster? Does it work?
- 15:12You're going to validate it. And all of this creates the this
- 15:16coupling that once you create a version for machine, learning
- 15:19model to be Department specific heart attack, you got to stick
- 15:21with it or you're going to do the work to support all of the
- 15:24other hundred targets that you need to support, right?
- 15:26So, Um, and so this is so manual today that, you know, I think it
- 15:33stiffens how people Department really models either they go
- 15:35suboptimal, you just go in the clouds, pick any sense and you
- 15:39scale. Whatever instance you got there
- 15:41or you live with poor performance on the edge or
- 15:44sometimes you don't even deploy them all to the edge because you
- 15:46don't reach the level performance that you need to
- 15:48deploy that model, right? So and he said say that's a lot
- 15:52of it boils down to part of dependence.
- 15:54That, you know, we will talk about how we, how we make the
- 15:56Much more portable and avoid the need for for human tuning by
- 16:02taking a fundamentally, a compilation approach to machine
- 16:04learning, as opposed to a translation Library, pin the
- 16:07protract. So any Senator going to like you
- 16:10don't aboard, the audience going deeper and deeper than this, but
- 16:12it's a like Hardware dependency machine learning, is something
- 16:15that is, I think this is is a serious problem that we need to
- 16:19solve. And once you decouple model from
- 16:21harder thing, you're going to create opportunities on both
- 16:23sides. Right?
- 16:24So. Yeah and the end.
- 16:26There's only really What you're saying and fundamentally?
- 16:28I mean, if I could paint like really broad Strokes here,
- 16:31talking about just maybe different like we're getting new
- 16:34abstraction layers around some of these Concepts, right, this
- 16:36interface between the hardware in the software.
- 16:38And yeah, I mean, I remember back in college, you know,
- 16:42taking parallel, programming classes going through the
- 16:44exercise of, you know, Cindy kind of like programming models
- 16:47doing stuff like actually having to code up, Cuda kernels.
- 16:50And I think a lot of people that enter the field today don't
- 16:53recognize how far we come even at this point.
- 16:56Compared to those earlier abstraction or the others
- 16:59earlier. Kind of Primitives that we had
- 17:00to deal with to do anything of sensible from a programming
- 17:03standpoint parallel, programming standpoint?
- 17:05Yes. So well said me like I?
- 17:07Yeah, thank you for acknowledging that we made a ton
- 17:09of progress, but even to this day like you know, folks pretty
- 17:12much the only mother still think about you know what we're what
- 17:15hard are you running? You know you think about
- 17:17performance early on when the model creation side imagine a
- 17:20world where you this abstraction Evolution goes even further in
- 17:24you when you create a machine learning model, all you think
- 17:26about This is what is the best work that I can do with the data
- 17:29that I have to create the very best model and not think about
- 17:32the heart of infrastructure and lets the system do that for you.
- 17:36Right? So yeah you know, it's a think
- 17:39it's interesting that you know, a lot of Machinery Engineers.
- 17:42You know when you see resumes they say they talk about the
- 17:44framework, there was nothing else to talk about so we can
- 17:46write Cuda code and cried suppose.
- 17:48First goes like hmmm. No, I wish that all those brain
- 17:50cells went to know all the cognitive Cycles which to
- 17:54creating a better model and not having to think about You should
- 17:57even think about what the heart is running.
- 17:59One should even think about Cooter C++.
- 18:00It doesn't make any sense, right?
- 18:02So I think it's not even even last Cindy and threading, what
- 18:06kind of? But people have to do that
- 18:07today, right? So, right, right.
- 18:09I mean, yeah, some some smart people did a lot of the legwork
- 18:12to make it easier for the next generation and maybe that's, I
- 18:15mean this, I think ties really nicely into what your maybe
- 18:17outgoing mail and even the efforts of your project in the
- 18:20company and is actually pretty nice segue.
- 18:23Because in a sense, one of the things that that The optimal
- 18:27seems like it was born out of TVM, right?
- 18:29And I actually remember using TVM in some of my own work back
- 18:33in the day. Great, nice Library.
- 18:35Yeah, no, no, I'm just like, it's really nice library, and
- 18:38I'd love to just maybe dive a little bit into talking about
- 18:41the motivations behind that effort, and how and then
- 18:44eventually we can get into talking about how that evolved
- 18:45into which, what October was probably start for a few of us
- 18:50out there, just like, can you explain what?
- 18:52TVM is? Yeah, absolutely.
- 18:54Yes. So today, yeah, so TPMS. Since
- 18:56for tensor virtual machine, right?
- 18:59So it is a VM, a virtual machine analogy because you have a clean
- 19:02interface over, you know, that abstracts away Hardware details,
- 19:06and you can map machine learning models into that interface and
- 19:09then whatever comes underneath. It should be should not be a
- 19:13concern for folks creating models, right?
- 19:15So, I noticed TVM started out of an effort, probably maybe six to
- 19:21eight years ago. Maybe more in the question that
- 19:23we are asking then was the following.
- 19:25We have lots of machine learning models, we have The part of
- 19:27targets there is this, you know, how to depend a software stack,
- 19:31you think about how would we think about intermediate
- 19:33representation, that you can translate models in, to do a
- 19:36bunch of optimizations to make those models run well on
- 19:39whatever how to Target you have in the general way.
- 19:41Such that you can extend to new harder targets and then
- 19:44progressively lower decks to custom codes for a given model
- 19:48on a given Hardware. So this is why you wouldn't call
- 19:51it. A library approaches video
- 19:52compilation approach like we early on as in the first one,
- 19:55says the question like can we Turn machine learning model,
- 19:57execution from an interpreted process, which is interpreted
- 20:01modern called library to modeling and fresh, binary code
- 20:06out for that model on the harder that you chose.
- 20:08So why am I emphasizing these? I promise.
- 20:11It's not to board the audience's that once you go from, you know,
- 20:14Library brace interpretive approach to a fresh cold
- 20:17generation, but you can do a lot of things that are very
- 20:19powerful, right? You can do high-level graph
- 20:22optimizations of your model like you can fuse operators, say a
- 20:26The pie with the convolution you can do them together so you get
- 20:30you know, locality benefits you can do a lot of choice of like
- 20:34how should you order the computation in a way that is
- 20:37going to better match the hardware capabilities.
- 20:39It in, as you go down. How do you automatically choose
- 20:42specific harder? Instructions that are available
- 20:44on the Honda processor or in the Jeep you that you're running
- 20:47there? Might not be available in
- 20:48others, right? So if you think about tense
- 20:51record today's is are you know essentially hard educated her
- 20:54units they can do Matrix multiply for example.
- 20:56Oh, but to use that, you have to set up your code, just right.
- 20:59But now what if you were automatic, that's the question
- 21:01that we are asking. So that's what we do, we divvy
- 21:03em. So we took a compiled, a
- 21:06compilation based approach and couple that with some special
- 21:09sauce that at that time was okay.
- 21:11So, when you're compiling machine learning model to given
- 21:14harder Target, that's literally billions of ways in which you
- 21:16can compile a given model on a given harder Target.
- 21:20The question is, how do you pick the very best option, okay?
- 21:23So without without trying them all because to try You know, a
- 21:27billion combinations of code choices compilation of
- 21:30measurement and trying you talking about centuries of
- 21:32computer more like just impractical.
- 21:35That's when we use machine learning for machine, learning
- 21:37code generation and to pick in a using predictive way, how should
- 21:41you make these choices compile your code.
- 21:43So I know this is a long long intro but I wanted to emphasize
- 21:48what makes the game special then?
- 21:50And I think was a huge driver of extraction because we not only
- 21:54made it very effective in generating code but also making
- 21:56It easy to extend to other Frameworks is to extend to other
- 21:59Hardware to other Hardware targets.
- 22:01We fast forward to, you know, three years at 34 years after
- 22:05creation. You know, we're started October
- 22:08Mao to game was about to become an Apache software Foundation
- 22:11project had been using production for a while, you
- 22:14know, at Big hyper scalars and harder than to start adopting it
- 22:18because it supported all the major Frameworks and you made it
- 22:21easy to extend to Me Harder targets and fast-forward to
- 22:23today. Now, to p.m. supports pretty
- 22:25much all the major heart attack. It's the folks care about and it
- 22:29supports all the major Frameworks and given the
- 22:32landscape of machine learning compilers and system software in
- 22:36general TV and build Bridges to all of the other pieces.
- 22:39And we really more bridges to other compilers for machine
- 22:42learning as well. Such that we offer.
- 22:44One Stop Shop for folks to come in, and get your models to run
- 22:47really well in hundred targets. So, Is that okay intro.
- 22:51You have to make sense? Yeah, no.
- 22:53I think, I think it's awesome. I mean, if I could even just
- 22:56like, you know, just say it even in 11, just maybe pause here to
- 23:00say that. I think that there's so many
- 23:02details behind what you just said.
- 23:04But for people, that that are maybe newcomers to like data
- 23:08science machine learning. I think the, the key point is
- 23:12that when you do something as simple as, like, Matt mole or,
- 23:15you know, convert 2D in your tents, your your pie torch code
- 23:18and your your tensor tensorflow. I heard that there's a lot of
- 23:21optimizations that have to happen in the background to make
- 23:24this run efficiently. So you're not there waiting
- 23:27forever for something actually run to completion and that's I
- 23:30mean that's really one of the core pieces.
- 23:31I think what you're discussing here is like all that extra
- 23:34level of optimization needs to happen to make something
- 23:36efficient to make it tractable. Right?
- 23:38From a computation standpoint, which is like the really is a
- 23:41lot of detail here that people are able to disregard because of
- 23:45things like TVM, which is really astounding, it's right?
- 23:48And until you turned your point. Thank you.
- 23:49Yeah. Yeah.
- 23:50So very well said is about, you know, raising the level of
- 23:52abstractions such that you don't have to worry about performance
- 23:54early on, right? So you can go and use these Matt
- 23:57Moore convolutions and not worry about, how is it going to run
- 24:00fast. And to be clear here, running
- 24:04fast is not a nice to have in machine learning.
- 24:06You know, making the most of the heart is an enabler.
- 24:08Otherwise it's just, you know, the amount of computation
- 24:10involved in in doing one, inference is just incredible
- 24:14compared to anything else of using computers rights though.
- 24:17So I'd love to go even a little bit.
- 24:20Maybe to give more context here. Where does something like a TV?
- 24:23Em sit in the ecosystem of other efforts have been made to
- 24:27provide these harder based compiler optimizations.
- 24:30When I think of something like a tensor RT or Onyx runtime,
- 24:33right? What you're trying to, maybe,
- 24:35maybe tackle someone with similar problems or with maybe
- 24:38different approaches. Where does it kind of sit in
- 24:39that whole ecosystem? Yeah, great great question and
- 24:43TDM integrates with unexplained time and destroyed.
- 24:45See the way to think about this is that so Onyx when time is
- 24:50Made. It was made to be generally, no
- 24:52support a broad set of models and also some sort of hard has,
- 24:55it does take, you know, primarily a library based
- 24:58approach by having a very rich library of basic operators that
- 25:01are pure optimized for harder targets that gives you some
- 25:03portability there. But the real question here is,
- 25:06is it can you, can you do better by generating fresh code for
- 25:11your whole model or parts of your model on the harder that
- 25:14you chose at that? Give at a specific time.
- 25:16The way we integrate with Onyx runtime is creating we call an
- 25:19execution. Vidor where the mother comes
- 25:21into an excellent time. And when profitable when makes
- 25:24sense it generates fresh codes, okay?
- 25:27So intense for Artie. But what it is is invidious
- 25:30answer to machine, learning compilation tool to a large
- 25:33extent and it's great of course because Nvidia created 100, they
- 25:37understand the harder properties, right?
- 25:39So in they have a long history of writing high performance code
- 25:42for their own hardware and that means they can do a fantastic
- 25:44job. But to a large extent has 40 is
- 25:47also specialized to the classes of models that Nvidia cares, you
- 25:52know, cares about of course because of its customers, right?
- 25:54So, where does CVM come in? And we do have, you know,
- 25:58collaboration with this. Alrighty folks in showing that
- 26:02it's the best of all worlds approach.
- 26:04Like, so the way we, it, we do not wear not dogmatic.
- 26:07By the way, I want to make it very clear that, you know, we
- 26:09created TVM, we invest a lot of resources interviewing, but it's
- 26:12not that we see the world, I should be only 2 GM, know our
- 26:15Here is to make models, run really fast on the how difficult
- 26:18is because it's Saves the World, you know, because it reduces the
- 26:22energy consumption of computers and makes people's life easier,
- 26:24right? So the reason I'm saying this is
- 26:26because we think a complementary approach.
- 26:28So if you take him although and you wanna and you have ten ten,
- 26:33it happens to be in a video Hardware.
- 26:34You what we do is we can show that okay.
- 26:37Parts of her mother should go to 10:30 and parts of all the could
- 26:39go through TV M and then you pick the vast of each and then
- 26:41combining producer, better model.
- 26:43Does that make sense? So, and I would say That in
- 26:46cases, that UVM tends to offer an advantage, or emerging models
- 26:50or things in the long tail that having received as much
- 26:53attention because those haven't been optimized by hand as much,
- 26:55right? So, this is why I would say,
- 26:57they're very complimentary and, but an offer parallel paths to
- 27:01define the model. So, to answer your question, me
- 27:03how I know it was with might have been a long answer but no,
- 27:07no, absolutely. I think that, that makes a lot
- 27:09of sense. So this I think also fits nicely
- 27:12into, you know. So TVM was the Genesis and in,
- 27:15he sounds like TDM. Still forms.
- 27:16The core of a lot of October ml, but optimal maybe he's taking
- 27:19this one step further where we going with with that.
- 27:22Yeah. Where you guys going with that?
- 27:23Great. Thank you for asking.
- 27:25So you know what would be a doctor Mao is machine learning
- 27:28deployment platform, right? So what we want their the
- 27:31highest level back to the early conversation, we want to bring
- 27:34develops agility to machine learning deployments.
- 27:36What does that mean? It means offering hard during
- 27:39dependence. So you give your mother can
- 27:41report. You never have to think about.
- 27:43You don't even need to think about whether You're going to
- 27:46have to, you're going to use a library based approach a
- 27:48compilation based approach or if it's if it's nvda going to use
- 27:51could be Nan or 10:32 p.m. like we abstract all of that away
- 27:54such that you have the you know a flow that looks like modeling
- 27:58and Deployable portable high performance function code to run
- 28:02out that you can you can move around to different harder
- 28:05targets. So if you're going to deploy it
- 28:06in the cloud, you could deploy in a given GPU.
- 28:08But then if you want to scale it up and the instance is not
- 28:11available. You can go and run on a
- 28:12different GPU and still make the most out of it, right?
- 28:15All right. Well, now this is how to make
- 28:17the whole process of exploring how your model runs on different
- 28:21hardware and produce vulnerable versions for each every, you
- 28:24know, Target that you choose. We support all major clouds TCP
- 28:29as you're in AWS. We also support some Edge
- 28:33targets, though. Our primary primary Strike Zone
- 28:36today. You know, with customers is, is
- 28:38in cloud deployments. And then you can, if you can
- 28:41evaluate, you know how different versions of your model during
- 28:44deployment by actually. No, give you the ability to
- 28:47create multiple versions of your modern compare, how they do
- 28:48respect each other price performance trade-offs, you
- 28:51know, things like say that you what you want is a model to run
- 28:56difference be at 100 milliseconds or last you don't
- 28:59care if it's if you care if it's the more than 100 seconds but
- 29:02you don't care if it's you know 15 minutes X is just cause I
- 29:05kind of realize. Then after that what you care
- 29:07about space throughput per dollar for you to do that today,
- 29:10you'd have to go do manual work in a bunch of differences,
- 29:13figure out which one you should do it for.
- 29:15So, Ultimate all of that introduces, the ability to
- 29:18choose that. So it abstracts away.
- 29:20All the trade-offs, are you think about, you know, batching
- 29:23and concurrency and threading is going like it just tries a bunch
- 29:25of combinations are as well and then he puts it in a package to
- 29:28can go and deploy it in the cloud or locally via python will
- 29:32or daughter. So library in a bunch of
- 29:34different packaging. So when I guess, you know,
- 29:37stepping back and seeing one line is modeling and Deployable
- 29:40code out and then everything you got in between tears of
- 29:42benchmarking and, and, you know, evaluating Multifamily
- 29:46properties and so on and ultimately the part that
- 29:48honestly today's kind of done by hand in a lot of what people
- 29:51call them a lava flows, right? So a lot of the just a lot of
- 29:55folks in model deployment and fully aware of that indeed
- 29:58there's a lot of great stuff being done there so the part of
- 30:00you wanted to do presume that we have with with our history and
- 30:04our technology. Our technology here is to cover
- 30:07the part that is assumed to be done by a very talented
- 30:11engineer, which is producing the thing that you're going to
- 30:13deploy. And that's the thing that you
- 30:14want to talk to mate, right soul.
- 30:15Um, in the process of doing that we have, since you guys like
- 30:18what is the GM's Road here TPMS is an important part, which is
- 30:22not the only part of the platform, right?
- 30:23So the platform here can use tense variety and unexplained
- 30:27time and you know part torches native Native stack tensorflow,
- 30:31native stack and we support all, you know, pretty much all the
- 30:34major framework for Frameworks for modern generation and so on.
- 30:39Does that, does that give you a general view, what it is?
- 30:41Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.
- 30:43And I think that I'd looks like, maybe go even one step further
- 30:46here by zeroing in on. So as you said, there's a lot of
- 30:50players in the deployment space and people have certainly
- 30:53recognize that it's it's a big problem area for a lot of
- 30:56Emily's and ml teams and data teams.
- 30:59And I'm curious you know, when you talk about one of the big
- 31:03value adds to something like an opto malware you you have your
- 31:06very deliberate because of your research history of TV.
- 31:09The one I used very deliberate about this Hardware software
- 31:11abstraction how you can optimize for different Hardware targets,
- 31:14and you're able to be super, super fine, grained about the
- 31:16level of control you given. Hey, I'm Uprising for this this
- 31:20Hardware Target. I'm I'm, you know, these latency
- 31:22concerns like this, throughput, maybe, you know, you talk about
- 31:24cost per dollar kinds of considerations.
- 31:27I wonder which of the kinds of groups that drive the most value
- 31:30from these that level of specificity in the
- 31:33considerations, right? Because there's also one can
- 31:35make that argument that there's this whole class of companies
- 31:38that don't even have. A single model production yet
- 31:40they're just trying to get something out the door, they
- 31:42don't care. If it's 50 milliseconds or 25
- 31:45milliseconds or like 300 milliseconds, they just need
- 31:48something that they can hit inference, you know, they can
- 31:50run inference and points with how do you, where does it sit in
- 31:53that? Yeah, kind of that, if that
- 31:55value chain. Yeah, I know, I love, I love
- 31:57that that question. So I would say that we offer,
- 32:01you know, harder Independence like we could performance right
- 32:03and Automation and really good performance, right?
- 32:06So in with these three value the property, Here, depending, on
- 32:11the end user, they get value in different ways, right?
- 32:13So for the high maturity users, what they care about is
- 32:17performance and hydro Independence, right?
- 32:19So because, you know, they're models will run faster.
- 32:22So they meet they save money running at scale in the cloud
- 32:25and they give you heart Independence.
- 32:27He gives them more ability to scale and automation reduces,
- 32:31you know, the time that they're expensive Engineers spend to get
- 32:34those models ready. So that's how they derive that,
- 32:36right? So, but now the product, as you
- 32:38see, you know, Probably you. If you've been following, we've
- 32:41been doing to the. We are, you know, going more and
- 32:44more towards broadening the set of users that would extract
- 32:47those see value in what we're doing, right?
- 32:48So in what we're doing in here is automation, you know,
- 32:51decreasing the complexity of getting your model ready for for
- 32:55deployment. How does it fit in folks that
- 32:57are early in the machine Learning Journey while?
- 32:59So for folks is still creating the model, figure out how much
- 33:01you learn is going to solve their problem.
- 33:03We don't cater to those users, right?
- 33:05So we cater to users that once they have model candidates are
- 33:07going to put into production. We're going To alleviate all of
- 33:11the complexities that typically involves handing off the model
- 33:15from a data scientist or machine engineer to a software engineer
- 33:18to go and figure out how to deploy.
- 33:20All right. So by shortening that time from,
- 33:23you know, weeks or months, two hours, think also closes the
- 33:26loop of English, like they can deploy it quick here, quicker.
- 33:29They can collect data and then figure out what is the next
- 33:31iteration of their model early on.
- 33:33Right? So anyways the direct answer to
- 33:35your question is for folks that are early in the journey and
- 33:37less mature. It's really Just about
- 33:39automation. They probably don't care as much
- 33:41about about performance stand. Unless the model doesn't run
- 33:45fast enough to be even be viable, then they're going to
- 33:47care about performance, right? So but I would say that what
- 33:52they what they care about disability to do to deploy it in
- 33:55a way that costs less and takes less time.
- 33:57So these are bigger players than like these didn't mature players
- 34:00in the ecosystem that maybe companies that have bigger
- 34:03resources that are able to, you know, that have already invested
- 34:06the time and the effort to build out machine gunner Pipelines.
- 34:09Now we're like hey we want to run this on this Hardware device
- 34:13or the mobile this Edge Edge Edge device.
- 34:16That's really where it seems like a lot of the values being
- 34:18derived. This is Skyler.
- 34:20I lead machine learning and health rhythms if you want to
- 34:22stay on top of everything happening in ml.
- 34:24Ops subscribe to this podcast right now is again the high
- 34:28maturity folks who see the value immediately because of performs
- 34:31a hard Independence in the lower maturity, you know, users of
- 34:36machine learning will see value more in the automation right
- 34:39there. Oh, of of just we have if you
- 34:42have a chance to take, take a look at our CLI demo that we
- 34:45have out there. You can see without writing a
- 34:47line of code, you can get your model in an endpoint deployed
- 34:50and then iterate on it and starting your laptop in the move
- 34:52it to the cloud without changing your code at all.
- 34:54So in that case, you know, anything about performance, all
- 34:57you care about is that, hey, you've done all this automation
- 34:59of migrating your code, from a local version to the cloud
- 35:02version or two different verses in the cloud.
- 35:04And I want I want to think to your point there.
- 35:06Oh, sorry. Yeah.
- 35:07On the, on the high mature users.
- 35:08One thing that's That it is important to highlight here is
- 35:11that we spent a lot of efforts in making very easy to integrate
- 35:16with existing devops flows, right?
- 35:19So that means living with, you can have a model in a
- 35:21repository, you can call in your CI CD flow.
- 35:24We have an API that you can send them, although download the
- 35:28container back and deploy it in a way that does not disrupt
- 35:31existing flows. Because if we did, that is just
- 35:34becomes a hard sell for the high maturity users to just go and
- 35:38and and and have to change how they do things just because they
- 35:41want to use our technology, right?
- 35:43So we like to think that once they do try it and they see the
- 35:46performance of the portability going to go and want to change
- 35:49their their flows. But we are working hard to make
- 35:53the API, be very easy to integrate to it.
- 35:55So so do you mainly talked with s.res and people that are doing
- 36:00devops or are you talking more with machine learning Engineers?
- 36:04Yeah so it's a it's a good question.
- 36:06We talked to to both and again, depends on the level Of
- 36:09maturity, right? So the high maturity, the high
- 36:13maturity companies deploying and high maturity amount users,
- 36:16rights of tend to have either sometimes dedicated seeing to a
- 36:20male deployment. So those were the things we
- 36:22talked to is some others that have.
- 36:23It's just part of the higher-end, you know, more
- 36:26machine, learning focused, s res but you know, for the lower
- 36:31maturity ones, it seems more the folks that are doing machine
- 36:34learning engineering and they have their hands in deployment.
- 36:37So then we talked to those in maturity Customers.
- 36:39So so you've got one book behind you which is start with why I
- 36:45have to ask why Bill dr. Mel well you made some things
- 36:51that were interesting to me before about if we have this
- 36:54optimized, if we can make things go faster, it's better for the
- 36:57environment. It's just better for people
- 36:58because they're not sitting around waiting for whatever
- 37:01their Hardware to do the hard work.
- 37:04But I'm wondering about your personal journey into In this
- 37:10product yeah I know. Great question.
- 37:13I'm glad you noticed that I promise was not on purpose, you
- 37:15know. So we do we did send this book
- 37:17to everyone in the company by the way.
- 37:19So I really love that book credits.
- 37:21Our CMO David miss, you know, who also loves his book is like,
- 37:24you know, everyone is completed read this book.
- 37:26So our, our vision here is to make AI sustainable and
- 37:30accessible. And I Want to Break these two
- 37:33words, to say to an accessible down, just to explain the
- 37:35originally. So sustainable.
- 37:37As in, you know, Faster, more energy, efficient using last
- 37:40natural resources, but also sustainable in terms of human
- 37:43effort, right? So using natural resources, just
- 37:45the right thing to do. As I said, if you look at, as I
- 37:48mentioned before, if you look at the amount of Computer Resources
- 37:51going to machine learning is just is.
- 37:52The fastest-growing category of computing have like in the
- 37:55desert very meaningful fraction of Cycles in the cloud and eh
- 37:59that is running very tight Loops Computing linear algebra.
- 38:03We got to make them really, really fast, right?
- 38:05And use less energy because it's only going to grow given where
- 38:08machine learning is going. So make more signal from their
- 38:10point of view and then making more sensible from a, from a
- 38:13human effort, point of view just accelerates Innovation, right?
- 38:16So then you want to have human human brains were too precious.
- 38:19Things to focus about the problems they want to solve and
- 38:21lies about, you know, how they can actually going to put in
- 38:24production. And then on the accessible side,
- 38:27remember, making machine learning sustainable and making.
- 38:30It is the same one accessible to do.
- 38:32Good, right? So, on the accessible site
- 38:34accessible to as many people as possible, that means that you
- 38:37have just more people creating Nations that are compelling and
- 38:41solve problems and relevant to the world.
- 38:43And then excessive was inaccessible as many devices as
- 38:45possible because, you know, by making enabling folks to run a I
- 38:50wear it should be run, can enable new applications and more
- 38:56Innovation as well. So, you know, from it'll
- 38:59believer that, you know, a, I can create very, very compelling
- 39:04applications that create new Industries.
- 39:07But also now on the personal, I have a passion for biology, and
- 39:11I've always had a passion for biology.
- 39:13Octo ml octave here comes from octopus and amazing organisms.
- 39:17That rewrite, their RNA is a lot of interesting parallels with
- 39:19just in time, code generation, and so on.
- 39:22And I've done a bunch of research in the past and
- 39:23molecular biology and Engineering molecular biology
- 39:25for computing purposes. And reason mentioning this, we
- 39:29seems like, it's not like crazy talk, right?
- 39:31Well, now, there is an issue. This is that fundamentally?
- 39:35I don't think that without a, i machine learning, you can make
- 39:38sense of Or engineer with Biology.
- 39:41And I feel that's just the next wave of human evolution is being
- 39:44able to manipulate biomolecules and engineer them and understand
- 39:48them to make life better to create new types of things that
- 39:52make life better, right? So.
- 39:54And it's so complex that it's beyond our ability to use first
- 39:57principles engineering. So we have to use AI machine
- 39:59learning, but the levels of performance that he needed a
- 40:04level of accessibility to run very, very confidential.
- 40:08Any models depends on. You can infrastructure, very
- 40:11efficient and sustainable. So now you go deep into how I
- 40:14think of it like by creating this platform and maybe more
- 40:16people to go and build is very sophisticated models and run
- 40:19them in a viable way. We're going to enable folks are
- 40:23going to engineer biology and they send biology much better.
- 40:25So that's so cool to think about it.
- 40:28And you see the Netflix documentary about the octopus
- 40:33ice yet? My teacher octopus.
- 40:35Yeah. Absolutely.
- 40:35It's a great know if you It's super anxious.
- 40:39You should you should if you are the audience is interested in
- 40:42that. So look at how octopus rewrites
- 40:46the fundament. That one of the fundamental
- 40:48reasons why they have such complex cognitive processes is
- 40:52because they be right, there are n a like this L don't normally
- 40:57you know this is wrong with that is its DNA to RNA to proteins,
- 41:01right? Messenger, native proteins.
- 41:03So most of the time you you change the proteins that you
- 41:07that you express which Whatever happens in your in your
- 41:11metabolism, right by just regulatory process that block
- 41:15and unblock parts of your DNA. But in an octopus's, what they
- 41:18do to actually get it from DNA to RNA to go and rewrites.
- 41:21The RNA molecule itself before it gets translated to proteins,
- 41:25which is very, very unique. It's very similar to, you know,
- 41:29a just-in-time compiler, that is its run is generating code that
- 41:32then you're going to go and run, right?
- 41:33So let's click very geeky aside here.
- 41:37So, so, So here's the killer question.
- 41:42Do you eat octopus? Oh boy.
- 41:46You know, I used to eat a lot more octopus.
- 41:48Now, every time I consider it, I think about how intelligent they
- 41:52are and it's hard. It's getting harder and harder.
- 41:54Do you know, especially know.
- 42:14They are. I must admit, it's, it's hard
- 42:18for me to opted to eat octopus today even though I'm not
- 42:20vegetarian, you know, so yeah, I can imagine.
- 42:23But anyway, we must comment and then I wanted to ask which is
- 42:31why I really appreciate the fact that you're calling out.
- 42:34This idea of making things more sustainable with machine
- 42:37learning because I feel like it always gets overlooked when you
- 42:40have like the new large language model that comes out via.
- 42:44Amount of resources that in took to train that and that it took
- 42:49to actually like create that, nobody talks about the effect on
- 42:54the environment of that. Yeah, that's right.
- 42:57You know, I'm glad you brought that up because there's a lot to
- 43:00talk about there. You can probably have a whole
- 43:01episode on this, you know, a whole session on that.
- 43:03But I want to comment on a few things.
- 43:06First time, it's important to realize that a lot of the people
- 43:09talk about today is the resources goes to training
- 43:12models, right? So, but for every very For
- 43:15models that he trained. There is successful, you're
- 43:17going to do a lot of inference that you do more ties, the cost
- 43:19of training to a very large. That means that it's okay to
- 43:22pay, you know, of signal amount of computation early on.
- 43:25If you can amortize it over, you know, a large number of
- 43:28instances. But if it's also has to be
- 43:29cheap, remember because any dominates the dominates where
- 43:33the Cycles go, right? So, and for any popular model
- 43:36does useful things, guess what you're going to do?
- 43:38Inference trillions of time. So you got to think about that.
- 43:40So people don't think about this in general.
- 43:43The second thing is, I hope I'm not going to sound like an
- 43:46activist here, but I think that a little, it's important to make
- 43:50these huge computational jobs to train models to be a success as
- 43:55accessible customer as many people as possible in all be
- 43:58behind, you know, huge pay walls, right?
- 44:00So, so here's what I end when you turn a language model.
- 44:04So here's here's a quick thought experiment, right?
- 44:06So, if you train a language model for English, right?
- 44:10So, and everyone who speaks English would benefit from this
- 44:14but then, You know everyone speaks English, also kind of on
- 44:16the English language so we shouldn't be good if it one who
- 44:18speaks English could use this model without having to pay for
- 44:21it, right? So this why I'm glad that people
- 44:23are more and more during this open and free language models.
- 44:27But it's that's only the beginning because now for you to
- 44:30be able to make use of these models computation has to be
- 44:32cheap enough, right? So and that's where I think
- 44:36making it very, very officious, not just about reducing the cost
- 44:39in beautiful in the first place, but also using the cost of
- 44:41people, to even use it, right? So, And it's great to see all
- 44:46the progress in, you know, in foundational models, where you
- 44:50can train a large model and then use it and specialized for
- 44:53different use cases and great to see both, you know, commercial
- 44:56and open source approaches to that.
- 44:58So I just want to go back to something that we talked about
- 45:01previously, which I'm really glad.
- 45:03We actually we touched on, which was your octopus.
- 45:06You have these this, these dualities on the one hand,
- 45:08you're like a hardware software compilation ml Guru, on the
- 45:11other hand, you have this very interesting.
- 45:14Of research interest in things like biology and molecular
- 45:18biology. And I mean, this has, it seems
- 45:20like that's very different ramifications, right?
- 45:22I mean, when I spent some time, looking into what that meant in
- 45:25the context of your research, it was Concepts around using DNA as
- 45:29a form of storage and kind of the high information density of
- 45:32fundamentally, you know, biological mechanisms, right?
- 45:36And and things like that. So, I'm curious.
- 45:38How do you tell me more how you bridge that Gap from something,
- 45:41which is more Hardware software, you know, ultramel which Is
- 45:44clearly more just focused on these types of concerns and how
- 45:48that eventually will evolve or can tie into what may be the a
- 45:52longer term goal is around using biology and interesting ways for
- 45:55computation and things like that.
- 45:58Oh yeah, no, even got the goose bumps.
- 45:59His thanks for asking that question.
- 46:00So I, well, like if I, if I zoom out the way I see, it is just
- 46:04about time scales, right? So, if ignoring ignoring Oxford
- 46:09mail and TVM, and even the specific use of DNA data storage
- 46:12as in a research on that, Even I can talk about competing as
- 46:16well, but what I'm interested in fundamental is, how do we build
- 46:20better Computing machines, you know, that our mortgage
- 46:23energy-efficient that enables you to, you know, really reach
- 46:26the next level of things that you can do with machines, to
- 46:29make, you know, human life better and imprudent.
- 46:31Let's say that the next wave of, of human evolution even right?
- 46:36Because humans design machines and make you my life's better,
- 46:38the least, but, so how do you make computers better?
- 46:41Well, as a computer architect, you have to look at you know,
- 46:44History of silicon based Electronics that's about to
- 46:47reach its limits. So, you have to think about
- 46:49Alternatives, and there's many Alternatives forward, including
- 46:52different types of electronics, like 35, materials,
- 46:55superconducting logic, Quantum, Computing and molecular based
- 46:59approaches, right? So, and, you know, the way I
- 47:03think about this is a computer architect is that, you know,
- 47:06we're going to have a mix of these things.
- 47:07I don't think Electronics is ever going to go away because
- 47:10it's hard, engineer bow but is we change limits fundamentally.
- 47:12So if you're going to go going to think about the next, Wave of
- 47:15evolution with Computing machines, you have to think
- 47:18about alternative compute methods in alternative data,
- 47:20storage methods and so on. So, and then now how do I reach
- 47:26these two things? Well, AI as I said before a, i
- 47:29machine, learnings is so fundamentally.
- 47:30How you think about Computing? The means you have to build good
- 47:33machines for it, right? So, and also, you can use that
- 47:36to to design the next wave of machine.
- 47:38So that's the bridge here, right?
- 47:40So, using computers that exist today, we create tools and
- 47:44Enables us to do research and explore new ways to do
- 47:47computation and DNA data storage is one example, right?
- 47:50So the motivation for DNA data storage early on was we did this
- 47:57really long absolutely awesome and research project between UW
- 48:02and Microsoft's are about 77 years ago or so asking the
- 48:06question of. Okay, so if you could look at
- 48:08the data grows any ability to store data, there's a growing
- 48:10Gap here and even in the vast assumptions of storage, Vice and
- 48:15ability to store data for all of the mainstream storage devices
- 48:18that gap, which to grow. So, you need to find, you know,
- 48:20a more first of all viable approach and second, the
- 48:24sustainable approach to it, we arrived at DNA because you know,
- 48:28it's fundamentally a couple few atoms per bit, right?
- 48:31So has been hardened by Nature. So it's durable it's dense and
- 48:36you know it's always going to be relevant because it's not going
- 48:39to go up so late, you're always going to care about reading DNA
- 48:42because it's relevant to to to life, right?
- 48:45So then when we started looking at this and know, how do you
- 48:49encode digital dating to DNA and writing to the molecules and
- 48:52reading it back? There's machine learning
- 48:53everywhere, like our encoder. How to map B.
- 48:57Two nucleotides is a learned based approach when you read DNA
- 49:01back, it's a giant, you know, really, really messy, you know,
- 49:06set of signals that have to go and decode back into basis and
- 49:08that back to this, that use a ton of machine learning.
- 49:11And all of that actually, is so big that the ability to run that
- 49:14He was helping our ability to the research that like, let's go
- 49:16to make it faster. So, in fact, we use TVM and with
- 49:20a lot of always done. We used to actually make those
- 49:23algorithms faster but the crazy loop there is that then what we
- 49:27did was, okay. So let's see if we can compute
- 49:30some machine learning Colonels directly in chemical form.
- 49:34So there is a paper that we put out last year, doing similarity
- 49:38search like you know, k-nearest neighbors like algorithms a
- 49:41molecular form and that's how we went full circle.
- 49:44I will be demonstrating how to do we actually day in biology,
- 49:47demonstrating the lab, including a bunch of images in DNA and
- 49:50showing how you can actually perform similarity, search
- 49:55indirectly in DNA forms. So, wow, that does that.
- 50:00That like crazy, you might have been a crazy, but it's all about
- 50:02time scales, right? So, making computers faster
- 50:04today and thinking about how we can make computers faster and
- 50:07better, you know, for the next wave.
- 50:09So, yeah, because I mean, there's all that sounds
- 50:13astounding. I would love to read this paper.
- 50:14Earth when the you just you just described the one question that
- 50:18I have though. I mean, just for all the good
- 50:22properties of the biological kind of substrate that you're
- 50:26using namely DNA. The one question I have is how,
- 50:30you know, the question of program program programmability
- 50:33right, which is something that you described even Electronics
- 50:36has the big advantage over other other sort of mechanisms for
- 50:38doing this. How does that, you know, how
- 50:41does that play into? Because when I imagined
- 50:43something, when I think of something I DNA, I think of like
- 50:45wet lab work, not as easy to program or manual labor kind of
- 50:48involved there. How do we bridge that that part
- 50:51of the problem machine learning and automation Yeah, it says I'm
- 50:58actually being being serious here at, you know, it's really
- 51:01hard to design any molecular systems, just with first
- 51:04principles, the way you design, you know, a mechanical system or
- 51:07even Electronics, or even a Computing system today.
- 51:10So, you have to use, which is not first principles, but, you
- 51:14know, explore what you need and then do a search process to
- 51:17arrive at a at a design that does what you need to do.
- 51:20So that fundamental is machine learning and then how you
- 51:24evaluate and Getting the lab is by using automation wet lab
- 51:29robotics to do experiments as well, because we just use humans
- 51:32to go to the white line. You just don't get the
- 51:34throughput that you needs to validate the designs, fast
- 51:37enough and turn the design cycle, right?
- 51:40So it's interesting is no different than, you know, even
- 51:44think about how Beauty machine learning models today.
- 51:46It's an iterative process that the faster turnaround the better
- 51:49and more information, it gives the more arrive at a, at a
- 51:53design. So there's another parallel
- 51:54they're creating machine learning models.
- 51:56Designing molecular systems today is very much, you know,
- 51:59process of search finding a good one, evaluating learning and in
- 52:02trying the next one, right? So I think that that's great.
- 52:06I mean, the need for the future where I could maybe know, 10 15
- 52:10years. So now, you guys are talking
- 52:11about the wet lab Ops, you know, how do you, how do you design
- 52:14better molecular systems and create?
- 52:17That's, that's, that's good. That's going to be the sister
- 52:22and you're going to say no, that doesn't exist.
- 52:26You would have come full circle, right?
- 52:27So we're gonna we're gonna play that clip.
- 52:30We're gonna, we're gonna actually reject the clip you
- 52:32like, remember when you said that and know that, that was
- 52:36fun. Yeah, so, anyway, well, this
- 52:39this is the us when we talked about a number of different
- 52:42topics here. They're all, I think comes back
- 52:43to ability to create better machine learning models and
- 52:47deploy them and make good use of them, right?
- 52:48So I want to make sure they're actually touching some of the
- 52:51key things that you all wanted to touch on.
- 52:52So you're so I don't distract you too much here.
- 52:54So yeah, but once One other maybe one question that I had
- 52:59because you know you are a professor also like you know in
- 53:02your background I'm curious. There's been certainly this this
- 53:06wave of Enlighten the last few years of people from Academia
- 53:10going into industry, either getting poached by big companies
- 53:13or starting companies. Can you talk a little bit about
- 53:16people for what that transition, you know, being a Serial
- 53:19entrepreneur, in your case from Academia into industry and you
- 53:23know, what are the skills that translate or how is it
- 53:25different? Friends and how to serve, think
- 53:27about that transition? Yeah, I know this.
- 53:31It's a pretty big question. So try, I'll offer some thoughts
- 53:34here, right, first. You know, there's, there's a lot
- 53:38to learn in beauty Beauty and business, right?
- 53:40So, you know, it's say that in Academia, your focus, the end,
- 53:44the say, the output of the work is a fantastic student is going
- 53:47to go and change the world but also papers are going to change
- 53:50how people think and this is very much about how do you
- 53:55create Wait, some surprise going to make coffee.
- 53:58That's going to motivate people to think differently, right?
- 54:00So, where as an industry, we would need to do to build a
- 54:03successful business, is build a product that people are going to
- 54:05pay money for and actually make a successful, right?
- 54:07So some of that is similar, which is about, okay?
- 54:11So you need to have some differentiation sometimes it's a
- 54:14piece of technology. Normally, coming from Academia,
- 54:16you have some different issues technology.
- 54:18Sometimes it's a set of people that think very differently, you
- 54:21know how to do things better than anyone else, right?
- 54:23Sometimes just a market opportunity that you Smoother,
- 54:26and you have to move as fast as you can, right?
- 54:28So that's what station for me from, you know, Academia to now,
- 54:33I miss them essentially, you know, my signal, I'm full-time.
- 54:36A talk to him about being full-time, in October for the
- 54:38past three years or so, still spend a little time in Academia
- 54:41because it's just part of how who I am and lots of a job.
- 54:45The, the things that, you know, I realized that I was very, very
- 54:50different is for you. To be a product organization.
- 54:53It's all about turning any If anything I would say most
- 54:57successful businesses today, even if they started from a
- 55:00technology Foundation eventually has to become product
- 55:03businesses, you know, because that's what people pay money
- 55:05for, right? So, and that each active process
- 55:08of finding design your product. And so on, I don't think it's
- 55:11similar to how we do research at all.
- 55:14Right? So and you have to come to, you
- 55:16have to contain understanding that.
- 55:17Hey, that's that's how that's how business is for.
- 55:20Can being very diligent about the project and not lat, you
- 55:23know, the shininess of Technology distract you from the
- 55:26fact that you doing a probably people should be money for is
- 55:28something that academics we do need to think hard about right?
- 55:31So but now to your earlier point of industry and I don't feel use
- 55:36the word poaching but I'd say no luring academics to do think
- 55:41it's a system for motivation for that, right?
- 55:43So All of them, just go to do research and industry.
- 55:45It's great to see, you know, companies that have built very
- 55:49successful businesses investing in future research, like,
- 55:51historically a lot of good stuff happened.
- 55:53That way, look at that, you know, you know, I'm Bell Labs
- 55:56deck deck, research labs, and IBM research, Microsoft
- 55:59research, you know. And now, Google like there's
- 56:02this is, this is naturally, it's great, right?
- 56:04So, I think that has to be done, right, right?
- 56:06Because if you get all of the, you know, the faculty that are
- 56:11very productive, doing research with your students into When
- 56:13they stop making students, then wait, so who are you going to
- 56:17hire with phds five ten years from now, right?
- 56:20So I think industry is now finding its balance and being a
- 56:22lot more flexible. In letting you know, people
- 56:25straddle like, no be part of not getting your part in industry
- 56:28and keep both going. I think it's coming from
- 56:31realization that. If you don't do this, you don't
- 56:32keep producing PhD students. You know, you're not going to
- 56:35have folks too high in the future that level of, you know,
- 56:40at that level of depth. So, that's, that's one point.
- 56:44But now, when, when industry hire faculty would say to do to
- 56:48do product often is because, you know, it's in the high-tech
- 56:51industry. Something that, you know, you
- 56:52beauty products around, you know, technologies that are
- 56:55pushing the state of the art. And that's what I particularly
- 56:57find. Exciting.
- 56:58I don't think definitely not the only way to build companies,
- 57:01obviously. But if it's what I think an
- 57:03appeal to a lot of folks that let's say, especially older
- 57:06faculty like me that have done have had their impact in writing
- 57:11papers and graduating students. I see building a company.
- 57:13Any out of research that starting Academia is the third
- 57:16form of impact, right? So, it is this some sorts no
- 57:19answer to your question but more thoughts, you know?
- 57:20So what do you say to the people that feel like Academia is out
- 57:26of touch when it comes to the work that they're doing and the
- 57:31impact that they could be having on industry?
- 57:34It's like almost like there's two parallel worlds there and
- 57:37I've heard some people say, well it's because Academia isn't
- 57:40exactly Earth Academia doesn't have.
- 57:43Of full range on all of the data that the industry has.
- 57:49So how can they be making all this impact?
- 57:53It's a great question. I think ties back a bit to tell
- 57:56me how asked as well, so the way I tie, this one question first,
- 58:01is that some faculty, get really attracted to music by the way
- 58:03because you have access to things for research that you
- 58:06wouldn't have in Academia often. It's the data set.
- 58:10This is through used to be through in life sciences now,
- 58:13it's being Through in computer science, like you have access to
- 58:16how the world do search, for example, you know, there's no
- 58:18way to have access that in Academia, right?
- 58:19So, now, actually being out of touch, I would say that I can
- 58:26see where the sentiment comes from, right?
- 58:27Because often Academia try to think about a world that might
- 58:29not be how the world is and solve problems in that imaginary
- 58:32world. You know in some cases actually
- 58:35leads to great ideas that this come back right?
- 58:38In some cases it doesn't what worries me is.
- 58:40When Academia This research In, you know, with intention of
- 58:46having packed in Industry when it's out of touch with industry.
- 58:50So that's the thing, that's the worrisome.
- 58:52I do not mind when you think about here is a let's say a more
- 58:56long Horizon Research. That's not directly motivated by
- 58:58an industry problem. With motivated by fundamental
- 59:00technology Trends. That's good.
- 59:02He might be seen as out of touch with industry today but
- 59:04eventually in this is going to catch up because it's a
- 59:06fundamental technology Trend, but now if you look at them make
- 59:08research and you try to motivate an industry and their motivation
- 59:11is wrong, that's bad, there's some research like that.
- 59:13And so those are the words that we should call out and then, you
- 59:16know, hopefully, you know, they'll come to grips with that,
- 59:18right? So, does that make sense?
- 59:20So I and it's interesting to see to I would say a lot of
- 59:27technology companies being more and more open about, you know,
- 59:31opening up data, sets opening up infrastructure for Academia to
- 59:34use. This is all ways of actually
- 59:37avoiding scenarios where Academia has to be speculate too
- 59:40much in what industries actually doing and all the Everything is
- 59:44starting to pay off, right? So yeah, yeah, so quick
- 59:49rapid-fire for you before we finish this I want to ask you
- 59:56what the last book you read was Whoa, but what was it again?
- 1:00:03Oh boys, in the boat. Oh yeah, dude, you know, dude,
- 1:00:07you know about this book right now so it's about the I think
- 1:00:121936 Olympics, the Rowing Club here and there is of Washington
- 1:00:17dead, end up, winning the Olympics, being completely
- 1:00:19Underdog, and then winning. So the stories like winning
- 1:00:22Against All Odds fun but the whole story about it.
- 1:00:25So please repeat of history. In this one of us, history is
- 1:00:28part of that too. You know, for example, there was
- 1:00:29a massive, Sandstorm that happening, the US had no idea,
- 1:00:33there was surprising, but the key thing there is About how you
- 1:00:37know for you to win that for successful crew, team to
- 1:00:41actually make it, you have to have these these Rovers like be
- 1:00:45completely in sync with their bodies and how they think.
- 1:00:47And so like, is it going? It's all about parallel
- 1:00:49Computing in the end, but we so you think, if you don't think
- 1:00:52this perfect synchrony in lockstep perfectly perfectly,
- 1:00:57you know, synchronized you don't you don't make it right?
- 1:01:00So in every single ounce of efficiency matters there, And I
- 1:01:06think there's an interesting parallel here with how
- 1:01:08eventually machine learning models running computers that
- 1:01:10everything seems like just perfectly right for it to be
- 1:01:13efficient, you know? And when I was reading about the
- 1:01:18level of that thing and refinement, that is team went to
- 1:01:23to reach maximum Peak efficiency in rowing.
- 1:01:26First of all, it's an incredible story of human achievement
- 1:01:29honestly but I also putting like a pure science hats like oh my
- 1:01:34God, held his buddies at that level.
- 1:01:35To see every single thing matter and they synchronize.
- 1:01:38The perfect degree made me think of how computers work to self.
- 1:01:41That's incredible. I love how you bring the
- 1:01:43parallels back to computers. And so what is a company in your
- 1:01:49in Washington, right? Washington State.
- 1:01:51What is it company or startup that you've seen?
- 1:01:54That has impressed you lately. One of his Runway ml.
- 1:02:00Mmm. Yep, we had Brandon on here, a
- 1:02:03few months ago, who is their lead ml engineer?
- 1:02:07They are they're killing it. That's it's soaked the video
- 1:02:10editing them out. That's, I think, you know that
- 1:02:13one, that is really fantastic. So here's, so here's another
- 1:02:17one, a alpha by, oh, so just to bridge computer science and and
- 1:02:22biotech with you're doing is using a mix of old saying,
- 1:02:26Synthetic. Biology protocol.
- 1:02:28The problem you want to solve is that what is the protein-protein
- 1:02:31interaction? Like how do you because it's
- 1:02:33important for antibody. Development is important for,
- 1:02:36you know, diagnostic throughout development.
- 1:02:38So, on and they had this machine learning + synthetic biology
- 1:02:42approach to use East through a lot of work to produce proteins,
- 1:02:46and then measure how they stick, or don'ts and read that with DNA
- 1:02:50sequencing and use a lot of machine learning to produce a
- 1:02:53data sets. That informs the folks designing
- 1:02:55vaccines and Design. Antibodies and so on, that's
- 1:02:58really impressive with data and, you know, and putting in
- 1:03:00bringing together synthetic biologist machine learning,
- 1:03:03folks, and folks doing what lab Automation and so on.
- 1:03:06Wow, yeah. All right, last one for you,
- 1:03:08Louise, how do you want to be remembered?
- 1:03:11Wow, that's wow, that's a good question.
- 1:03:18I think in bringing the right people together, so buting
- 1:03:23teams, I guess. Using, yeah, and it doesn't
- 1:03:28matter in what context I feel like, you know, it's impossible
- 1:03:31to do anything big without having a team.
- 1:03:34Nobody can do big things alone, right?
- 1:03:35So, and I guess being somewhat, remember, it's not that I have
- 1:03:38aspirations of having a legacy of not like, but I was like, if
- 1:03:41people give me a, somebody was able to bring the right people
- 1:03:43together. I'll be very happy so I like
- 1:03:47that, I got goosebumps. Well, thank you so much, Lisa.
- 1:03:50This is super cool. Come on, jeez on.
- 1:03:53She's moving to Obrigado. The more two emotional people
- 1:03:58saving for our podcast, it total been proposed a Optimum.
- 1:04:05Thank you very much guys. Awesome chat.
- 1:04:07Hope to meet you in person and you know coaches on this
- 1:04:09conversation is in a pub sometimes so yeah, absolutely.
- 1:04:14We're starting a local meet up in Seattle so you are maybe I'll
- 1:04:19have to drop by and absolutely I'm you don't have to talk.
- 1:04:23I love. I love to join and bring some
- 1:04:25other. CO2 and help help spread the
- 1:04:27word here. So there we go.
- 1:04:29Awesome.