Latest / Agentic Conversations (formally mlops.community) / Who's MLOps for Anyway? // Jonathan Rioux // #261
Transcript
- 0:00So my name is Jonathan Ryu. I'm a managing principal for
- 0:06artificial intelligence department at Epam Systems.
- 0:10I take my coffee black. I, I, you know, recently got
- 0:15wean from sugar in my coffee. I no longer like it.
- 0:19To me, the important thing is that it needs to be hot.
- 0:21I cannot do lukewarm or cold coffee.
- 0:25ML OPS Community Podcast is back in action.
- 0:28I'm your host Demetrios and talk with Jonathan today.
- 0:32We did not conflate. We did not ML OPS and business
- 0:38value. That was one of his key
- 0:40takeaways that I am going to probably be repeating time and
- 0:45time again. Just because you have ML OPS
- 0:47doesn't mean your ML projects are going to be successful.
- 0:54In other news, I tend to talk about on this podcast how you
- 0:59don't see fraud detection as a service type companies out there
- 1:05because oh it's too hard or the data's too messy or this I was
- 1:10completely wrong. I just found out today there is
- 1:13a fraud detection as a service company.
- 1:15It is called Cubiant cubent maybe is another pronunciation
- 1:20of it. Stock ticker is KBNT.
- 1:22It was so successful it I PO D and everything was on the stock
- 1:27market until last year when it got delisted.
- 1:29So yeah, I was wrong. There we go.
- 1:35Let's get into this conversation with Jeff.
- 1:44We got to start with this because we were in California
- 1:49two months ago, three months ago.
- 1:50I can't remember exactly when but we sat down.
- 1:54You guys had a very nice place rented out.
- 1:58Our man cave. Yeah, I appreciate you inviting
- 2:01me there. I felt like AVIP, it was the
- 2:03only, it was the only meeting that I actually took when I was
- 2:06at that conference and I got treated like royalty.
- 2:09So it was awesome to see you in your element.
- 2:12And you just told me now that you don't think envelopes is
- 2:17sexy. So I have now gone down on the
- 2:20People sexiest man of the year charts, apparently because I am
- 2:26very attached to the ML OPS term.
- 2:30But why don't you think it's it's sexy?
- 2:34If I define ML OPS as not being sexy, it's it goes in the same
- 2:38vein. That's like in dev OPS not
- 2:40really being sexy or, or software engineering as a whole
- 2:43not being extremely sexy. I feel like a lot of individual
- 2:48have coined the term ML OPS as kind of a guarantee of revenue
- 2:52or a guarantee of ROI on their ML initiative.
- 2:56It's a different ball game. You know, if you get to think
- 2:59about it, or at least my definition, I really see ML OPS
- 3:04as a set of principle, a set of process, you know, tooling that
- 3:09are all going to work together to facilitate like how quickly
- 3:15you can take an idea and get it to production and maintain it in
- 3:19production without having crashing on you.
- 3:23It does not give you ideas. I mean it I I was discussing
- 3:28with a few of my colleagues a terrible idea implemented using
- 3:32ML OPS principle is going to yield a terrible product, but
- 3:36faster and more reliably. With the with the DevOps
- 3:44principles in hand. And that is hilarious.
- 3:48So huge thing you just said there is that do not conflate ML
- 3:53OPS with ROI. Just because you have very
- 3:57strong ML OPS practises and processes in place, that does
- 4:02not mean that you're going to have a successful ML product or
- 4:07product in general that leverages ML or AI or whatever
- 4:11magic bullet you think is going to save you. 100% I mean,
- 4:16you're, you're looking into this.
- 4:19I, I find it absolutely hilarious to see organisation
- 4:23that say, you know, were ML OPS compliant, whatever that means,
- 4:29But then they're data scientist or ML engineers are working in
- 4:34kind of a shared service and becomes that kind of arbitrator
- 4:38of like what is good enough to become an ML product.
- 4:41The way like a couple of years ago we were talking around, you
- 4:46know, dev OPS for ML before ML OPS became kind of bonafide
- 4:51accepted. And to me, it was always about
- 4:56putting, you know, business forward people to technology
- 4:59forward people. And in the case of ML OPS,
- 5:02analytical and, and ML forward people to be able to create
- 5:06something. Where did we get lost in the
- 5:10process? Saying that, you know, you need
- 5:12a centre of excellence that's going to control all of the
- 5:15intake for ML and it's going to evaluate it with an arbitrary
- 5:21framework to be able to determine the value, which I
- 5:26think in practise is whoever screams the loudest or you know
- 5:31who, who gets to own the budget. But I feel like this way we're,
- 5:37we're going further, further away.
- 5:40Pardon me from from the the original piece which was infused
- 5:45embed ML where it makes sense into the product development.
- 5:52And and I think it's because a lot of organisation don't really
- 5:55know what to do with ML. So by putting somebody who's
- 5:59accountable on it, I think the natural tendency is to want to
- 6:03centralised everything. It's a little bit the same thing
- 6:06with data organisation. If you have a data team who
- 6:09doesn't understand how the data is being produced and who has no
- 6:12control in fixing the source, how can you hope to have data
- 6:17quality? Same principle.
- 6:20So bit of a hot take there on organisations don't know what to
- 6:25do with ML. But before we dive down that
- 6:28rabbit hole, you sparked a gigantic thought.
- 6:34I may have my next business idea thanks to you which is ML.
- 6:39OP certified.com just bought that domain while we were on
- 6:43this conversation. Now I am going to go sell that
- 6:47to these businesses and say you know what you need, you need
- 6:50some ML OPS certifications and I will look at your processes and
- 6:55tell you if they are in line with the best standard practises
- 6:59that we are seeing out there. Hey, you don't know at one point
- 7:04you need to make your. You need to make rent.
- 7:09My daughter needs diapers. That's it exactly.
- 7:11So let's go down in this rabbit hole of what makes you say that
- 7:15folks do not know what to do with ML.
- 7:18I think this has been magnified and I mean, we can talk probably
- 7:23about the two last hype cycle, you know, deep learning.
- 7:27Couple of years ago, I, I actually joined EPAM, my current
- 7:33employer when at, at the hype of, I think it was around the
- 7:38time where they were saying like blueberry muffin versus dog
- 7:42using computer vision. Like that was kind of the, the
- 7:45thing that a lot of people were going around.
- 7:47And now we're having large language model and generative
- 7:51AI. And, and to me, I think there's
- 7:54a, there's a big discomfort because we're back to use case
- 8:01chasing and a lot of conversation are oriented in the
- 8:06fact of, hey, I have this new technology, where can I apply
- 8:10it? And in my opinion, this stems
- 8:16from a, a misunderstanding a little bit of the technology,
- 8:20which is totally normal. I think there's a lot of hype in
- 8:24in what it can and cannot do. I think people have incentives
- 8:27to be able to vote from a personal standpoint, but also
- 8:30some companies are over advocating the capabilities of
- 8:34of generative AI, let's say in that kind of circumstance.
- 8:37But, but I think it leaves a lot of business leader kind of
- 8:41flipping the script of instead of focusing on what they know,
- 8:46which is their business and seeing what are the problems
- 8:50that can be solved using this technology and, and looking at
- 8:53your portfolio from a holistic fashion.
- 8:57We're seeing the opposite where people are starting with the
- 9:00technology, which they understand partially and then
- 9:06trying really, really hard to think about compelling business
- 9:09problem or even worse in certain cases, like, oh, what kind of
- 9:15white space innovation we can do where the biggest benefit that
- 9:20we see companies that I mean, our company as, as an example,
- 9:23like our, our biggest usage of generative AI is Spermi in the
- 9:27grey space innovation. Like what are the process that
- 9:30are cumbersome? What are the process that are
- 9:34tedious, repetitive that we can kind of do micro optimization if
- 9:39you allow me to like blend 2 words together.
- 9:44But for us, it was always evident you, you know, if you're
- 9:47in control of the road map and the problem that you have and
- 9:49you have a good grasp on what are your opportunity for
- 9:54improvements. You don't really need to go into
- 9:58that, that all out panic. And you add on top of that, you
- 10:04know, adding a generative AI centre of excellence, which
- 10:08means that your data scientist who already have permeated the
- 10:12industry now are kind of working double shift because, you know,
- 10:16you have your, your regular job where you're part of a product,
- 10:19you may follow ML OPS process. Some companies are lucky enough
- 10:23to be able to have data scientists that are horizontally
- 10:26laid out. And then you have that centre of
- 10:29excellence, which means that you're, you're uprooting how
- 10:33your company is working just to be able to adopt that
- 10:36technology. So I, I think a lot of companies
- 10:39are not AI ready and a lot of companies that were, you know, a
- 10:43little bit more AI mature Gen AI is kind of disrupting them, but
- 10:48but not because the technology is so promising and wonderful.
- 10:51It is promising and wonderful, but because I think the natural
- 10:55reaction is decentralised to control, to limit and and
- 10:59ultimately it it sets you back. So basically it's like you're
- 11:04saying, folks are taking their eye off of the ball and instead
- 11:09of spending time and energy and cycles in what they know best,
- 11:13which is product or just their business line and what the
- 11:17business is actually focused on now, they're thinking, oh, this
- 11:22AI stuff is so cool. What if we put it into here?
- 11:25And what if we put it into there?
- 11:27And mind you, nobody's actually asking for that.
- 11:32Nobody's thinking, you know what, I would love chatbot that
- 11:37actually responds to me when I pop up onto your website, stuff
- 11:41like that. It's not that they are going
- 11:44from those principles of what is the customer want and then is AI
- 11:50the best way of solving it? It's more thinking we've got AI
- 11:55now, we might as well use it and especially if you're in another
- 11:59one. This might be my ultimate dream
- 12:01job. I want the title of AI Centre of
- 12:04Excellence at some company. That sounds like an incredible
- 12:07job. I will be Chief AI Centre of
- 12:11Excellence if you annoyed me. That title sounds like the most
- 12:17bullshit job ever, but I agree. So.
- 12:22So anyway, if it is if if that is my title, I am going to of
- 12:28course champion for all these different use cases of how we
- 12:32need to infuse AI into all these processes, right?
- 12:35Because it's in my best interest.
- 12:37Yeah. But then you get into the very
- 12:39real problem of you're, you're ultimately centralising all all
- 12:45of that innovation for an entire company, which means that you
- 12:50need to acquire more than a working knowledge on every
- 12:55business function that is coming to you with use case.
- 12:58Because otherwise it's very difficult for you to understand,
- 13:03appreciate and empathise with the value that this can bring.
- 13:08There's also a tremendous amount and this is something that we
- 13:12see quite, quite a bit is separating, you know,
- 13:18optimization versus potential revenue generation, calibrating
- 13:22some of the risk that you can have.
- 13:23So there is a place for deeper knowledge on, on what is the,
- 13:28you know, the application of generative AI and having a
- 13:31little bit of a more technical bias.
- 13:33But this is doing in conjunction with, you know, your, your, your
- 13:39business functions and you, you, you can't remove them, the
- 13:43agency, you can't prevent them from innovating otherwise.
- 13:48We're you know, we talked a lot about shadow IT, but we're
- 13:51seeing a lot of like shadow AI, shadow Gen AI and and to me,
- 13:55this becomes the that is step one in, you know, having a very
- 14:03unfortunate thing that's going to happen being a word.
- 14:06We're seeing a tonne of use case that, you know, public chat bots
- 14:11that are making promises, whether we're not supposed to
- 14:13make promises, data leak, those kind of thing.
- 14:17And and I think it is related. I I'm not involved in those
- 14:22thing. I like the thing that, you know,
- 14:24I keep a tidier ship than this, but we I, I think it's easy to
- 14:31explain is you're you're in a business function, you really
- 14:34want to be able to launch something.
- 14:36There's someone somewhere else in a company that's saying this
- 14:38is not really a priority. You're looking at this as an
- 14:42opportunity to out innovate the innovation lab.
- 14:46You go forward. Yeah, and then you sell cars for
- 14:50$1.00. You sell cars for $1.00 or, you
- 14:53know, in, in, in Canada. We, we had Air Canada promising,
- 14:58you know, refunds where there were no, no refunds that, that
- 15:01were supposed to be done. And we're, we're seeing, we're
- 15:05seeing a lot of funny things. I mean, internally we experiment
- 15:09quite a bit with like some patterns that we hear.
- 15:12We, we test a lot of LLM. We have some pretty funny
- 15:16stories. We definitely dog food a lot of
- 15:21of what were like try to come in front of a client and and have a
- 15:25compelling point of view. So I I failed a lot with LLM but
- 15:33you don't usually behind closed doors.
- 15:37It's yeah. So you protect your ass.
- 15:39That's my way of doing it. Just yesterday I read about how
- 15:42Slack rolled out their AI feature and they didn't realise
- 15:48it, but you can prompt inject it so that it gives information
- 15:53from private channels into the answers of any questions that
- 15:58are asked to the Slack AI. So it's like there's stuff that
- 16:03are in those private channels that may want to be kept
- 16:07private. And this is Slack.
- 16:10Like, we've had really great engineers and data scientists on
- 16:14this podcast from Slack. They're incredible.
- 16:17Yeah. And they're still not able to
- 16:19fully think about all the different repercussions that
- 16:22this can have when it comes out. And I think we're going full
- 16:25circle on that frame is to me, this is, this is a gap in your,
- 16:32let's call it LLM MOPS pipeline because I, I see this as
- 16:37building a tower. You know, you, you have your dev
- 16:40OPS practises, you know, your version control, good coding
- 16:43hygiene. Are you using, you know,
- 16:46extension that can augment your productivity and so on and so
- 16:50forth, like personal development, but also team
- 16:52management. You have your data OPS, which is
- 16:55where you know, data as a product, what can be used when
- 17:00clear governance. There's still a lot to explore
- 17:04there. I, I think that we're, we're
- 17:06doing a pretty bad job at weaponizing data properly.
- 17:13We moved to ML OPS, which is your entire life cycle model
- 17:16management, but also your entire lineage, making sure that you
- 17:20know, you can have reproductive reproductible builds when, when
- 17:26a model is put in place. And, and then you go with LLM
- 17:28OPS, But you get to think about it like to me, a data leakage.
- 17:33I, I don't know exactly, you know, how they've architected
- 17:37the product, but somewhere at some point there, there's an
- 17:41access control that is failing. And I'm not saying that it's
- 17:45easy and, and they're under a tremendous amount of pressure,
- 17:52but it becomes like it, it's easy to understand, at least
- 17:56conceptually, where it failed. And it's a it's a good reminder
- 18:01that even the the strongest company, the company that
- 18:05employs the best engineer and that has the most budget is not
- 18:09immune to those lapses in in their process.
- 18:16So you mentioned how centralising things with this
- 18:20centre of excellence is not the ideal scenario because the
- 18:26centre of excellence now has to understand on a deep level each
- 18:31aspect of the business, almost more than the actual people that
- 18:38are doing that. Because they have to understand
- 18:41what AI is capable of and where, where the rub is for the
- 18:44accountants or for the sales people or whatever it may be.
- 18:48How do you recommend going about it so that it isn't centralised
- 18:54but it's also successful? I mean, I like to you say the
- 19:01expression like are you a left-leaning data scientist or
- 19:04right leaning data scientist? So like are are you looking
- 19:07into, you know, you want to be able to centralised by
- 19:10competence, which means a little bit what we've mentioned and I
- 19:15think we see that it does not work in practise.
- 19:19But I also think that the complete opposite, which means
- 19:23you each business function is is responsible for the entire data
- 19:27MLLLM stat. It is also out of reach for most
- 19:32organisation. You can't have, you know, one
- 19:38data scientists or a series of data scientists across multiple
- 19:42functions and it becomes really hard to encode best practises
- 19:46and you end up with, you have a tonne of data scientists all
- 19:51around the organisation, their governance become difficult,
- 19:54dissemination of best practises becomes hard.
- 19:57This is where you get, we're seeing sometime, you know hand
- 20:04different environment. With a different set of
- 20:07governance, it's, it's really, really tough to control your,
- 20:12your enterprise risk on, on that front.
- 20:16So to me right now, like in, in August of, of 2024 or I think
- 20:24September of 2024, when this is going to, to go live, I, I think
- 20:29that the, the best model that we can have is, is some sort of hub
- 20:34and spoke where but a little bit of a, a different approach where
- 20:41you're, you're not seeing the centre of excellence as a
- 20:44governing function, but more of a support function.
- 20:49And, and I think that that's what's hard for a lot of people
- 20:52because they see the centre of excellence as a way to augment
- 20:56or profile. But you know, you're really
- 20:59supporting, you're, you're making sure that everybody is as
- 21:03the tool that they have a, a little bit kind of a, you know,
- 21:07a proverbial scrum master, your job is to facilitate and make it
- 21:11easy to do the right thing. So I think right now this would
- 21:15be the model that I have a tendency to recommend.
- 21:18We do have a tendency to go in between, like as LLM is going to
- 21:22become more commoditized, easier to understand, more permeated
- 21:28into the industry, I think that we're going to go more and more
- 21:31decentralised and then something else going to come in and you're
- 21:34going to see a huge shrinking that or we have a huge skill
- 21:38gap. We don't have a lot of people
- 21:39that understand this. We're going to create a centre
- 21:41of excellence that's going to govern whatever new hype cycle
- 21:44is going to come and we're just going to repeat that process
- 21:47again and again. Again, anybody out there that's
- 21:52hiring for Centre of Excellence chief.
- 21:57So that is exactly that hub and spoke model is exactly what I
- 22:04think Uber did. When I was reading their blog
- 22:07post on how they've evolved Michelangelo, which is arguably
- 22:11one of the most famous ML/AI platforms out there.
- 22:16They said that and they mentioned how you have very
- 22:21experienced and advanced folks that are are kind of pulling
- 22:27features or needs or capabilities out of the
- 22:31platform. And what they had to do is
- 22:35recognise what use cases they were trying to create with these
- 22:42feature requests and see how much money that was making for
- 22:48the business. And they, one thing that I
- 22:52thought was fascinating, and I repeat this quite a bit, is how
- 22:55they were able to figure out which models, which use cases
- 23:01were generating what kind of ROI for the company.
- 23:04And so they had different tiers of babysitting, we could say,
- 23:10for different models. And you see that.
- 23:13And it kind of is, is what you were saying, because they have
- 23:16the Michelangelo platform and it helps support 99% of the use
- 23:21cases. But if there are people that
- 23:23want to do their own thing, they can.
- 23:26And Michelangelo just tries to make it as easy as possible for
- 23:30those people to. Then when they're done doing
- 23:33whatever it is they're doing, they can bring it into the fold
- 23:37and run it on Michelangelo. I, I, I love that example
- 23:43because to me did this. This exemplifies perfectly that
- 23:50support model that, that we're trying to get it.
- 23:53And I mean we're even looking at this and Uber is an example of a
- 23:59very advanced company. But I think a lot of, a lot of
- 24:03individual are working, whether it is banks, insurance company,
- 24:07pharmaceutical publishing, they, they, they probably don't have
- 24:13the, the VC funding that to, to invest or nor should they.
- 24:18Like I, I think we have to acknowledge that Uber made a
- 24:22very risky bet in creating their bespoke architecture and they
- 24:26were one of the first to, to do so and to be very public about
- 24:30it. I think the market is catching
- 24:32up. I mean, Uber has open source
- 24:35significant portion of their tooling.
- 24:38There's other players in the market, but I think you have to
- 24:43think of it as the jobs to be done.
- 24:46So what what are the process that you want people to follow
- 24:51up? Where are your your source of
- 24:54truth? And you know, the way, the way
- 24:58that we look at this, you know, we talked a lot about ML apps
- 25:02around people process platform. And I think a lot of people are
- 25:05are just throwing this around, but people follow process and
- 25:10the platform enables those process.
- 25:12But at the end of the day, you can have the best platform in
- 25:15the world, you can have the best people in the world.
- 25:19But if there's no clear way of doing things or as you said,
- 25:22when you need to go off script, how do you plug in and plug out
- 25:27of of that that process and, and identify those 95 to 99%
- 25:36activities like you, everyone's going to need to host a model.
- 25:41How do we make it as simple as possible?
- 25:43What is, you know, the SLA that we need to provide?
- 25:47Do we want to create this in house, you know, deploy our own
- 25:50model in Kubernetes? What's going to be the scale
- 25:53gap? You know, a lot of people are
- 25:56going and they're saying, oh, you know, we don't want to pay
- 25:58for, you know, either a third party tool or, you know, hosting
- 26:02is very expensive. So we're going to try to do it
- 26:04ourselves. What you have to acknowledge
- 26:06that if your team of data scientists are not, you know,
- 26:12cloud competent, it's going to be difficult for them to go and
- 26:18they will be frustrated because as long as it's going to work,
- 26:21it's going to be wonderful. But the day that you're going to
- 26:24have to troubleshoot something and, and the abstractions going
- 26:29to fall, you, you also need to be mindful that everything is
- 26:35good as long as it works. But, but, and I, I talk from
- 26:40experience, like my previous organisation, we, we made the
- 26:44choice of, of deploying our, our models on, on ETS and it was
- 26:52wonderful. It was really fun.
- 26:54I mean, it's very gratifying to be able to deploy.
- 26:57We got some problem where our, our scaling was not working
- 27:02properly. It was very interesting and
- 27:04fulfilling like intellectually to be able to learn about this.
- 27:08But ultimately I look at this from from an, an OK R
- 27:12perspective. I was unable to work on any
- 27:17other thing. My team was 100% mobilised to be
- 27:19able to fix this, which basically means a month later,
- 27:23there's nothing new, no model refresh, no nothing kind of
- 27:26coming into place. So it's, it's all a question of
- 27:29cheques and balances. And I I like to use and remind
- 27:32everyone of what needs to be done.
- 27:35Make it as as easy as possible, make it as friendly as possible.
- 27:39And if people want to be able to go off script, at least they
- 27:42have a set of convention that it can hinge into.
- 27:45God, just talking about that reminds me of a conversation I
- 27:48was having with my buddy last week and it was a little bit
- 27:54about how you have these companies that are spun out of
- 27:57the what quote unquote top tier companies like the Ubers or the
- 28:03Linkedins or the Googles or Facebooks, Meta, all of that.
- 28:07The engineers at these companies say, oh wow, I have this
- 28:12problem. And they create some open source
- 28:14product and then it gets a bit of traction and boom, you know
- 28:17the playbook, they go raise a bunch of EC funding and it's off
- 28:21to the races. And my buddy was saying, man,
- 28:25but what a lot of these folks don't understand is that not
- 28:29everybody is a top tier engineer.
- 28:32So they've built this product for their friends at the company
- 28:39that they used to work at, knowing the skill level that
- 28:42they were at. And they're not building it for
- 28:44me. Like I am not that type of
- 28:46engineer. I, and I'm being very candid
- 28:49about it. I'm not going to be working at
- 28:53Uber in their engineering department anytime soon or
- 28:56Meta's engineering department, except these products are built
- 28:59like I should know how to work it and I should know how things
- 29:05need to function. And it's like you're saying,
- 29:09like if you can just bring it down a few notches, dumb it down
- 29:13for me, that would be incredible because you're going to have
- 29:16much more success. That's going to be mass market
- 29:19and you're going to have people that love your product because
- 29:23of that user experience. I'm, I totally agree with you.
- 29:28I, I think it's also like, I, I, I want to excuse a little bit
- 29:33the behaviour of those folks because I, I also think that
- 29:36it's, it's just very natural. Like I, I think anybody who's
- 29:40been working in the space for a long period of time, especially
- 29:43surrounded by their peers, sometime there's kind of a big
- 29:48dichotomy like on, on one part you're looking around and you're
- 29:52like, man, we're so late and everything.
- 29:55But also, and, and I'm 100% guilty of this.
- 30:01We have an overwhelming tendency to assume that everybody knows
- 30:06as much on the topic we love as as ourselves.
- 30:10So I mean, I'll use kind of very funny anecdote, but we had some
- 30:16interns this summer and very eager to learn and, and very
- 30:20excited. And they've done a lot of data
- 30:24science, you know, in Jupiter notebook kind of analysis.
- 30:28And then we get them, you know, kind of set up into the
- 30:32environment and me and my team, at least for personal project,
- 30:37like we have a pretty old school stack.
- 30:39Like I'm still a big, big fan of make files with all of its
- 30:42warts. I I just feel like, you know,
- 30:44it's kind of a good thing that he can hinge ourself onto.
- 30:48And they were all like, if you're talking about one of the
- 30:52low lights of their internship was like, figure out all of
- 30:56those tool version control, CICD, make files, automation.
- 31:01They were just like, it's so much, so much.
- 31:04To take all of no the first months so.
- 31:09But to me, I was like, oh, what? Well, I've, I've learned this.
- 31:12Like, you know, anybody can learn it, but you get to think
- 31:16about that. Like, I'm happy to go on the
- 31:18record that I, you know, it took me, I mean, a couple of years to
- 31:24be able to adopt version control properly and then to be able to
- 31:29understand CICD in a way that works for me.
- 31:36Like not necessarily all of the intricacy.
- 31:38It took me, you know, a little bit of time afterwards.
- 31:41So I, my, my expectations of adoption are like, Oh yeah, man,
- 31:48that should be enough. It's not like you're, you're
- 31:51trying to change habits and it, it's one of the challenge.
- 31:57You know, I, I, I do a lot of, of ML OPS consulting and
- 32:03implementing the stack, suggesting a process map, doing
- 32:07an analysis of like what is versus what should be doesn't
- 32:11take a lot of time. You know, there's, there's good
- 32:14internalised practises that you can go.
- 32:17We, we take pride in nuancing a little bit, like not everybody,
- 32:23you know, I'm, I'm not going to go and sell the same product to
- 32:25everyone. Not everybody is in the same
- 32:27boat. But to change management and,
- 32:30and getting data scientists to adopt tooling.
- 32:34And we have a lot of conversation down downstream
- 32:38where, you know, we do a check in and they're like, well,
- 32:40they're, they're like, I don't understand, like, you know, CICD
- 32:44is not, not everybody's using it.
- 32:46And it's like, take, it's going to take time.
- 32:48You know, people need to, I almost feel like you need to be
- 32:54frustrated enough with the current state so that you can
- 32:57adopt the the change. But but ultimately everything
- 33:03you know from you decide as a company to become more agile, to
- 33:07put some automation to streamline your process.
- 33:10This is going to cascade into individual team how they're
- 33:12going to adopt this and then it's going to go to individual
- 33:15developer and, and that process is like it can take months,
- 33:21years, depending on how far you're you're going.
- 33:26And I, I don't think we appreciate it.
- 33:29Like, you know, you and I, we, we did all of this.
- 33:32So now it's kind of like everybody should do it.
- 33:35Exactly. So great points.
- 33:37All right, real quick question for you.
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- 35:19the link below. Let's change gears for a minute.
- 35:22I want to talk about this idea that we touched on where you
- 35:28mentioned how you're doing all kinds of POC's with folks in the
- 35:33Gen AI sphere. And all of a sudden, six months
- 35:38later, you got that POC up and running and people are coming
- 35:44back to you saying, OK, so now what's the ROI on this?
- 35:47You're looking around like, wait a minute, we weren't talking
- 35:52about ROI. We're just trying to get
- 35:53something up and running. You're explaining that a little
- 35:56bit more, put a little more colour on that.
- 35:57Oh, for. Sure.
- 35:59So maybe like we can contextualise a little bit like
- 36:04the the situation you're, you're an enterprise and I mean this
- 36:09could be my company, this could be any companies that that we do
- 36:11work with. One of their primary goal is to
- 36:15get familiar with the technology.
- 36:17So they're, they're selecting use cases, they're prioritising
- 36:21use cases and, and as part of the prioritisation, no talk or,
- 36:26or very little of what's going to be the return on investment.
- 36:29And I'll use the example of the HR chatbot because I think it
- 36:34was identified for a lot of company as it's kind of the
- 36:38Goldilocks use case. You know, the data is well
- 36:41understood because everyone is at least has a high level of
- 36:47familiarity over what HR is, the type of questions that you can
- 36:52ask, the type of answers that you can expect.
- 36:55Not saying it's a very easy use case.
- 36:58There's a lot of of, you know, finesse into it, but
- 37:03conceptually everybody can understand it.
- 37:06Your data's captive. You don't need to do third party
- 37:08data acquisition. You don't need to, you don't
- 37:10even need to understand your data landscape.
- 37:14You know, every company has an HR function, everybody takes
- 37:17vacation, everybody gets paid like it, it, it almost kind of
- 37:21perfect on that front, but it's, it's one of those automation use
- 37:27case. So, so the real question that
- 37:29you have to ask yourself is if, if you want to turn out an ROI
- 37:32is are you going to be able to limit your hiring?
- 37:37Is it going to, you know, relieve people from doing more
- 37:43productive work or revenue generating work?
- 37:49And it, it's not a use case that's going to drive I, I don't
- 37:54think for most organisation in HR chatbot is going to drive a
- 37:58tremendous amount of return on investment.
- 38:01Because on top of it, one of the prerequisite to be able to have
- 38:04that is to have your, your documents very well organised,
- 38:10very well structured, which is kind of a, a big important of
- 38:14the. And by the time you're done with
- 38:15this, then an FAQ becomes a very easy thing to implement.
- 38:21So you do it, you implement it, you do the POC, you get it up.
- 38:26The costs are very real because you know, you're calling the
- 38:29API, you have your application, you can have a cloud bill or you
- 38:33know, the salary of people that are coming into.
- 38:35Usually it's going to be a time, let's say a team of four people
- 38:39for a number of weeks. And then you keep one or two
- 38:41people to be able to maintain it and continue updating the
- 38:45knowledge base. And those jobs might be part
- 38:47time. So you're engaging the cost and
- 38:50then you're going to be asking yourself, OK, what's going to be
- 38:52the return on investment? And we see a lot of people whose
- 38:58like their usage statistics are not super great.
- 39:01A lot of people don't want to use the chat bot or the answers
- 39:04are not super relevant. We've seen people have like chat
- 39:08bots getting confused by the country that you're in because
- 39:11you don't necessarily have the context so on and so forth.
- 39:16But then they're like, OK, so what's the return on investment?
- 39:18And, and you have to acknowledge that the true return on
- 39:21investment that you had is well, you undertook, you know, doing
- 39:25your vendor selection for the technology that you want.
- 39:28You, you got a preferred Gen AI, but vendor you, you know,
- 39:33internalise some of the design pattern.
- 39:35You got to see some of the failure mode from Gen AI.
- 39:39There's a lot of endemic knowledge that kind of got into
- 39:41it. You're better positioned to be
- 39:43able to prioritise those use case.
- 39:45But somehow all of that learning, nobody cares about it.
- 39:48Everybody is like, OK, you know, how do we turn an ROI on this
- 39:53specific initiative? And, and I feel like it's, it's
- 39:55a little hypocritical to to do that because, and I understand
- 40:02where it comes from. But ultimately, you know, you
- 40:05have to acknowledge that you took that use case because you
- 40:10wanted to get familiar with the technology.
- 40:13You need to keep this as part of of your narrative because it is
- 40:20probably. Like 90% of the reason why you
- 40:23pick that use case. Otherwise, if you really wanted
- 40:26to have something that drive return on investment, if you
- 40:30have to do this at the inception, you have to do this
- 40:32as you're prioritising initiative and, and especially
- 40:37APOC is, is meant to prove return on investment.
- 40:41So you're, you're validating. Like to me, the concept that
- 40:44you're trying to to validate is if I use an LLM for this
- 40:50business process, A isn't going to work.
- 40:53We've seen occurrences where you don't have access to the data,
- 40:57you don't have a complete picture.
- 40:59You're looking at automating the process, but you need to insert
- 41:02the human into the process at the very awkward places, which
- 41:07basically means that attempting to automate the process makes it
- 41:11slower and more cumbersome. That's what you want to
- 41:14validate. So to me it comes a little bit
- 41:20as as a weird positioning. We're seeing less of this now.
- 41:24I know we talked about this a couple of months ago.
- 41:26I think organisations are getting a little bit better at
- 41:29this. And, and we see, you know, some
- 41:32of the organisation that we do work with are, are actually
- 41:35quite unapologetic around selecting use case and
- 41:39identifying revenue. And what they have in common is
- 41:45their, their business people took a very keen interest in
- 41:49getting familiar with the technology, understanding not
- 41:53necessarily like, you know, the intricacies of it, but they have
- 41:56a good mental model of how it works.
- 41:59And there is a very tight collaboration in, in creating
- 42:03those products. And we're seeing more and more
- 42:05of this. I find this very encouraging.
- 42:09Do you feel like those learnings that you talked about in the PO
- 42:12CS, they can be salvage and almost like you pull a rabbit
- 42:18out of the hat and you say hey the HR chat bot is shit, We all
- 42:22know that. Even.
- 42:24But now that we've got all this stuff, we actually have an idea
- 42:28for something that will bring ROI.
- 42:30Does that give people pause? Because now they're thinking
- 42:35this again, We got to go through that whole cycle, even though
- 42:38it's going to be a bit more streamlined, there still is.
- 42:42Isn't that kind of buy in as there was before?
- 42:47I, I think it depends on like what, what's your appetite to
- 42:49invest and, and, and ultimately how, how the market is
- 42:55responding to, to those claims. Like, I think it's important to,
- 43:02to, to remember that it's, it's very exciting to, you know,
- 43:09pursue generative AI and her and, and I mean the, the market,
- 43:14like for a lot of public company, the market has rewarded
- 43:17companies that have been very vocal about adopting Gen AI.
- 43:21So what do you do with that power?
- 43:26I I think it's, it's the, the broader question that that you
- 43:29need to ask yourself. Some companies are, you know, a
- 43:33little bit burned because you know, they, they, they, they
- 43:39don't really have that risk, like that notion of risk that
- 43:46it's not guaranteed. You know, you're, you're putting
- 43:49a hypothesis in on top of that. Some people are, are not
- 43:53stopping their POC early enough. I'm, I'm, I'm seeing sometime
- 43:58people doing a proof of concept and they're engaging full UI
- 44:03complete build. They want to be able to do user
- 44:06testing and it is expensive. If, if you're very confident
- 44:14that your, your backbone that like there's going to be, you
- 44:18know, a fit and it's going to be used and you have a good notion
- 44:22of, of where it's going to go. I, I think it's fine.
- 44:25Like there's no one size fit all.
- 44:27But I would, I would postulate that a lot of company could use
- 44:31in reducing their, their POC's and you know, trying to distal
- 44:39them down to a series like one, maybe up to three questions that
- 44:45you're trying to validate. And one of the thing that we're
- 44:49implementing on a lot of the PO CS that we do is we start with a
- 44:53scorecard. So, you know, you want to do
- 44:56I'll, I'll use a very common example that we see, but you
- 45:00have a tonne of unstructured data that is coming, you know,
- 45:02fax, emails, PDF and, and you want to extract, you know,
- 45:08relevant information on it. I think at this stage the PO CS
- 45:12been validated. I think industry wide, we
- 45:15understand it's a very good use case for generative AI.
- 45:18Is it going to work with your document?
- 45:20We'll boil them down to a very simple question.
- 45:23Work on the ML portion, use those result to be able to build
- 45:27a business case. You don't necessarily have to
- 45:29engage, you know, a massive team for a long amount of time.
- 45:33It it's your, your exactly. You're, you're proving a
- 45:36concept. If if you want to go straight
- 45:39into a pilot, we're seeing a lot more about that happening
- 45:42because, you know, the concept's been proven and then you can go
- 45:47you can start asking questions that are going to come on to it.
- 45:50But to me, this is like, this has very little to do with how
- 45:55you do data science as an organisation.
- 45:57It's very much how do you develop internal product or even
- 46:00external product? Yeah.
- 46:02And and how do you like, how do you innovate as an organisation?
- 46:07Yeah, I was thinking that same thing.
- 46:09It's more about how do you run a proper POC it?
- 46:13If it's in Gen AI, great. If it's in some other random
- 46:17aspect to the business, great. You still got to know how to
- 46:20properly conduct these POC's. Yeah, there there's another
- 46:25thing too that as I was thinking it almost is, I don't know if
- 46:33it's, it's counterintuitive, but it is like going back to what we
- 46:37were saying earlier on your job is the centre of excellence and
- 46:43you now have to validate those PO CS and you have to figure out
- 46:50where is the ROI. It makes for potentially sticky
- 46:55conversations. And so like you were saying,
- 46:59you're coming in more in the line of there are certain use
- 47:04cases that have been proven. We've had ChatGPT for almost 2
- 47:09years now, right? And so it's pretty clear that it
- 47:13works really well with these five things.
- 47:16Choose one of these five things and you'll probably be able to
- 47:20see some ROI from it. If you go down this route.
- 47:24It's cool, it's fun, you'll learn stuff.
- 47:26But ROI? Don't bring that into the
- 47:30conversation. Well, I mean, we're consulting
- 47:34organisations, so we've, we've created a series of like handy
- 47:39dandy tools for, for those kind of endeavours.
- 47:43It's funny that you say those five things.
- 47:45We, we actually have like I use that mental model a lot of time,
- 47:49like the five pillars of Gen AI, like like what are the verbs
- 47:54that generative AI is very good at?
- 47:56It's like, you know, kind of summarise, synthesise like it,
- 48:02it gives, I think it's a great way to do outreach, you know,
- 48:06with people that are closer to business function.
- 48:08And it also helping them build a healthier mental model of of the
- 48:15technology, whether it is, and I mean, generative AI is what's
- 48:20going to be the tip of the spear.
- 48:21But, you know, traditional machine learning or deep
- 48:25learning or even plain old automation has also a place and,
- 48:31and usually they, they work together.
- 48:34Like, you know, you have a lot of compound system.
- 48:36A lot of people talk about, you know, LLM agents, which I prefer
- 48:41to see it as that synergy between software, ML, deep
- 48:45learning and, and, you know, generative AI.
- 48:50But you're by by doing that outreach and continuing to to
- 48:55maintain those relationship with within your organisation, you're
- 48:58in a much better position to be able to identify use case and do
- 49:02back of the envelope POC. But one of the thing that we do
- 49:06quite a bit is, you know, hey, one afternoon we're going to
- 49:10validate this a handful of document like see, this is a
- 49:13result. This is, this is what's good.
- 49:15This is what's bad. Are we in a stage where we feel
- 49:20pretty comfortable? And then as you design, you
- 49:24know, your, your flow like what you're trying to, to optimise or
- 49:27what you're trying to develop, understanding what are the
- 49:31different failure modes? I, I think that this is, this is
- 49:38a very exciting way to me to develop new products and to be
- 49:42able to, to generate what I would say like differentiating a
- 49:50product. Like once in a while we see a
- 49:53couple of companies and most of the time it's not a company that
- 49:56you would expect, but they naturally like couple of people
- 50:01are gonna converge, they're gonna hack on an idea and you're
- 50:03just gonna be like, wait a moment.
- 50:05That's really. Smart.
- 50:09What have been some of those that you've seen that surprised
- 50:11you? I would say to me, it's
- 50:17something that we, we've seen very recently was to how do you
- 50:25create a chat bot, let's say with content that is not that
- 50:35needs to be curated like in the sense of your, your
- 50:39hallucination tolerance is 0 like none whatsoever.
- 50:45So it's kind of a tough predicament to say we're just
- 50:47going to put in LLM. No amount of prompt engineering
- 50:50rag fine tuning anything. Is this going to make up for the
- 50:55fact that ultimately you will get inconsistency.
- 51:00So one of the thing that we've developed as, as a, as a
- 51:04blueprint, which came from numerous conversation that we
- 51:08had across the, the industry was to, well, what if we didn't use
- 51:14an LLM for that stage? What if we just use a mere
- 51:18classifier, present the information in a way that you're
- 51:22not compromising. Like, you know, when you ask a
- 51:25question, you do, you know, a classifier to like what is a
- 51:29question that is closely related and present that.
- 51:33And if there's a little bit of inconsistency, that's just
- 51:35become part of your, your knowledge loop.
- 51:38But then use the large language model, the LLM loop in the
- 51:41content creation, creation and review to streamline the work,
- 51:47which is mandatory work. At one point someone needs to
- 51:50create the content that's going to be served up.
- 51:53How can we accelerate it? So we ended up creating a bona
- 51:56fide workbench for optimising the creation of that content,
- 52:02the ingestion of of the relevant material to be able to create
- 52:06going even to a point you're ingest APDF.
- 52:09What are like this is the style of questions that we know people
- 52:13are going to ask. What type of question does this
- 52:15document answer? And we're ultimately we're
- 52:20seeing the same benefit. You have the chat bot, the chat
- 52:23bot is presenting the information that is supposed to
- 52:26the chat bot is not hallucinating.
- 52:27There's nothing sexy there. Like, you know, it's something
- 52:30that you use previous generation technology, but we're, we, we
- 52:37look at the process, see where the friction was.
- 52:39And ultimately it wasn't a content creation and curation.
- 52:44And because this is something that the human is very tightly
- 52:46in the loop. Well, LLM can play in that
- 52:50arena. And, and to me, it was one of
- 52:53the thing that like, at first when I was looking at this, I
- 52:57was a little bit puzzled because I was like, this looks overly
- 53:00complicated. But then you start decomposing,
- 53:03like, what are the non negotiable?
- 53:06And then you're like, well, traditionally you would say
- 53:09like, oh, you can't have any hallucination.
- 53:12Oh, well, so LLM is not a good use case.
- 53:14We're going to go to the next, Oh, wait a moment.
- 53:17This is actually something that is very valuable.
- 53:21You know, a lot of contents. It's a big pain in the ass for a
- 53:24lot of of people. Can we pay attention to it?
- 53:30And then it was, you know, in our case, you know, we had some
- 53:34subject matter experts, some people that are creating the
- 53:36content, a team of data scientists to be able to develop
- 53:40the model. And it works.
- 53:42I'm I was, I was legitimately surprised it works.
- 53:46Wait, so I I wasn't clear there was no LLM involved or it's just
- 53:51involved later on it's. It's involved ahead of time.
- 53:55It's like you're basically, you know, you're, you're like you
- 53:59have kind of a knowledge base and you're doing, you know,
- 54:04you're using natural language understanding to be able to
- 54:06match the question that is proper.
- 54:08But when you're creating those articles and the metadata that
- 54:13makes them referenceable, you use large language model to to
- 54:19generate that. Like the embeddings, when you're
- 54:22creating the embeddings, you have your embedding model and so
- 54:25you're using the embedding models still.
- 54:28It's, yeah, it's, it's kind of a, it's kind of a reverse rag,
- 54:31like. You just created a whole new
- 54:34type of rag. Get out of here.
- 54:38So now hold on, hold on, hold on.
- 54:39Yeah, we've got graph rag, we've got advanced rag, we've got
- 54:42naive rag. And you heard it here first.
- 54:45You we now have reverse rag. I will.
- 54:48I will take absolutely no credit for this.
- 54:50I, I do not want to, there's something that a lot of people
- 54:55say like it's been unvented, like, you know, it just happened
- 54:59to be the pattern at hand. I, I, I, I don't want to be, I
- 55:06don't want to, I don't want to go and create a paper on reverse
- 55:09rag and I'm going to get shredded on LinkedIn.
- 55:14This is how I'm going to go and get my Centre of Excellence job.
- 55:17I'm going to go write that paper on reverse rag of an I.
- 55:21Can imagine this in your ML OPS certification thing.
- 55:24You've never heard of reverse Rag?
- 55:26And then people start searching and they see your name as the
- 55:29primary author. Like self-service at there we
- 55:33go. LinkedIn top voice.
- 55:36That's what I'm going for baby. All right so you reverse ragged
- 55:40it basically, which means you and there's a classification
- 55:44model. I'm.
- 55:44I'm still not completely sure how this works out but it sounds
- 55:48really cool because any time anyone says these magic words to
- 55:52me my brain and my attention perks up, which is we decided
- 55:58not to use an LLM. When you say that to me in 2024
- 56:02I go wait, wait what? Yeah, yeah, that is
- 56:05unconventional. And so you're using a
- 56:08classification model but. But I am not.
- 56:11So you're using the embedding model still?
- 56:13So I'll, I'll, I'll give you an example like let's, let's say
- 56:16for, let's say, for instance, that you're working for an
- 56:22insurance company and you want to be able to have some
- 56:26information around your policy. So you're, you're going to ask
- 56:31her questions around like, you know, what is my deductible if I
- 56:35have sewer backup? Well, there there's actually
- 56:40like you, you don't need an LLM in order to be able to serve
- 56:46that information. There was a couple, it's there's
- 56:49a couple of classification that you're going to have to do
- 56:51where, you know, you live in, you know, state X, you're in
- 56:57this city. This is your policy.
- 57:00You're going to have to extract all of that information, which
- 57:02for the most part is structured like you, you don't need to
- 57:06like, you know, start stuffing some embeddings and creating a
- 57:09massive rag of all the policies and so on and so forth.
- 57:12Because it's it's in the CRM exactly.
- 57:15You have that information about the customer and this is
- 57:18basically a customer support question.
- 57:20Insurance can't be telling you policies that are not your
- 57:24actual policy. So it can't go wrong exactly.
- 57:27And and then the, the article like, you know, as a matter of
- 57:30fact, your, your insurance policy was written with a set of
- 57:34articles. So if you can just say, you
- 57:37know, you're going to take this article, that's going to be
- 57:39attached to your policy, that's going to be attached to who you
- 57:42are, and and then you can craft that answer.
- 57:45So in in that case, you know, you just resurface the piece of
- 57:50content that you want and you can just add like some
- 57:54deterministic fluff of like, Hey, Dimitrios, like based on
- 57:59this information that we have with you, this is what's written
- 58:02in your policy. If if you have more questions,
- 58:06you can, you know, ask more question and then you can
- 58:08escalate with it to a human. But serving that initial piece
- 58:12of content, there's absolutely nothing stochastic with the
- 58:17exception of taking your question and translating it to
- 58:21the appropriate article. But if you use an LLM, there is
- 58:25a chance like that is whatever it might reshuffle something.
- 58:30And we're not talking like in that case, we're not talking to
- 58:35people that are like, I would rather eliminate hallucination.
- 58:39We're talking around people that are either scared shitless or
- 58:45they're constrained either by the government or, you know, by
- 58:51they're afraid to get sued if they get some bad information.
- 58:54I mean, think of it for a moment.
- 58:58Companies that are trying to do chatbot for.
- 59:02Sign in. Drugs, drug usage, where when
- 59:06you get information like it's, it's really easy for this to get
- 59:09out of hand. Like let's discount the legal
- 59:12framework for a moment. If you ask questions around like
- 59:16interaction between two medication and the LLM, for some
- 59:21reason there's there's something that magically escape.
- 59:26Well, you you could be in trouble.
- 59:29So, so how do you redesign this and find alternative pattern?
- 59:35And it's not just data science, it's how you're going to present
- 59:39the information. We did a lot of of analysis like
- 59:44human centre design, UX development to be able to see
- 59:49how it is going to go, a lot of experimentation internally
- 59:53because it, it's a problem that we decided was we're pursuing.
- 59:57It's a pattern that we're seeing across multiple customers.
- 1:00:01And it, it's, it's an interesting problem.
- 1:00:04And I think that taking that approach also demystifies that
- 1:00:08all or nothing approach to like either you put LLM at the centre
- 1:00:12of everything or you go home. There's a there's a lot of
- 1:00:18things that you can do with a more nuance and thoughtful
- 1:00:22approach. Wait, so isn't this just
- 1:00:26basically what we were doing in 2017 with chatbot?
- 1:00:30Yeah, but not every company is not every company is is is Peter
- 1:00:36was ready for that or for a lot of company generating the
- 1:00:40content was tedious. So, and, and this is one of the
- 1:00:47place where in that case and in the content generation or the
- 1:00:51the content curation or collection or in in that case,
- 1:00:55like we've, we've done some work with a client where we've used
- 1:00:58large language model to generate the questions that could be
- 1:01:03answered by that document and do Q&A pairs, which is a lot easier
- 1:01:08for someone to review then have to generate it themselves.
- 1:01:11So it becomes more of a productivity play rather than
- 1:01:14the like your user with an approximate chat bot.
- 1:01:18I see. Yeah.
- 1:01:20And this is this is fascinating to me because I know a few
- 1:01:25companies that are actually trying to do this as a service.
- 1:01:29And so I think it is one of those things that is immensely
- 1:01:33valuable as a use case if you can.
- 1:01:36The support team at any company that has a large volume of
- 1:01:42customers is just inundated constantly.
- 1:01:44And we know that because if you've ever tried to call or get
- 1:01:49somebody on the phone of whatever your phone provider or
- 1:01:53your for her local whatever, you know that it's a pain in the
- 1:01:58butt. And so if you can lift a little
- 1:02:02bit of that burden, it's really helpful.
- 1:02:05What I always have trouble with is a lot of times there are
- 1:02:13questions, but then there are other times where I need
- 1:02:17something done. I need to talk to you because I
- 1:02:20need something to happen. And I'm.
- 1:02:23So it's almost like I am very sceptical that I'm going to be
- 1:02:28able to get a machine or a support bot to actually do those
- 1:02:32things in a way that I can trust that thing to happen.
- 1:02:36And I mean, it's, it's also kind of The Dirty secret of, of, of a
- 1:02:41lot of like ancient workflow. We like a lot of people use the,
- 1:02:51the verb like function calling, you know, for, for an LLM to be
- 1:02:55able to perform an action, the function need to exist.
- 1:02:59Like, I find it funny to say this.
- 1:03:02And, and, and I know like I'm, I'm I saw your smile when when I
- 1:03:08I started. But the if the, if there's
- 1:03:13nothing to call, then everything fall like a House of Cards.
- 1:03:16So, you know, you need to build that kind of tower.
- 1:03:20Like let's say you use an example like I want to close my
- 1:03:23account. Then you talk to a chat bot
- 1:03:26because you're going to your bank.
- 1:03:28Well, there's a pretty big SOP that like standard procedure,
- 1:03:33standard operating procedure that needs to be followed.
- 1:03:36Sometime people are going to try to retain you.
- 1:03:39So it, it, it actually like if if you look at this, it usually
- 1:03:43looks like a decision tree with like, you know, Inflexion point
- 1:03:46and and decision making that you have to do.
- 1:03:50But let's say for an example, that like the action close the
- 1:03:54account involves 3 application, 4 screens and then a letter that
- 1:04:01you have to mail to the person. Cool.
- 1:04:04Your very first step should be to automate that and, and, and
- 1:04:09then you can start growing your process and maybe, and maybe the
- 1:04:15agentic LLM is, is going to be your North Star, but start with
- 1:04:21those fundamental gain the ROI as it's going to go.
- 1:04:24What are the things that because you're not necessarily going to
- 1:04:28want to the, the LLM to call for function one after the other.
- 1:04:32If that step happened, you might want to, you know, do something
- 1:04:36that's going to abstract it. You might still be working with
- 1:04:41like an AS400 type system, which means that you're going to do
- 1:04:45RPA or God forbid, you know, put an LLM to interpret the screen
- 1:04:50and then click on those things and.
- 1:04:52And there we go. Yeah, but, but, but I mean, it's
- 1:04:55it, it all has to do with your system design and and an LLM
- 1:04:59application is also an ML application, which means that
- 1:05:01all of the consideration that you have with ML also applies to
- 1:05:05your LLM app. And all of that is also a
- 1:05:07software product. So if you so you have to
- 1:05:09remember that all of the responsibility of developing a
- 1:05:12software product and nothing disappears because you ignore
- 1:05:15it, but it also gives you that complete array of tool that you
- 1:05:21can leverage. And a lot of things need to
- 1:05:24happen sometime before you can use an LLM competently.
- 1:05:29And a lot of, a lot of companies are I, I, I think we're seeing
- 1:05:37this right now where everybody's doing agent base LLM and they're
- 1:05:41all doing LLM hosting and they're all doing like, you
- 1:05:44know, LLM development into the ecosystem because it's new, it's
- 1:05:50interesting, it's fresh, But you, you also need to remember
- 1:05:54that's just part of the story. Like what are you going to do
- 1:05:57with the rest of the stuff? Do like you want to be able to
- 1:06:03do a rag and you need embeddings?
- 1:06:05Cool. But if your data is on a
- 1:06:10OneDrive somewhere and you know it's getting updated by, you
- 1:06:16know, Penny from finance every Tuesday, well, you need to be
- 1:06:22able to have a pipeline that's going to do this.
- 1:06:25It's not an AI, but it needs to happen still.
- 1:06:31It's funny because in 2020 we had Luigi Petrino on this
- 1:06:36podcast, and I wrote a post after talking with him because
- 1:06:40one of the main themes that I took away from the conversation
- 1:06:43was start manual 1st and then automate.
- 1:06:47Yeah, and you just added an extra little bit to it.
- 1:06:50It's start manual first, then automate, then AI fi or then
- 1:06:56make it AI agentable, whatever it may be that the next step is.
- 1:07:02So if you want to function call it or make it agentic.
- 1:07:07It's almost like that manual automate agentic.
- 1:07:11And you can't just jump over any of those steps because your
- 1:07:16agent is going to not be efficient.
- 1:07:22And I really like how you said that it's probably not the most
- 1:07:25useful for the agent to have four different function calls in
- 1:07:29there. Maybe you can extract abstract
- 1:07:31something and make it a lot easier for the agent when it
- 1:07:37comes time for you to make it agentic.
- 1:07:40And as you design your experience, you know, you have
- 1:07:44to remember that even though it's an LLM, like it depends on
- 1:07:48how much control you want to give to the machine.
- 1:07:50Like if, if you're one of my favourite thing, like sometime
- 1:07:54we do design of like, you know, customer service bots or, or,
- 1:07:59you know, internal productivity bots.
- 1:08:01And, and you ask, OK, what should happen at this point?
- 1:08:05And everyone around the room, it's like, well, it depends.
- 1:08:08And it's like, cool, we're going to have to break that down
- 1:08:12because ultimately you're relinquishing your decision
- 1:08:18making to either an open source LLM or a third party LLM.
- 1:08:24And and you also need to be able to design fail safe.
- 1:08:28And this is very similar to how you design for human.
- 1:08:31You know, humans errors are creeping and how do you correct
- 1:08:34them there? There's a lot of process that
- 1:08:37you don't need a second person to go over it because it's
- 1:08:41highly sensitive. So, so you have to design those,
- 1:08:46those workflow. And I think we're, we're getting
- 1:08:49the grasp of it. One of the, one of the thing
- 1:08:53that I use a lot is every single time there's a decision point
- 1:08:56that you want to use machine learning and you want, or you
- 1:08:58want to use generative AI. I'm always saying the question
- 1:09:02like, let's assume that's 70% of the time it's going to do the
- 1:09:05right thing, but 30% of the time it's going to do something
- 1:09:08wrong. Is this making or breaking your
- 1:09:12use case? And I, I had some occurrences
- 1:09:16where people were like, well, we need 100% accuracy still to this
- 1:09:21day. You know it, it was the same
- 1:09:22thing when we were talking about like linear regression tree
- 1:09:26based models, you know, even neural network.
- 1:09:30And now with LLM you know your your definition of OK.
- 1:09:36How many errors are you willing to accept if your number is 0?
- 1:09:42Probably not the right use case. Probably not the right use case,
- 1:09:45but also are you really that certain that the humans that are
- 1:09:48doing the job are? Also, making zero mistakes.
- 1:09:52Turn the tables. Yeah, totally.
- 1:09:56Because anybody who answers that honestly is going to go, yeah,
- 1:09:59of course we're making mistakes all the time.