Experimentation Tools; Surge in MLOps; 2021 Books
Data Exchange podcast
Modern Experimentation Platforms: Che Sharma is the founder and CEO of Eppo, an experimentation framework that integrates with modern data platforms (lakehouses and cloud data warehouses). Investors and engineers have created an abundance of companies that specialize in ML infrastructure and MLOps, while applications like experimentation have received little attention. The reason isn't ignorance: numerous books have extolled the virtues of experimentation. The reality is that most data teams live primarily in the world of reporting (with a sprinkling of ML models). Companies that are able to make experimentation more accessible end up with data and product teams that have a more intimate connection to metrics and KPIs.
NLP and AI in Financial Services: Anshul Pandey is the CTO and co-founder of Accern, a startup helping financial services companies build and deploy AI applications via a no-code platform. Our conversation focused on the specific challenges of building AI and NLP applications within financial services, an industry that has long been one of the early adopters of AI and data technologies.
Data & Machine Learning Tools and Infrastructure
Making Scala Work at Databricks: Li Haoyi describes an impressive suite of tools and best practices.
Launching the Infinite Laptop: Over the last few months I’ve enjoyed early access to Anyscale’s newly launched platform. I write and test out any Python program on my laptop, add a few lines of code, and the exact same program that relies on my favorite libraries runs on a cluster. It has been a critical addition to my toolbox for recent projects involving machine learning models in time-series and NLP. As a result, I can now easily run code from my "laptop" that utilizes as many CPU/GPU cores as I need.
Recommendations
As we approach the end of the year, let me share a few books and long reads I enjoyed this year:
This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race
Cryptography: The Key to Digital Security, How It Works, and Why It Matters
Samuelson Friedman: A crash course in modern macroeconomics through the friendship of two Nobel laureates and leaders of competing schools of thought. With all the talk about inflation and economic uncertainty, this book is a must-read as we move towards 2022.
Geopolitical Alpha: An Investment Framework for Predicting the Future
The World for Sale: Money, Power and the Traders Who Barter the Earth’s Resources
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Ben Lorica edits the Gradient Flow newsletter. He helps organize the Ray Summit, the NLP Summit, and the Data+AI Summit. He is the host of the Data Exchange podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @BigData. This newsletter is produced by Gradient Flow.