A look at LLMs and their popularity — Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have been in the news lately, with special attention paid to large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s GPT-3. There have been some bold claims in the media — could models like this soon replace search engines or even master language? But what exactly are…

Build a news headline classifier on the command line — From intent classification in virtual assistants like Alexa & Google Home, through to sentiment analysis and topic identification — text classification can power many different applications. Text classification is the job of predicting which category a piece of text belongs to. If for example the categories are intents for and…

Sharing status at work — Imagine your friend is renovating their house and you ask how it’s going. “It’s all great!” they say. “We’ve stripped 3 rooms, put 7 tins worth of emulsion on the walls, sanded 9 sq m of floorboards and assembled 2 of the bookcases plus a desk. …

Talking to machines through the years — Conversation comes naturally to us. It’s remarkable just how fluently we can converse on any number of topics, and adapt our style with ease to speak with any number of people. In contrast, our conversations with machines can be clumsy and stilted. Conversational AI has been a long-standing research topic…

The multifaceted job of managing Machine Learning experts — If you’re building an ML product and hire more than a couple of scientists, you’ll quickly reach a point where they need a dedicated manager. Yet, experienced ML managers may be even harder to hire than ML scientists! …

Who is building automated transcription services? — Speech-to-text (STT) — also called Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) — is a fast growing technology, which fuels applications like virtual assistants, automated captioning, note taking & more. But what are the options for companies who want to build their own products making use of the latest speech-to-text technology? There are…

Building models and much more — Machine learning scientist is a role in high demand and companies who want to build ML technology are having trouble filling all their vacancies. Yet, in-depth descriptions of what the job entails are hard to come by. Candidates new to industry don’t always know what they can offer with their…

Using Hugging Face Spaces — ML tools have come a long way in the past decade. One of the companies making great strides here is Hugging Face. I wanted to try out their new Spaces to create a public browser-based demo of some NLP tools. …

What’s really needed to build an ML product? — Problem identification For building any product, whether it includes ML or not, the first step is to identify the problem you’re trying to solve. ML is a great tool for solving some problems, but there are many where it’s best to start simpler. In this post, let’s consider working for a company…