Podcast
Practical AI
Hosted by Daniel Whitenack and Chris Benson · EN
Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).
The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!
53episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Open source AI to tackle your backlog
Apr 17, 202500:42:04Summary readyVibe coding, agentic workflows, and AI-assisted pull requests? In this episode, Daniel and Chris chat with Robert Brennan and Graham Neubig of All Hands AI about how AI is transforming software development—from senior engineer productivity to open source agents that address GitHub issues. They dive into trust, tooling, collaboration, and what it means to build software in the era of AI agents. Whether you're coding from your laptop or your phone on a morning walk, the future is hands-free (and All Hands).Featuring:Robert Brennan – LinkedIn, XGraham Neubig – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:All HandsAll Hands on GitHubAll Hands on Hugging Face
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Orchestrating agents, APIs, and MCP servers
Apr 14, 202500:42:52Summary readyIn this episode, Daniel sits down with Pavel Veller, EPAM’s Chief Technologist, to explore the practical challenges of orchestrating many AI agents and managing connections to disparate systems/tools. Pavel shares insights from his hands-on work with agentic architectures and internal tools like "DIAL". Pavel also helps us understand things like MCP servers and why connecting assistants via APIs is easy—but making them useful is hard. Featuring:Pavel Veller – LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:EPAMDIALSWE-bench results
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Software and hardware acceleration with Groq
Apr 2, 202500:43:24Summary readyHow do you enable AI acceleration (at both the hardware and software layers) that stays ahead of rapid industry shifts? In this episode, Dhananjay Singh from Groq dives into the evolving landscape of AI inference and acceleration. We explore how Groq optimizes the serving layer, adapts to industry shifts, and supports emerging model architectures. Featuring:Dhananjay Singh – LinkedIn, XChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:GroqSponsors:Augment Code - Developer AI that uses deep understanding of your large codebase and how you build software to deliver personalized code suggestions and insights. Augment provides relevant, contextualized code right in your IDE or Slack. It transforms scattered knowledge into code or answers, eliminating time spent searching docs or interrupting teammates.
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AI-assisted coding with GitHub's COO
Mar 21, 202500:50:04Summary readyKyle Daigle, COO of GitHub, joins the hosts to discuss the evolving role of AI in software development, GitHub Copilot’s impact, and the challenges of AI-assisted coding. The conversation covers licensing concerns, ethical considerations, and how developers can navigate these complexities. Kyle also shares his vision for ambient AI, which seamlessly integrates into workflows to enhance productivity and innovation, shaping the future of developer tools. Featuring:Kyle Daigle – LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XSponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products.
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Optimizing for efficiency with IBM’s Granite
Mar 14, 202500:43:38Summary readyWe often judge AI models by leaderboard scores, but what if efficiency matters more? Kate Soule from IBM joins us to discuss how Granite AI is rethinking AI at the edge—breaking tasks into smaller, efficient components and co-designing models with hardware. She also shares why AI should prioritize efficiency frontiers over incremental benchmark gains and how seamless model routing can optimize performance. Featuring:Kate Soule – LinkedInChris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XLinks:IBM GraniteIBM Granite on Hugging FaceIBM Expands Granite Model Family with New Multi-Modal and Reasoning AI Built for the Enterprise
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Build a workspace of AI agents
Mar 8, 202500:47:39Summary readyHow can every single person build a personal AI protégé and then accumulate (and share) a host of other assistants? In this episode, we dive into the world of no-code AI with Scott Meyer from Chipp.ai. We discuss AI tooling for people that can't code, the cultural shift that needs to happen for widespread AI adoption in businesses, and the predicted growth trajectory of AI assistant that you can own.Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XScott Meyer - LinkedIn, XSponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products.Show Notes:Chipp.aiChipp.ai's Discord
SummaryGenAI hot takes and bad use cases
Feb 24, 202500:30:36Summary readyIt seems like all we hear about are the great use cases for GenAI, but where should you NOT be using the technology? On this episode Chris and Daniel share their hot takes and bad use cases. Some may surprise you!Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 3 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!
SummaryTool calling and agents
Feb 14, 202500:45:00Summary readyIt seems like everyone is uses the term “agent” differently these days. In this episode, Chris and Daniel dig into the details of tool calling and its connection to agents. They help clarify how LLMs can “talk to” and “interact with” other systems like databases, APIs, web apps, etc. Along the way they share related learning resources.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 4 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:smolagentsHugging Face agents courseSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
SummaryDeep-dive into DeepSeek
Jan 31, 202500:50:47Summary readyThere is crazy hype and a lot of confusion related to DeepSeek’s latest model DeepSeek R1. The products provided by DeepSeek (their version of a ChatGPT-like app) has exploded in popularity. However, ties to China have raised privacy and geopolitical concerns. In this episode, Chris and Daniel cut through the hype to talk about the model, privacy implications, running DeepSeek models securely, and what this signals for open models in 2025.Join the discussionChangelog++ members save 5 minutes on this episode because they made the ads disappear. Join today!Sponsors:Notion – Notion is a place where any team can write, plan, organize, and rediscover the joy of play. It’s a workspace designed not just for making progress, but getting inspired. Notion is for everyone — whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or freelance designer, starting a new startup or a student juggling classes and clubs. Domo – The AI and data products platform. Strengthen your entire data journey with Domo’s AI and data products. Featuring:Chris Benson – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Daniel’s blog post on DeepSeekDeepSeek R1 on Hugging FaceDeepSeekSomething missing or broken? PRs welcome!
SummaryAI trends: a Latent Space crossover
Jun 14, 2023Tap to summarizeDaniel had the chance to sit down with @swyx and Alessio from the Latent Space pod in SF to talk about current AI trends and to highlight some key learnings from past episodes. The discussion covers open access LLMs, smol models, model controls, prompt engineering, and LLMOps. This mashup is magical. Don’t miss it!Sponsors:Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.comFly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs. Typesense – Lightning fast, globally distributed Search-as-a-Service that runs in memory. You literally can’t get any faster! Featuring:Shawn Wang – Website, GitHub, XAlessio Fanelli – Website, GitHub, XDaniel Whitenack – Website, GitHub, XShow Notes:Latent Space podcastFeatured Latent Space episodes: BenchmarksReza ShabaniMosaicML and MPTSegment AnythingMike ConoverFeatured Practical AI episodes: From notebooks to Netflix scale with MetaflowCapabilities of LLMs 🤯 ML at small organizationsPrediction GuardData DanUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here!
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