Career Success in the AI Era, with Deepali Vyas

Rapid A.I. advances can be intimidating: How can you approach your career so you flourish in the coming A.I. era? Find out from Deepali Vyas — a world-leading A.I.-exec headhunter — in today's episode.

Deepali is:

• Senior Partner and Global Head of the Data, A.I. and Financial Technology Practice of Korn Ferry, one of the world’s largest executive-search firms.

• Founder of ProFolios.ai, a video-centric, A.I.-enhanced professional-branding platform.

• Founder of Fearless+, a platform that empowers tens of thousands of young people for career success.

• Holds a Bachelor’s in Financial Mathematics and a Master’s in International Finance from the London School of Economics.

Today’s episode should be interesting to everyone. In it, Deepali details:

• How A.I. has driven a 10x increase in applications per position and how you can compete in this high-volume climate.

• Why technical skills are becoming "table stakes" and what will differentiate the best candidates in the A.I. era.

• An insider's view on the talent flows between Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and how you can capitalize on these flows in your career.

• The "green flags" to look for in potential bosses and employers.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

How to Become Happier, with Dr. Nat Ware

On most metrics, it's never been a better time to be alive. And yet, many of us are unhappy. In today's episode, Dr. Nat Ware explains why we're unhappy... and, mercifully, what we can do about it!

Nat:

• Is a renowned keynote speaker; he has one TEDx talk alone that has over 2 million views on YouTube (it forms the basis of the content in today’s episode).

• Is the social-impact entrepreneur behind 180 Degrees Consulting (the world's largest consultancy for non-profits) as well as Forté (a startup that facilitates cost-free reskilling of workforces).

• Holds both a doctorate in economics and an MBA from the University of Oxford.

Today’s episode should be fascinating to anyone. In it, Nat details:

• Why, despite life on this planet being better than ever before, humans are so unhappy.

• Concrete guidance on what you can do to become happier.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

AI Systems as Productivity Engines, with You.com’s Bryan McCann

Today, wildly intelligent Bryan McCann describes the Agentic A.I. behind his skyrocketing startup You.com and how it will lead to scientific discoveries human scientists couldn't dream of making. Don't miss this episode!

Bryan:

• Co-Founder and CTO of You.com, a prominent Bay Area A.I. startup that has raised $99m in venture capital (including a $50m Series B in September that valued the firm at nearly a billion dollars).

• Was previously Lead Research Scientist at Salesforce and an assistant on courses at Stanford such as Andrew Ng’s wildly popular machine learning course.

• Holds a Master’s in Computer Science, a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and a Bachelor’s in Philosophy, all from Stanford University.

Today’s episode should be fascinating to anyone interested in AI. In it, extremely well-spoken Bryan details:

• The philosophical underpinnings of the breakthroughs that led to the leading A.I. models we have today as well as the ones that will emerge in the coming years.

• How a coding mistake he made serendipitously revealed fundamental insights about meaning and language model alignment.

• Why he believes humanity is entering an existential crisis due to A.I., but nevertheless remains optimistic about the future.

• The fascinating connection between language models and biological proteins.

• Why A.I. systems might soon be able to make scientific discoveries humans could never dream of making.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

In Case You Missed It in October 2024

It's unreal to be able to speak to folks like the guests I hosted on the SuperDataScience Podcast last month. ICYMI, today's episode highlights the most riveting moments from October.

The specific conversation highlights included in today's episode are:

1. UC San Diego neuroscience professor Dr. Bradley Voytek on how data science facilitates breakthroughs in our understanding of the brain.

2. Eloquent Natalie Monbiot on how lifelike, digital versions of ourselves can scale up our public-facing work.

3. Lightning AI CTO Dr. Luca Antiga on where he sees generative A.I. being most useful in our professional lives.

4. Gable CEO Chad Sanderson on how, when we work with data, we always need to think about how downstream users might come to interpret our data... which is why he finds data contracts so important that he's writing an O'Reilly book about it.

5. Polars CEO Ritchie Vink on the incredible specs (e.g., efficiency speedups) of his open-source DataFrame-operations library for Python.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

The 10 Reasons AI Projects Fail, with Dr. Martin Goodson

Most A.I. projects fail. In today's episode, the brilliant (and hilarious) Dr. Martin Goodson details the top 10 reasons why A.I. projects fail and how to avoid these common pitfalls.

Martin:

• Is CEO and Chief Scientist at Evolution AI, a firm that uses generative A.I. to extract information from millions of documents a day for their clients.

• Is Founder and Organizer of the London ML Meetup, which (with >15,000 members) is the largest community of AI/ML experts in Europe.

• Previously led data science at startups that apply ML to billions of data points daily.

• Was a statistical geneticist at the University of Oxford (where we shared a small office together)!

Today’s episode will be of interest to anyone even vaguely interested in data science, ML or AI. In today’s episode, Martin details:

• The 10 reasons why data science projects fail and how to avoid these common pitfalls.

• His insights on building A.I. startups that serve large enterprises.

• The importance of open-source A.I. development.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Neuroscience Fueled by ML, with Prof. Bradley Voytek

Today's guest is the extraordinarily intelligent and well-spoken UC San Diego theoretical neuroscience professor, Bradley Voytek. He reveals how AI/ML is accelerating our understanding of the brain.

More on Brad:

• Professor in UC San Diego's Department of Cognitive Science, Data Science Institute, and the Neurosciences Graduate Program.

• Joined Uber as their first data scientist, when it was a 10-person startup, helping build their data science strategy and team.

• Outreach work has appeared in Scientific American, NPR... and Comic-Con!

• Co-authored the amusing book "Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?"

Today’s episode has some brief exchanges that will appeal most to hands-on practitioners, but should overall be fascinating to anyone.

In today’s episode, Brad details:

• How large-scale data science and machine learning are accelerating neuroscience research.

• Discoveries his lab has recently made that overturn nearly a century of neuroscience doctrine.

• Insights on structuring data science education to balance technical skills with creative, practical problem-solving.

• Lessons from using data science to optimize Uber's early ride-prediction algorithms.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Are “Citizen Data Scientists” A Myth? With Keith McCormick

In a recent episode, Nick Elprin and I laughed that "citizen data scientists" don't exist. Keith McCormick joins me today to eloquently rebut us and demonstrate the clear value of low-code/no-code tools.

Keith is:

• Data Science Principal at the enterprise A.I. consultancy Further.

• Creator of dozens LinkedIn Learning courses on machine learning and A.I. with, in aggregate, over a million students!

• Author of four statistics books.

Today’s short episode should be of interest to just about any listener. In it, Keith details:

• Common circumstances where low-code/no-code data science tools are the best option for you, even if you are a coding whiz.

• Whether citizen data scientists are myth or reality.

• How AutoML fits into the data science workflow - and why it won't replace data science teams.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Data Contracts: The Key to Data Quality, with Chad Sanderson

Before talking to Chad Sanderson, I had never heard of Data Contracts. Now, I'm a proponent of how critical they are for data quality within any platform. Listen in and you may become a proponent too!

Chad is our guest in today's episode. He's:

• An extremely smooth communicator of technical information.

• CEO and Co-Founder of Gable, a platform for data teams that has raised $7m in seed funding.

• Chief Operator of the non-profit Data Quality Camp.

• Author of the forthcoming O'Reilly book “Data Contracts”.

• His informative social-media posts on Data Contracts have enabled him to amass over 80,000 followers on LinkedIn alone.

Today’s episode will appeal most to folks who work with data hands-on or who are involved in management roles that oversee data flows. Init, Chad details:

• What data contracts are.

• The critical concept of "shifting left" in data quality and governance.

• How data debt accumulates and leads to "spaghetti" data architectures.

• Why data quality is fundamentally a change-management problem.

Thanks to Emily Pastewka for suggesting Chad as a guest on the show!

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Virtual Humans and AI Clones, with Natalie Monbiot

Today, the clever and astoundingly well-spoken Natalie Monbiot provides a fascinating, mind-expanding episode on virtual humans, A.I. clones and the emerging virtual-human economy.

Natalie:

• Is Head of Strategy and a Founding Team member of Hour One, a leader in virtual-human video generation that raised $20m in a Series A led by Insight Partners.

• Through her own consultancy, EKLEKTIK, she advises virtual-human and A.I.-clone companies.

• Regularly speaks at the world's largest conferences, including Web Summit and SXSW.

• Holds a Master's in Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford.

Today's episode will of interest to everyone. In it, Natalie details:

• What virtual humans are.

• How virtual humans will buy us time and unleash a virtual-human economy.

• The ethical quandaries and challenges associated with creating virtual twins.

• What distinguishes virtual humans from deep fakes.

(P.S.: This is the first time we've ever shot an episode with three video cameras... if you watch the video version, let me know if you think it's worth the extra effort and investment!)

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

The Skills You Need to Be an Effective Data Scientist, with Marck Vaisman

Based on extensive research and analytical evaluations, in today's episode Marck Vaisman details all the skills that are essential for today's data professional.

Marck:

• Has been at Microsoft for seven years; for 5+ years, he’s been a Senior Cloud Solutions Architect, specializing in data, data science and AI/ML.

• For nearly a decade he’s also been an adjunct professor at both Georgetown University and The George Washington University, teaching graduate-level courses on math, stats, analytics and decision sciences.

• Co-Founded a non-profit in Washington, DC that runs both the Data Science DC and Statistical Programming DC Meetups.

• Holds a Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University and an MBA from Vanderbilt University.

Today’s episode will be of interest to anyone who is, manages, or aspires to be a data professional.

In today’s episode, Marck details:

• The skills, competencies and personas that data scientists and related professionals (such as analysts, data engineers, ML engineers and A.I. engineers) can have.

• The academic research on why “data scientist” is such a difficult job title to define.

• A comprehensive characterization of the essential skills that every data professional needs to be effective and the skills that allow you to specialize as a particular subtype of data scientist.

• The implications of all of this for both folks hunting for a data role and the companies that are looking to hire them.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

In Case You Missed It in August 2024

We had a slew of eye-opening conversations in August on the SuperDataScience Podcast I host. ICYMI, today's episode highlights the most fascinating moments from my convos with them.

Specifically, conversation highlights include:

1. ChainML's Head of A.I. Education Shingai Manjengwa on how multiple, individual A.I. agents can come together to perform complex actions.

2. Renowned futurist and entrepreneur Dr. Daniel Hulme on how A.I. can help us become better and faster at our jobs by circumventing the traditional corporate hierarchies that today seem only to slow us down.

3. Mathematical-optimization guru Jerome Yurchisin (of Gurobi Optimization) on how continuing education will be vital in our increasingly automated work environment... and how this education will be streamlined by A.I.

4. Nick Elprin, Co-Founder and CEO of the wildly successful Domino Data Lab, on why it's essential for enterprises to clearly define their A.I. infrastructure in order for their A.I. deployments to prosper.

Check out today's episode (#818) to hear all these eye-opening conversations. The "Super Data Science Podcast with Jon Krohn" is available on all major podcasting platforms and a video version is on YouTube.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

The Positron IDE, Tidy NLP and MLOps with Dr. Julia Silge

Prepare to have your brain tickled by Dr. Julia Silge. In today's episode, Julia details the IDE she's been developing for data scientists, "Tidy" NLP, and open-source libraries that make MLOps a breeze.

More on Julia:

• Engineering Manager at Posit PBC (makers of RStudio... and the company formerly known as RStudio).

• Authored the bestselling O'Reilly books “Text Mining with R” and “Tidy Modeling with R".

• Previously worked as a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow and Datassist.

• Prior to joining industry, was an academic researcher and professor at Yale University.

• Holds a PhD in Astronomy from The University of Texas at Austin.

Today’s episode will probably appeal most to hands-on practitioners like data scientists, software developers and ML engineers. In it, Julia details:

• The brand-new IDE Positron (free to use and source-available) that she’s been developing.

• Her favorite LLMs for code generation.

• The open-source software libraries that make MLOps easy.

• Her top tips for effective Natural Language Processing, including when more traditional NLP techniques should be used instead of an LLM.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Explaining AGI to a 94-Year-Old

In today's short episode, I explain "data", "data science", "A.I." and AGI to a 94-year-old woman (my brilliant grandmother) who previously had no familiarity with the terms.

Perhaps the episode will be helpful to folks who are unfamiliar with any of these terms themselves, or to folks who'd like ideas for how to explain any of them to laypeople.

("AGI" is Artificial General Intelligence, btw!)

The "Super Data Science Podcast with Jon Krohn" is available on your favorite podcasting platform and the video version (which today is simply an audio waveform!) is on YouTube. Today's episode is #816.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

DataFrame Operations 100x Faster than Pandas, with Marco Gorelli

Today's episode is all about Polars — the hot library for Python that offers up to 100x speedups for DataFrame operations relative to pandas. Marco Gorelli, a core Polars developer, is our gifted guide.

Marco is a tremendously talented communicator of complex technical topics, making him the perfect guest for this highly technical episode. He:

• Is a core developer of the popular Python libraries pandas and Polars.

• Is the creator of the Narwhals library.

• Has spoken at several major Python conferences (such as PyData), taught Polars professionally, and wrote the first complete Polars plugins tutorial.

• Currently works as Senior Software Engineer at Quansight Labs.

• Previously, worked as a data scientist and was one of the prize winners (from amongst >100,000 entrants!) of the M6 forecasting competition.

• Holds a Master’s in Mathematics and the Foundations of Computer Science from the University of Oxford.

Today’s episode will appeal primarily to hands-on technical folks like data scientists, ML engineers and software developers.

In today’s episode, Marco details:

• What the hot, fast-growing Polars library for working with DataFrames in Python is (it already has 65m downloads and 28k GitHub stars).

• How Polars offers up to 100x speed-ups relative to Pandas on DataFrame operations.

• How the lightweight, dependency-free Narwhals package he created allows for easy compatibility between different DataFrame libraries such as Polars and Pandas.

• How he got addicted to open-source development.

• The simple trick he used to be a prize-winner in super-popular forecasting competitions.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Scaling Data Science Teams Effectively, with Nick Elprin

Today's episode with (extremely intelligent and wildly successful ML entrepreneur) Nick Elprin covers efficiently scaling data science teams and ensuring A.I. projects are commercial wins 🥇

Nick:

• Is Co-Founder and CEO of Domino Data Lab, a colossal Bay Area startup that has raised over $200m in venture capital from some of the world’s most prestigious VC firms.

• Prior to co-founding Domino Data Lab 11 years ago, he worked as a technologist at Bridgewater Associates, the well-known hedge fund.

• He holds both a BA and MS in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Today’s episode may appeal most to technical folks but has tons of content that will be of interest to anyone in or interested in commercializing data science or A.I.

In this episode, Nick details:

• How organizations can leverage enterprise platforms to efficiently scale their data science teams and data science workflows.

• The exact team size at which integrating such a platform becomes worthwhile.

• How to ensure A.I. projects are commercially successful.

• The tech stack they use at Domino to create such a performant platform.

• His top tip for growing your own colossal data science startup.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Superintelligence and the Six Singularities, with Dr. Daniel Hulme

Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) could be realized in our lifetime... some even think within a few years. Today's brilliant guest, Dr. Daniel Hulme, details the six major ways society could be overhauled by ASI.

More on Daniel:

• Chief A.I. Officer at marketing giant WPP.

• CEO of A.I. consulting-services company Satalia.

• Entrepreneur-in-Residence at one of the world's top A.I.-research universities, UCL.

• Co-founder of Faculty and speaker at Singularity University.

• Holds an Eng.D. in computational complexity from UCL.

Today’s episode should be of interest to everyone. In it, Daniel details:

• How and when Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) may arise.

• The six types of Singularity ASI is expected to unleash.

• Neuromorphic computing.

• How to align A.I. interests with human interests.

• Ways human work could be dramatically automated not just in the future… but this very day.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

Merged LLMs Are Smaller And More Capable, with Arcee AI’s Mark McQuade and Charles Goddard

Today's episode is seriously mind-expanding. In it, Mark and Charles detail how they're pushing the A.I. frontier through LLM merging, extremely efficient (even CPU-only!) LLM training, and *Small* Language Models.

Mark McQuade:

• Is Co-Founder and CEO of Arcee.ai.

• Previously, he held client-facing roles at Hugging Face and Roboflow as well as leading the data science and engineering practice of a Rackspace company.

• He studied electronic engineering at Fleming College in Canada.

Charles Goddard:

• Is Chief of Frontier Research at Arcee.ai

• Previously, he was a software engineer at Apple and the famed NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

• Studied engineering at Olin College in Massachusetts.

Today’s episode is relatively technical so will likely appeal most to hands-on practitioners like data scientists and ML engineers. In it, Charles and Mark detail:

• How their impressive open-source model-merging approach combines the capabilities of multiple LLMs without increasing the model’s size.

• A separate open-source approach for training LLMs efficiently by targeting specific modules of the network to train while freezing others.

• The pros and cons of Mixture-of-Experts versus Mixture-of-Agents approaches.

• How to enable small language models to outcompete the big foundation LLMs like GPT-4, Gemini and Claude.

• How to leverage open-source projects to land big enterprise contracts and attract big chunks of venture capital.

On that final note, congrats to the Arcee.ai team on announcing their $24m Series A round this very day... unsurprising given their tremendously innovative tech and rapid revenue ramp-up! It's very rare to see runaway A.I. startup successes like this one.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

A Transformative Century of Technological Progress, with Annie P.

For today's special episode (#800), I learned from my 94-year-old grandmother the tricks to living before electricity or running water... and how the wild tech transformation of the past century has impacted her.

In a bit more detail, in this episode, Annie covers:

• What work and life were like growing up on a farm with no electricity or running water.

• How education, communication, security, entertainment and food storage have evolved over her lifetime.

• Similarities between geopolitical events in the 1930s and events transpiring today.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

In Case You Missed It in May 2024

We had another incredible set of guests in May on the SuperDataScience Podcast I host. ICYMI, today's episode highlights the most fascinating moments of my conversations with them.

Specifically, conversation highlights include:

1. Dr. Luis Serrano, a math- and ML-education YouTuber with 150k subscribers, explaining what language embeddings are, how they function, and how essential they are for running semantic search queries.

2. Sol Rashidi, serial C-suite data-role executive at Fortune 100s and bestselling author of "Your A.I. Survival Guide", on her approach to building data teams.

3. Co-founder of the MLOps Community, Demetrios Brinkmann, on the differences between ML Engineering and MLOps roles.

4. Navdeep Martin, an entrepreneur blending climate tech and generative A.I. in her latest startup, on opportunities where you can tackle climate change with technological innovation yourself.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.

The Six Keys to Data Scientists’ Success, with Kirill Eremenko

For today's episode, Kirill Eremenko — who has taught more than 2.8 million people data science — fills us in on his six most valuable insights about data science careers.

More on Kirill:

• Founder and CEO of SuperDataScience, an e-learning platform that is the namesake of this very podcast.

• Launched the SuperDataScience Podcast in 2016 and hosted the show until he passed me the reins four years ago.

• Has reached more than 2.8 million students through the courses he’s published on Udemy, making him Udemy’s most popular data science instructor.

At a high level, Kirill's six data science insights are:

1. Unlike many other careers, there’s no need for formal credentials to become a data scientist.

2. Mentors can be invaluable guides in a DS career, but you should also try to give back to your mentors when you can.

3. Portfolios are the key to landing the DS job of your dream because they showcase your DS abilities for all to see.

4. Hands-on labs are a fun, interactive way to develop your portfolio and are a great complement to classes.

5. Collaborations can make lots of aspects of DS career development fun, including learning new materials, completing labs and developing your portfolio.

6. Data scientists can come from any background and work from anywhere in the world with an Internet connection.

The SuperDataScience podcast is available on all major podcasting platforms, YouTube, and at SuperDataScience.com.