"No one is harder on a talented person than the person themselves" - Linda Wilkinson ; "Trust your guts and don't follow the herd" ; "Validate direction not destination" ;

April 27, 2024

OpenAI - Prompt King - Prompt Usage Patterns

The interesting thing about OpenAI is the prompt history. The information below is a gold mine:

  • Commonly used prompts and their responses.
  • Ranking responses based on user feedback.
  • Distribution of prompts across different domains. (Health, History, News, Tech)
  • Caching of prompts and answers for quicker access.
  • Low latency approach to handling cache versus read operations.
  • Asynchronous processes involved in domain detection, intent detection, and retrieval.
  • Various combinations of indexes are used to optimize searches using golden data, cached data, summary data, and raw data.
Keep Exploring!!!

April 25, 2024

Good Paper Read - THE LANDSCAPE OF EMERGING AI AGENT ARCHITECTURES FOR REASONING, PLANNING, AND TOOL CALLING: A SURVEY

THE LANDSCAPE OF EMERGING AI AGENT ARCHITECTURES FOR REASONING, PLANNING, AND TOOL CALLING: A SURVEY

Key Summary notes

  • AI agent architectures are either comprised of a single agent or multiple agents working together to solve a problem.
  • Agent Persona. An agent persona describes the role or personality that the agent should take on, including any other instructions specific to that agent
  • ReAct. In the ReAct (Reason + Act) method, an agent first writes a thought about the given task. It then performs an action based on that thought, and the output is observed
  • Reflexion. Reflexion is a single-agent pattern that uses self-reflection through linguistic feedback


Dify is an open-source LLM app development platform

Beyond LLMs: Agents, Emergent Abilities

1. Agent is able to split / create smaller subtasks



2. Persona can be set for the agent, Few shot examples supplied to get the context



3. Multiple agents created for different purposes



4. Custom Agents / Agent to Agent communication etc..


Keep Exploring!!!

Career Blues and perspectives

My selected list from below bookmarked articles

  • Try to become a new person every 3-6 years.
  • Try to solve big problems as fast as possible. 
  • Adding a little bit of extra productivity to every day is great advice. The challenge can be finding the time, which means you need to subtract time from some other activities.
  • I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp — W. Somerset Maugham
  • Focus more on my own future rather than on what others think.
  • Set clear short-term and long-term career goals.
  • Enjoying programming and having the time outside of work. When it's a passion it all becomes a lot easier.
  • Effort and consistency trumps all
  • I personally believe anybody can find success if they just focus on the journey and the joy of coding, make sure they show up and participate, be present, stay curious and playful, and don't expect any rewards for their efforts. The real reward is having fun and feeling fulfilled while you're creating something.

Bookmarks

Keep Exploring!!!

April 22, 2024

Different stages of ML / DL Learning

I want to learn ML -> Take a course 
I know the basics from the course -> Try the code examples 
I tried but I don't know what's next -> Find a use case 
I found a use case -> Collect data 
I collected the data -> Model the ML problem 
I built an ML model -> Create an API to consume it 
I built an API -> Dockerize it 
Is the API scalable? -> Check options such as serverless functions, Endpoint providers like Anyscale / SageMaker Endpoints, GCP, Azure Inferencing 
I deployed the model -> Version your models using MLFlow 
When to update -> Audit / Track data 
What tools to learn -> Align with what your organization uses and cloud vendors

Learn to walk before you try to fly. Everything is incremental learning. Keep going!!!

Keep Exploring!!!


April 20, 2024

Good vs Bad Leaders

From my 2 decade observations,

  • Title <> Experience 
  • Title <> Knowledge 
  • Good failures can be Good knowledge experiences but people without Titles

I have worked with all ages 20's, and 30's. My peers.

  • With my juniors, I give them context, references, and How I would do in their situations.
  • With my seniors, I get only what to be done, I don't mind, work comes to me what they can't do
  • With my peers, When asked for input, I share the same
  • You meet people with Ego without knowledge. Not knowing and pretending is more dangerous.

Be an Empathetic Leader and Manager. Be accountable for your work


Keep Exploring!!!

April 18, 2024

Good Read - Is mid-career unemployability the big issue no one's talking about?

Good Read from thread - Is mid-career unemployability the big issue no one's talking about?

Some key points from the thread
  • Hit refresh button and run your own startup in any sector build new skills explore new opps
  • Help others as much as possible.
  • I agree with you and I believe most experienced professionals are actually wasting their expertise by working as an employee and paying lakhs in income taxes
  • I think everyone who is good at what they do and are over 40 should learn to become a consultant.
  • There is a lot of value in being able to bring people together, solving problems holistically and from first principles
  • Building your career progression to have higher impact, bigger outcomes, critical decision making and mentoring the next tier is the way to go. 
  • The skillsets you have acquired through your career is the USP that you have
  • Growth in terms of skills, decision making, managing complexity or mentoring people
  • Putting a self-paced learning system in place, ranging from making time, choosing learning goals, and modes that work for you
  • Embracing lifelong learning opportunities, staying updated with industry trends, and acquiring new skills can help seasoned professionals remain relevant and valuable in a competitive landscape. 
  • Most importantly, one must maintain a strong professional network and stay visible in their industry to stay top of mind among one's peers and discover new opportunities.
Keep Exploring!!!

Data Science & Data

Every project is a learning experience. Data science is based on "Data". Working with no data, less data, or encrypted domain knowledge with minimal data has been challenge over the past 4 years. Yet, even when data is plentiful, there remains a balancing act between leveraging it effectively and mitigating trust issues, as collaboration can sometimes be overshadowed by the scramble for credit. Everyone wants to work on a model, not on data, the old google paper still comes into their eyes :). The current trend is to train large language models (LLMs) on uniform datasets, yet this approach glosses over an important truth: no dataset can capture the full spectrum of reality. Issues such as digital poverty, underrepresentation, and inherent biases are embedded within the data we collect. Without addressing these challenges, solutions can be superficial and short-lived. Moving fast with a lot of guardrails is essentially a band-aid, not a solution. Take a step back and balance data vs model. Build something that lasts forever not for paychecks!!!

Keep Thinking!!!


April 15, 2024

Why we don't see good AI / ML work

Why we don't see good AI / ML work. Good AI / ML work depends

  • Choosing a use case with a strategic and AI-focused approach. Selecting the use case that has a balance of vision/strategy / applying AI lens
  • Ensuring access to adequate data for training and deployment
  • Garnering robust business support
  • Acquiring or developing tools to deliver meaningful AI/ML contributions

Struggling with your AI strategy? Let's connect and navigate it together.

Keep Exploring!!!

April 08, 2024

Anyscale Endpoints discussion

Step #1 - Anyscale signup



Step #2 - Notebook for Deploying Diffusion models



Step #3 - Deploying Service Command



Step #4 - Service Deployment


Code Example - 


Keep Exploring!!!

April 07, 2024

2024 - Year of Opportunities / Lessons / Learning's

My memorable moments/projects/achievements.  

  • Build vision capability
  • 2 Granted Patents
  • Won Vision solutions for Retail, and FMCG customers
  • Built products in a consulting role (Some failed / some worked)
  • Rewrote warranty for 220million consoles in Microsoft

Next Steps

  • Teaching + Deep Dive + Part-time is my goal for sustainable health and learning
  • Pick and select a few things and deep dive and build a point of view

Keep Exploring!!!

April 02, 2024

Data is not the new oil - Alexandr Wang

Great Talk, Lot of good insights

  • Oil is a commodity and everyone has same access to oil
  • Not all data has same level of value
  • Every type of data fintech / insurance / healthcare has different 
  • Data has multititude 
  • Multiple frameworks / thoughful strategy to stitch data
  • Building block for next move is quality code / automated code
  • Earliest is Autonomous cars
  • Raw data to labelled data is First step towards quality data
  • Data = New Oil, Scale = Refinery
  • Most capabilities are taught by large scale data
  • Data Engine = Refinery for data
  • Teach a model how to access one answer better than other with a bunch of examples

Opportunity for Enterprises

  • Total data available - 99% - Private
  • Messages / Emails will never end up on internet
  • Enterprises have a lot of unused data
  • Tune General purpose model for Enterprises
  • Customer care / Legal Apps
  • Focus on big problems that matter to your business

Questions

  • Unique Data Assets
  • Better than Anyone else 
  • Unique capabilities / Differentiators
  • Cost Reduction / Customer Care / Optimization
  • AI = Productivity enhancer
  • Meaningful chunks of work
  • Health care / Financial Services
  • Data & Compute Limiting Factors
  • AI <> Replacement for humans
  • Economically viable human systems
  • There is no future here 2 years back vs This is a threat
  • Model improvement is going to get better
  • Need broader cooperation
  • Inequality with jobs / upskilling with new jobs
  • AI misuse is punished / handled severly
  • Testing and Evaluation for Systems and use case
  • Fit for purpose vs primetime
  • FDA for drugs similar regulation options, Apps approved after scruitiny
  • Public evaluation of models
  • Testers in public / private / regulators
  • Ideas + Accountability decentralized

Ref - Alexandr Wang: 26-Year-Old Billionaire Powering the AI Industry

The Truth About Building AI Startups Today

  • GPT Wrappers
  • AI Agents 
  • High Beta Opportunities
  • Idea Maze
  • Once in a Life time opportunity
  • AGI / Multimodal / Videos
  • Workflow Automation
  • RPA - Search/ Form Filling
  • Sweet Spot - Pivot LLMs Automate Government Contract
  • Dev tool companies
  • Fine Tuning LLM Models
  • Something more than Finetuning
  • Customize to private datasets (Healthcare / FinTech)
  • Cybersecurity to Cloud -> Cybersecurity for LLM
  • LLM to data access Mapping
  • Purpose trained models / Run Locally models
  • Prototype with close source LLM Models
  • Collect data in parallel for domain context
  • Partner and build private models
  • Closed source AGI = Monopoly / Dangerous
  • AI Ethics + Regulation + Measuring it

My Take

  • Prototype with close source LLM Models
  • Collect data in parallel for domain context
  • Partner and build private models

Product #1 - Syncly

  • With AI feedback analysis, Syncly instantly categorizes feedback and reveals hidden negative signals. 
  • Centralize all your feedback and take proactive actions based on real time insights to elevate your five-star customer experience.

Product #2 - Cradle

  • Protein engineering without the guesswork

Keep Exploring!!!

Transformer Walkthrough

Session #1


Session #2

Keep Exploring!!!

March 26, 2024

Weekly News for Learning - LLM,GenAI

Weekly News for Learning - LLM,GenAI

Sequoia Capital AI Ascent Summary

  • Idea #1: LLMs as Agents - LLMs have the potential to be powerful agents, defined as (1) choosing a sequence of actions to take - through reasoning/planning or hard-coded chains – and (2) executing that sequence of actions
  • Idea #2: Planning & Reasoning - Planning & reasoning was a major emphasis at our event and a close cousin to the “agents” topic
  • Idea #3: Practical AI Use in Production - Smaller/cheaper/but still “pretty smart” models were a consistent theme in our event
  • In addition, we discussed speed/latency, expanding context windows/RAG, AI safety, interpretability, and the CIO as “on the rise” as the key buyer for AI that makes enterprises more efficient internally.
  • Idea #4: What to Expect from the Foundation Model Companies - Bigger smarter models, More developer platform capabilities

Apollo's AI email-writing assistant (Example of Idea #1)

  • Automatic email opener-personalization
  • One-click sequence generation
  • One-click sales playbook generation
  • Email response assistance

The Gong team has been quietly working on LLMs and Generative AI for over a year now. I have started to use the new Call Highlights internally and it's a huge time saver: no need to listen to calls anymore!

Agents on the Brain

To reach their full potential, the next generation will need to be:

  • Compute aware: minimizing resource usage as an objective function
  • Data awareness: finding and connecting to the right model or data source for the task
  • Agent aware: finding, reusing and communicating with ecosystems of agents
  • Safety aware: checking outputs and sandboxing code is the first step, plus more serious controls will be needed to prevent abuse
  • User aware: learning from user behavior and preferences to optimize performance

Ref - Link1, Link2, Link3, Link4, Link5

Keep Exploring!!!

March 25, 2024

AI Skills


 Keep Learning!!!

March 24, 2024

Ten reasons why you don't need AI / ML Platform

  • Data Disparity: Your datasets are dispersed across multiple silos without a unified view, hindering effective data analysis for AI/ML.
  • Unclear Business Objectives: Without well-defined business problems and corresponding data mapping, your organization cannot identify valuable AI/ML use cases.
  • Cross-Functional Misalignment: Lacking a collaborative ecosystem among product management, domain experts, and AI/ML specialists can prevent meaningful integration of AI/ML into business processes.
  • Limited Data Operations: Your data volume is insufficient for significant AI/ML insights, and without preliminary model testing, the utility of AI/ML is questionable.
  • Technology Stack Assessment Gap: Your data science team has not yet evaluated major cloud AI/ML and MLOps offerings, which is essential before committing to an AI/ML platform.
  • Model Deployment Inexperience: The absence of experience with deploying machine learning models at scale on cloud platforms indicates that your organization might not yet be ready for an AI/ML platform.
  • Cloud Integration Deficiency: Running on a major cloud provider without having experience deploying models integrated with cloud-based databases or CDPs suggests a lack of technical preparedness.
  • Business-Tech Disconnect: Missing alignment and understanding between your business goals and technology capabilities, coupled with uncertainty about data privacy and compliance, poses significant risks.
  • Strategic Incongruence: If AI/ML initiatives do not align with your company's product roadmap, then investing in an AI/ML platform may not support your business strategy.
  • Adoption Ambiguity: Not having a defined path for how AI/ML will be leveraged for text, video, recommendations, forecasting, etc., leads to uncertainty in the adoption of an AI/ML platform.

In many companies, I observed these challenges. 

If you are a startup, or SMB looking to apply AI/ML in your solutions, We can connect and collaborate on your AI Strategy. My coordinates [sivaram2k10][at][gmail]

Keep Exploring!!!

March 23, 2024

AI skills at work

  • Selling AI is a skill
  • Building (Billing) with AI is a skill
  • Keeping the end goal a moving target is a skill
  • Build vs Buy vs Manage cost is a skill
  • Hiring someone who can Build (Bill) effectively is a skill
  • Differentiating AI demos vs AI reality is a skill

Choose wisely!!!!


AI Skills <> AI Experience

  • How to build it right = Skill
  • What it takes to build it right in the first iteration = Experience

Keep Exploring!!!

How to get correct in the First Attempt with AI

Experience in AI = Ability to ask the right questions even if you don't have answers and provide AI awareness, complexity, ROI, and helping them manage costs vs Selling vision + charging $$$$ hefty for all types of costs build/buy/explore/expand. 

Build targeted products :)

Keep Exploring!!!

March 22, 2024

Failures in AI/ML/GenAI Adoption

Success in #AI/ML/GenAI projects has a lot of challenges. Some projects' data availability / some projects handling bias / Some projects balance features vs bugs / Knowing 80% features vs 20% future releases. This needs a lot of iteration and team mix to make it work. Success goes in LinkedIn posts. Failures end up haunting us searching for the next success.

Keep Exploring!!!

March 21, 2024

GenAI + Vision

Some moments to cherish :) 


Ref - Link

Hellmann’s collaborates with Google on AI tool that tackles food waste

Hellmann’s Launches Innovative Campaign to Clear the Galaxy of Food Waste

SANDWICH HELLMANNS 

Happy Learning!!!

My Consulting Journey - AI - DL - GenAI Projects

As I wrap up my consulting tenure, I reflect on my success stories in the past 4 years. Here are some key projects that serve as my badges of success:

Bundle Recommendations Project #1 - Bundle recommendations for a specialty retailer of children’s apparel, from newborns to pre-teens (2020) Work/Impact - Transitioned from automated merchandiser-based recommendations to ML-based bundle recommendations. Achieved a 100% match with the ML approach. For a category level, we analyzed 6 months of transactions, comprising 1.5 million orders, and generated recommendations in 15 minutes.

Performance Optimization Project #2 (2021) - For a multinational mining company, optimized an existing app, more akin to a trading app, deployed between OLAP vs. OLTP. Applied a blend of DB/user and usage analysis/patterns/ML-based techniques to provide a list of recommendations to optimize.

GenAI + Vision Project #3 (2023-2024) - For a British multinational fast-moving consumer goods company, My key contribution is solution architecture based on Vision + GenAI for product detection and personalized recommendations, for its customers' products and brands.

Plants Classification Project #4 - Developing vision-based state-of-the-art classification models for the world's leading gardening charity. This work involved data curation, augmentation, and training, and ended as a paper :). Link

GenAI and CX improvement Project #5 - For a US-based leading specialty retailer of organizing solutions, custom spaces, and in-home services, leveraging GenAI + Vision to improve the customer journey. Pitched/deployed selected use cases. This is similar to what you see in Amazon/Swiggy GenAI Changes.

Forecasting Project #6 - Domain played a key role for me to contribute. For a leading South American beauty retailer, developing forecast models.

I had a mix of responsibilities as a Solution Architect, DB, and ML Engineer. I relied mostly on SA/DB/ML. In all projects, The team was a mix of platform, MLOps, and ML engineers. Sometimes the platform is a vendor cloud or an in-prem solution.

Hoping to undertake a few more similar projects in my next self-employed consulting roles.

If you are a startup, or SMB looking to apply AI/ML in your solutions, We can connect and collaborate on your AI Strategy. My coordinates [sivaram2k10][at][gmail]

Keep Exploring!!!

March 20, 2024

AI - Applied use case - Vision in Action

 

Spot the right use case, solve with the balance of data / strategy to meet the market on time

More read - Link

Keep Exploring!!!

March 04, 2024

Klara Chatbot - Devil in Details

  • It recites exact docs and passes me on to human support fast.
  • Good job on the team for making hallucination not possible - because it seems to spit out the same responses however I ask it, and refuses to go “out of bounds.”
  • As soon as I ask or instruct anything that is not a doc, I’m *boom* talking with a human agent.
  • Also, almost all questions I ask about payment terms or problems the chatbot tells me - in various ways - to talk to the merchant if I have a problem, not to Klarna
  • These assistants turn docs into chat text, that people read!
  • Klarna is a middleman. The customer buys from the merchant and Klarna sells defaulted payments to collections agencies!!
  • Klarna wants potential investors to believe they are buying into an “AI edge” company

Ref - Link

Keep Exploring!!!

March 03, 2024

Dense to Sparse - AI World

  • What we do in CNN - Convert Dense to Sparse with convolution and activations 
  • What we do in NLP - Text Preprocessing: Stemming / Lemmatization / Stop-word removal - Vectorization 
  • Topic Modelling - Words - Documents - Non-Negative Matrix Factorization 
  • ML Feature Engineering / Recommendations - PCA / SVD 

Everywhere we attempt to retain key features/vectors aligned to vision/text/features/topic modeling tasks. Converting Dense to Sparse is the way to get the signal from the noise :)

Keep Exploring!!!

Custom Chatbot vs OpenAI Chatbot

Build vs Develop on LLM

Custom Chatbot

Time- Data collection, labeling, classification, NER models

Build

  • Preprocessing
  • Lower case
  • Stemming, Lemmatization with POS Tags
  • Entities, NER

Inference

  • Intent
  • Topic Classification
  • Frame a response

Context - Limited to corpus

LLM Chatbot

Time - Prompts / Responses / Store / Retrieve

OpenAI

  • Prompt
  • Inference answers

Challenge

  • Air Canada hallucinations use cases
  • Context vs Hallucination


Keep Exploring!!!

February 28, 2024

Video Summarization

Learning to Summarize Videos by Contrasting Clips

  1. Feature Extractor
  2. Score Predictor
  3. Summary Extractor
  4. Highlight detection as a special case of the summarization task

Video Summarization: Towards Entity-Aware Captions - Summarizing video content into a natural language description

Video Summarization Using Deep Neural Networks: A Survey

Option #1

  • Feature Extractor
  • Score Predictor
  • Summary Extractor
  • Highlight detection as a special case of the summarization task

Option #2

  • Frame 1 - Feature Vector
  • Frame 2 - Feature Vector2
  • Frame 3 - Feature Vector 3
  • Feature vector score comparison to pick / unpick
  • Object score comparison to pick / unpick

Other Techniques

  • Hashing based
  • Clustering based
  • Feature based

Keep Exploring!!!



February 27, 2024

Which #GenAI use case will succeed ?

In 2006, I was part of a Reverse Logistics team at Microsoft working on the launch of a new product, the Zune—a competitor to the iPod. The Zune was somewhat boxy and heavy. At first glance, it was clear that the iPod and Zune were worlds apart. Despite tight deadlines for setting up the supply chain and tracking every aspect, we all know the Zune's life ended by 2012.

Choosing the right use case is crucial; Zune vs. iPod is a classic example. It's not only about applying AI but also about selecting the right use cases that bring tangible benefits and align with our business strategy.

Courses may teach us the fundamentals, like LEGO blocks, but the same challenges persist today in terms of supply chain visibility and customer experience. Choose the right use case, invest time in understanding your data and domain. Out of the several applicable AI use cases within domain context, focus on those that hold relevance to your business needs, domain, data, to derive real value.

Copycat use cases will not work unless they are relevant and meaningful for your business.

Stay observant of industry trends, and align your AI initiatives with your strategic goals. 

#AI #Strategy #Innovation #TechHistory #Business #Data #ProductDevelopment #Microsoft #Zune #iPod #DataScience #GenAI

Keep Exploring!!!

February 16, 2024

AI News, Tools, Observations

Good discussion on observations and experiments with #CreativeAI, Summary, and adding my perspectives

1. AI-generated visuals: Frustration over production inconsistency despite enjoying creative collaboration. 

2. #CreativeExploration by embracing the unpredictability in current ideation tools broadening horizons and seeking inspiration. 

3. Lack of emotional connection; you don't draw anymore. 

4. Things are advancing rapidly, reminiscent of the text AI scene pre-#ChatGPT. Rapid progress is observed, yet we will need to do more. 

5. #Startups is never ending in Creative Exploration Image-space - Midjourney, RunwayML, alpacaml, clad.ai, dreamlook.ai, photoroom, neurallove, letsenhance, topazlabs. 

6. The latest one today morning is #OpenAI Sora - capable of generating a minute of high-fidelity video. #GenAI #Startups Currently inspiration oriented, seems #OpenAI will consolidate this space with #DALLE5/6 :). Sometimes we need to patiently wait to pick a winner and move forward. #GenAI #CreativeAI #DigitalTransformation #generativeai #midjourney #dalle3 #imagegeneration 

AI is now a CIO boardroom Topic


Keep Exploring!!!

February 13, 2024

LLM Guardrail Notes

Existing Implementation Solutions

  • Llama Guard
  • Nvidia NeMo
  • Guardrails AI

Measure / Validation for 

  • Free from Unintended Response
  • Fairness
  • Privacy
  • Hallucination

Ref - Link1

NeMo Guardrails contains two key components

  • Input moderation, also referred as jailbreak rail, aims to detect potentially malicious user messages before reaching the dialogue system.
  • Output moderation aims to detect whether the LLM responses are legal, ethical, and not harmful prior to being returned to the user.

Challenges on Designing Guardrails

  • Custom to domain
  • Custom to use cases
  • Training by Zero-shot and Few-shot Prompting
  • Topic relevance, content safety, and application security, ultimately standardizing the behavior of LLMs.

The Llama Guard Safety Taxonomy & Risk Guidelines

  • Violence & Hate
  • Sexual Content
  • Guns & Illegal Weapons
  • Regulated or Controlled Substances
  • Suicide & Self Harm
  • Criminal Planning

Evaluation of LLMs

  • Reliability
  • Safety
  • Usability
  • Compliance 

Keep Exploring!!!!

Good Read - Three trends of 2024 - Multimodal race

Good Read - Link

  • Small models - high-quality training data. Possible use cases - LLM on edge with high accuracy
  • Multimodal AI - Merge text + image + video + Audio. Making all types of content useful for creating/querying new assets. Creative Breakthru across image/video / ads/games etc
  • AI in healthcare/agriculture

For #2 - Multimodal race has a lot of players

  • Winning products across all modalities 
  • Platforms that enable creating + publishing content workflows
  • Automatic content creation, customization, and repurposing across formats and platforms

microsoft designer is stunning. 

#2024 #predictions

Keep Exploring!!!


February 12, 2024

Evolution of Data Management and Advanced Analytics: Milestones from 2004 to 2023

The technological landscape of data management and analytics has undergone significant transformations over the past two decades. From 2004 to 2006, many organizations began migrating from SQL Server 2000 to SQL Server 2005, introducing newer features and improved performance. Meanwhile, the migration to SQL Server 2008 and later to SQL Server 2012 occurred subsequently after their respective releases in 2008 and 2012.

Around the year 2009, NoSQL databases such as MongoDB, and earlier CouchDB which emerged in 2005, started challenging traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS), shifting the emphasis towards CAP theorem principles. This paradigm shift saw a movement of certain use cases away from the confines of ACID compliance towards the more flexible NoSQL solutions.

By the late 2000s, Hadoop was capturing the attention of the industry, and by 2012 it had firmly established itself as a cornerstone of the Big Data movement, driving many enterprises to incorporate Hadoop and other related technologies for managing large data sets.

In terms of analytics, machine learning (ML) applications became more prevalent and sophisticated around the mid-2010s, with 2017 witnessing a surge in diverse and powerful ML use cases.

In 2018, neural network architectures, particularly deep learning (DL), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), began to take the lead in driving advancements in artificial intelligence.

The field continued to evolve, and by 2020, Vision Transformers (ViTs) emerged as a groundbreaking approach in the realm of computer vision, challenging the long-held dominance of CNNs, and by 2022 they were among the forefront of innovation.

Arriving at 2023, the role of Generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) has come to the foreground, shaping an era where AI is not merely a tool for automation but also for creativity and complex problem-solving.

Looking ahead, the machine learning landscape is expected to be a rich tapestry of ML, DL, and Generative AI applications. The decision to employ Transfer Learning, develop a custom model, or utilize an LLM will be informed by the nuanced requirements of data, domain expertise, and the specifics of each use case. As the field continues to grow and diversify, the challenge will be in effectively mapping each use case to the appropriate technology to harness the full potential of these evolving tools.

Keep Exploring!!!

Data - Use Case - Iterative Thinking - Evolving solutions

Many times learning comes from people around us. For vehicle PPF it gave a lot of insights

  • While removing all the door cladding/mirrors, the 0-2yrs exp people were putting all screws together
  • While fitting on screws, Same dimension screws were applied for two parts, There was confusion on pending screws
  • The PPF person was very focused, and the sun film person was a separate person

Three things to build a solution

Many times learning comes from people around us. For vehicle PPF it gave a lot of insights

Observation #1

  • Fresher Lens -  While removing all the door cladding/mirrors, the 0-2yrs exp people were putting all screws together
  • Experience Lens  - The person (lead) he asked them group based on the parts
  • Lesson - group problems, data logically to debug / build solution

Observation #2

  • Fresher Lens - While fitting on screws, Same dimension screws were applied for two parts One screw was perfect silver, and another was perfect black, When all screws were filled, juniors were clueless about where it had to be fitted
  • Experience Lens  - The lead was able to provide clarity to fit the connecting dots
  • Lesson - Leadership is solving with what you have, not afraid to look back and rework where it is needed

Observation #3

  • The PPF person was very focused, the sun film person was a separate person
  • Lesson - Build relationships, cannot solve all problems all alone
  • Be good at a few, use expertise when you need a great product

What does it imply in the AIML context

  • Inexperienced team members initially consolidated all components indiscriminately during disassembly. The team leader guided them to categorize components systematically, akin to structuring data for efficient algorithmic problem-solving.
  • Different screws of identical size were used interchangeably during the assembly process, leading to confusion. The leader demonstrated critical thinking, using available resources to retrospectively address the issue, a trait essential for refining machine learning models.
  • Task specialization was evident; individuals focused on PPF or sun film application roles. This mirrors the need for specialization and collaboration in AIML, leveraging cross-disciplinary expertise to enhance overall model performance.

Keep Exploring!!!

February 07, 2024

Vision Product Catalog Startups

  • Background removal
  • Super resolution
  • Image Restoration Deformation Fixes

Startups in Focus

Keep Exploring!!!


February 04, 2024

Computer Vision License Validation

Business problem: Id verification system(valid or invalid) say driving license as id. How do we go about solving this business problem using Deep learning

Input - License Id Images

Approach

  • Feature Definition
  • Defining Elements
  • Historical data
  • Labeling / Annotation

Vision

  • Problem #1 - Extract Face images
  • Problem #2 - OCR, License Id, Dates, LicenseNumber, Authority
  • Problem #3 - Detection for Signature Extracting
  • Data Validation - Blurriness - Image Sharpening / Laplacian / Sobel / Canny edge to sharpen images. Non-readable - Far / Validation - Near View

Backend Validation

  • API call
  • Face Match
  • Similarity Score
  • Output - Valid License

Keep Exploring!!!

CNN Experiments - Solutions - Building End to End Solutions

CNN Experiments - Solutions - Building End-to-End Solutions

CNN Experiments

  • Minimum Exp Without Aug
  • Data Aug + CNN Model 
  • Data Aug + CNN Model (Deeper Layers) - Few more convolution blocks
  • Data Aug + CNN Model (Deeper Layers) - Few more convolution blocks + (Dropouts / Regularizer / Adjusting Learning rate)

To Launch a Product / Build Model things to consider

  • Pre-requisites
  • Data Collection
  • Data Pre-processing and transformation
  • Data Imbalances / Data Augmentation 
  • Modelling
  • Deployment
  • Monitoring
  • Real-time data training
  • Collaborate with Healthcare prof
  • Keep updating the model

We have 95% Accuracy, Remaining 5% how do we handle

  • Similarity scores
  • Ensemble methods
  • Human in loop

Keep Exploring!!!

February 03, 2024

Can ML Solve this Problem ? Vision Problem - How to approach Damage Detection in Mobile Phones ?

How do you approach Damage Detection in Mobile Phones? 

Detecting defects on phones during exchange

Question - Can it be done with ML? 

  • Student Answers - DL Vision

Question - Data Prerequisites?

Student Answers

  • Physical damage to vision
  • Images of the phone from various angles
  • Software issues
  • System diagnostics
  • Images of cracked screens

Question - Model building

Student Answers

  • Cnn classification 2 classes
  • Damaged, not damaged
  • Multiclass - damaged, degrees of damage (so that can identify price negotiation)
  • inside parts, maybe images of phone when it is not damaged?

Real-world Way of Solving 

My Recommendation

  • Detect Type of Phone, - Flip / Smart Phone
  • Brand Detection (OCR)
  • Image Similarity (Good Screen vs Similarity score to what you have)
  • Line Detection - Count Cracks on Screen
  • Segmentation to detect %% of cracked area
  • Measure the deformation in the picture
  • Yes / NO - Cracks
  • Low / Medium / High
  • Centre, Lower, Top
This is not a single model for all needs. This has to be based on brands, models, categories, Defect types, Data Collection, Labelling and Phased Adoption.

Keep Exploring!!!

February 01, 2024

Video Recommendation System

  • Interest-based recommendations by signup
  • Content-based - System that follows videos watched
    • Similar videos based on content
    • As interest changes, content changes, adaptive strategy
  • Collaborative, Recommendations based on other people similar to me
    • Watch history based on users in clusters
    • A model trained as a batch job 
  • Two-tower approach (based on neural network)
  • Batch, Online training, Ranking
  • Model updated in real-time
    • Recent changes are updated in real-time

  • Vectors from video data - Indexing videos


  • Videos - Index creation - Vector Embeddings
  • Online + Offline Systems





Keep Exploring!!!

When product outshines tools

Great insight on how they built sivi

  • Multifaceted and multi-layered nature of graphic design
  • Template-based design tools
  • Template replaced designs are neither cohesive nor relevant
  • Atomic design principles, composes designs from scratch across infinite dimensions and spanning over 72 languages

Ref - Link

Keep Learning Product and Tech from Customer Needs :)


Startup Objectives

Startup Objectives 

  • Think problems not tools
  • Clear Goals
  • Team / Solopreneur
  • Tools / Inputs
  • Data to Collect  / External Sources
  • Data Collection

Keep Exploring!!!

My Consulting + Product Journey

  • AI Roadmap - Data Analysis, Availability, Staged use case Adoption, Roadmap for 3PL, Beauty, Fashion, Retail, Media
  • Products - Conceptualized, Solution Development, Implementation of Vision-based products in Agriculture, Fashion, FMCG
  • Training - SME for AI / ML Training for product managers. Completed 4 batches covering use cases in Retail, Fashion, FinTech, Energy
  • Domains - 3PL, Reverse Logistics, Retail - Planogram, Inventory Management, Loss Prevention, E-commerce
  • Production Implementation - Recommendations, Vision Solutions, Forecasting, GenAI Adoption

Will share a few more specific examples coming weeks :)


Keep Exploring!!!

January 31, 2024

Photoshoot Catalog Creation - claid.ai - Startup Analysis

claid.ai

Key Vision Lessons

  • Product placements with coordinates guided
  • Image operations - Resizing, restorations, color adjustments, padding, super resolutions
  • Detailed examples for retail, real estate





Keep Exploring!!!

AI Products ?

Before embarking on any ambitious AI work, ask yourself these questions:

  • How much time do you plan to spend?
  • Do you plan to customize or reuse APIs?
  • Do you have data to validate consumer needs?
  • Are you building the product with the end customer in mind or working with a matrix of stakeholders?
  • How do the realistic technical skills compare to the gaps in creating actual products?
  • Many developers create "Hello World" apps that masquerade as real-world solutions, but in reality, only truly practical applications survive.

Without data, without product clarity, and without customer collaboration, it will end up a big success :)

#2024 will have many #GenAI apps in market. Many "Hello World" LLM apps masquerade as real-world solutions. Without data, without product clarity, and without customer collaboration, it will end up a big success :) that is the going to be the mantra of #GenAI adoption. 

Keep exploring!

January 30, 2024

Keep Exploring and Move on

Ideas are easy, On ground challenges makes the differences
Power point is easy, Getting first principles right is important
Always strong basics and persistence shine over presentations 
Ideation is Easy, Evolving is Innovation and Differentiator

Keep Exploring!!!

Startup Analysis - Jan20 - Concepting Tools in Vision - dreamlook.ai

Concepting, Vision based ideation is picking up. Dreambooth custom fine-tuning is easy to use, intuitive, and user-friendly. The UX and execution are seamless. 

Below are steps in a basic working example

1. Start with Custom Model Training


2. Upload Images
3. Submit a Job

4. Monitor Job Progress
5. Job Completion
6. Generate Images based on Custom Models


Very user friendly tool.

Keep Exploring!!!

January 29, 2024

Startup Analysis - Jan 29 - yarnit.app - Concepting Tool

Concepting Tool 

Creative use of LLM, GenAI, and Vision Models

  • Ideate, Design, Write, Audit & Publish content 
  • 50+ expert-trained templates
  • Contextual content ideas 
  • Vision Tools - Dreambrush, background remover

Keep Exploring!!!


January 28, 2024

“Can ML solve my problem?

What it takes to get to the level, ML Perspectives

Even answering the question “Can ML solve my problem?” requires you to overcome half of the challenges ML libraries, Find state-of-the-art (SOTA) deep neural networks, experiments, and MLOps.

Machine learning often boils down to the art of developing an intuition for where something went wrong.

Certain behavior signals with where the problem likely is in your debugging space - preprocessing, data issues, optimization, weak labels, and learning rates. ML Learning = Experimentation = Experience.

The efforts in terms of marking production-ready apps - Text, Code copilot are in (primetime)

Vision tools/custom tools are evolving rapidly. The maturity of imagegen, DALLE3, and Midjourney is nearing prime time in 2024, One area is learning to build production solutions where there is maturity. Another area is building custom tools where maturity is nearing prime time :)

Ref - Link1, Link2

Keep Exploring!!!


January 24, 2024

Figma - Lessons we can learn on Usage / Adoption / ML Lens

How to use user signup data

  • Email, name, and role
  • Data shows us how the product is used, and includes metadata about how the platform is accessed
  • Features our users are using
  • Features like invite other users into their file, to manage file permissions, and to publish their work
  • Primary drivers for crashes to improvements incremental frame loading and image sampling for prototypes

How to know user engagement

  • Funnel with all users at the top
  • Encourage users to interact with notifications
  • User behavior at scale
  • Those on personal accounts, designers on team accounts were opening 80% of the comment notifications

Data Science Perspectives

  • Significant lift in all users leaving comments, and this increase was especially pronounced for non-designers
  • Data also indicated a more dynamic collaboration process

Link1, Link2, Link3

Keep Exploring!!!

2024 Tech Goals

  • Adapt to a flexible solution mindset, More tools will come :)
  • Bird's eye view of offerings / Tools
  • Experiment with Tech, Build working solutions
  • ML / Cloud solution architectures across clouds
  • Teach with use cases/solution - Product + Developer Perspective
  • Apply for a few accelerators for solutions
  • Build working solutions
  • AI for a social cause
  • Solutions E2E integrating aspects

Keep Exploring!!!

January 22, 2024

Buying Decision - Data Analysis

This could be biased but when you have limited budget and have to take a convincing decision :)

 





Keep Exploring!!!

Good Read - Staying up With Experience in Tech

Summarizing key points from post

  • Have solution / Approach / Code on key areas/ New Tech
  • Spend Time on Architecture / Review / Discussions
  • Understanding the fundamentals of the products you use
  • Map Tech trends to use cases
  • 'connecting the dots' = Product + Tech + Domain

Keep Exploring!!!

Fantastic Read on Titles vs Learning vs Relevance

Fantastic Read on Titles vs Learning vs Relevance 

Key pointers

  • Irrelevance is the new retirement
  • As humans we struggle for relevance
  • Growing old is compulsory but growing up seems optional
  • The pain of failure is less than the pain of regret
  • You will be relevant in job market as long as you keep your learning curve focused

Keep Exploring!!!

January 18, 2024

Leadership vs The Job Security Myths Vs Layoffs

Key Article from Googler

  • Pattern #1 - They point in a direction, their subordinates swarm the area, try a bunch of stuff, and sometimes something sticks and is cool.
  • Pattern #2 - Given that they have no real vision of their own, they really need their subordinates to come up with cool stuff for them
  • Pattern #3 - Just randomly firing people, torching institutional knowledge, and blowing up perfectly functional teams.

So I guess I will just hang around and do my job until Google no longer wants me.


Job Security Myths

There is no relationship between skills vs job vs priority. We need to carve our own skills to survive.

  • When you know tech, you feel like know business to remain competitive
  • When you know Database, you feel like learning API to remain competitive
  • When you know ML, you feel like learning Kubernetes, and MLOps to remain competitive
  • When you know UI, you feel like learning DB, and API to remain competitive

Add everything that compliments, You can only be a better version every day not by comparison but by your own aspirations

Keep Exploring!!!


2024 - GenAI Trends - Use Cases

How Enterprise Companies are Buying AI (or Not) with ContextualAI, Anthropic, and Glean

Use Cases

  • Info Discovery and Synthesis
  • Deeper Insights
  • Hierarchical Summarization
  • Support Chatbots
  • Knowledge Extraction

Barriers to Adoption

  • One tool is better than the other
  • Security questions / Data Leaks
  • Governance to manage tools/data

Challenges

  • Tech does not work from Day 1
  • It needs iterations
  • Fixing Hallucinations / Citations
  • Focus on use case vs Fine tune vs Level Setting vs Context Window 
  • Artificial specialized intelligence = Fine tune vs Context Window 
Product Roadmap
  • Getting Certifications
  • Run Lean in Customer Environment
  • Solution = LLM + RAG + VectorDB - Blend of All (Solution Strategy)

Keep Exploring!!!

AI Tools + Vision Use Cases + GenAI

Vision Tools + GenAI

  • Stable Diffusion, ComfyUI and Automatic1111.
  • Dreambooth and LoRA
  • Midjourney, Dalle, Runway, and PikaLabs
  • Supportive AI tools for segmentation, data labelling and inspection
  • NeRFs and Gaussian Splatting
  • DALL-E, Runway and Wonder Studio

Use Cases

  • Commercial Production
  • Graphic Design
  • Social Media
  • Content Marketing
  • Branding
  • Product Mockups
  • Spec Ads

Domain-Specific Use Cases

  • Drafting concept art, architectural concepts, and interior design plans on a budget
  • Generating free portraits of yourself, friends, family members, and pets
  • Completing hand-drawn projects that you no longer have free time for
  • Designing stunning cover art for podcasts, albums, and books
  • Printing AI-generated posters that fit your aesthetic
  • Crafting custom gifts for birthdays and holidays
  • Generating wallpapers and backgrounds for your desktop or phone
  • Visualizing random ideas to get your creativity flowing
  • Mixing up your social media posts with a new style
  • Writing cards and invitations for personal and commercial use
  • Creating eye-catching clipart-style characters for emails, posts, and presentations
  • Developing logos and icons for websites, apps, and marketing
  • Experimenting with fashion design projects
  • Competing in art challenges to embrace the AI community
  • Growing your business with AI art prints
Keep Exploring!!!

January 11, 2024

Comfy Tool Notes

Comfy Tool Notes

Summary from Link

Key Notes

  • Model files - civitai, hugging face
  • CLIP, Main Model, VAE
  • CheckpointLoader - Outputs Model, Clip, VAE
  • Clip Model - Encode the text to main model, Positive and Negative prompt
  • Encoded positive and Negative prompts sent to MODEL at each step and used to guide denoising
  • VAE transalate image in latent space to pixel space

Inpaint Examples

Samplername - uni_pc_bh2

  • AutocodePro
  • Finetuned Stable Diffusion for Anime
  • AlphaCTR
  • Low Rank Optimization LoRA models are essentially compact versions of Stable Diffusion that introduce minor, yet impactful modifications to the standard models. 
  • ControlNet/T2I adapter needs the image that is passed to it to be in a specific format like depthmaps
  • Stable Zero123 is a diffusion model that given an image with an object and a simple background can generate images of that object from different angles.
  • SDXL Turbo is a SDXL model that can generate consistent images in a single step. 

Nodes Explanation

  • CLIP model: to convert text into a format the Unet can understand
  • Unet: to perform the "diffusion" process, the step-by-step processing of images that we call generation
  • VAE: to decode the image from latent space into pixel space (also used to encode a regular image from pixel space to latent space when we are doing img2img)
  • KSampler node. This is the actual "generation" part, so you'll notice the KSampler takes the most time to run when you queue a prompt.

Checkpoints

  • Place checkpoints in the folder ComfyUI/models/checkpoints:
  • SDXL 1.0 base checkpoint, SDXL 1.0 refiner checkpoint
  • VAE - Place VAEs in the folder ComfyUI/models/vae
  • Fixed SDXL 0.9 VAE 
  • LoRAs - Place LoRAs in the folder ComfyUI/models/loras
  • Stable Diffusion Hub

Keep Exploring!!!

AI threats, freelancing, making millions & building businesses

AI threats, freelancing, making millions & building businesses

Good talk and lot of key pointers. Execution matters + creative ideas.

Key Ideas to Align

  • Time to execution is low
  • Top creators can do more work 
  • Things can be done in parallel
  • Weight of brand carries message (AI or AI-generated)
  • Increasing opportunities for a few
  • Embrace AI for better execution
  • Pulling tools together makes you more competitive
  • Ideas are connecting the dots

AI will take over

  • Content writing
  • The cost will come down to building software
  • You can better learn task / prompts with chatgpt
  • Better Experience = Better Prompt
  • Good prompt based on past experience
  • Drag and Drop pics train vision model

Tips

  • Get more Inspirations
  • Add more ideas
  • Synthesize tools (Good/bad output)

AI Risks

  • Not works on consumer side
  • Don't do things already mainstream

Path to Progress

  • Freelancer -> Agency -> SaaS Platform
  • Posters for Real estate
  • Posters for Mfg Companies
  • Niche Photography
  • Upskill before it becomes popular
  • Storytelling, Personalization

Future

  • Multimodals
  • AI + Image + Vision
  • Super Apps
  • AR, VR
  • Keep good at some skills
  • Skills + Network + Opportunities
  • Identify gap in market to graph your career :)


Keep Exploring!!!

January 09, 2024

Vertex AI Search

Example for Vertex AI Search and Conversation. In GCP look for Vertex AI Search and Conversation

  • We will upload PDFs
  • Ingest them and perform qna with it
Step 1- Select Search Option 

Step 2 - Name your App



Step 3 - Create Datastore for APP

Step 4 - Upload pdf to the App

Step 5 - Configure your data store




Step 6 - Configure and Customize


This tutorial was helpful to follow/evaluate. Link

Keep Exploring!!!