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1 week ago | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Hugo Bowne-Anderson
If we want AI systems that actually work, we need to get much better at evaluating them, not just building more pipelines, agents, and frameworks. In this episode, Hugo talks with Hamel Hussain (ex-Airbnb, GitHub, DataRobot) about how teams can improve AI products by focusing on error analysis, data inspection, and systematic iteration. The conversation is based on Hamel’s blog post A Field Guide to Rapidly Improving AI Products, which he joined Hugo’s class to discuss.
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3 weeks ago | 
oreilly.com | Duncan Gilchrist |Hugo Bowne-Anderson
In a recent episode of High Signal, we spoke with Dr. Fei-Fei Li about what it really means to build human-centered AI, and where the field might be heading next. Fei-Fei doesn’t describe AI as a feature or even an industry. She calls it a “civilizational technology”—a force as foundational as electricity or computing itself. This has serious implications for how we design, deploy, and govern AI systems across institutions, economies, and everyday life.
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3 weeks ago | 
flipboard.com | Duncan Gilchrist |Hugo Bowne-Anderson
15 hours agoIf you’ve recently found your Mail app stuck on a blank white screen, you’re not alone. It’s been happening to my girlfriend, to my mom, and to quite a few thousand people around the world. Here are a few workarounds. No Mail for you Over the past few days, a growing number of iPhone users have …
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3 weeks ago | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Hugo Bowne-Anderson
If we want AI systems that actually work in production, we need better infrastructure—not just better models. In this episode, Hugo talks with Akshay Agrawal (Marimo, ex-Google Brain, Netflix, Stanford) about why data and AI pipelines still break down at scale, and how we can fix the fundamentals: reproducibility, composability, and reliable execution.
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2 months ago | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Hugo Bowne-Anderson
What if building software felt more like composing than coding? In this episode, Hugo and Greg explore how LLMs are reshaping the way we think about software development—from deterministic programming to a more flexible, prompt-driven, and collaborative style of building. It’s not just hype or grift—it’s a real shift in how we express intent, reason about systems, and collaborate across roles.
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Feb 20, 2025 | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Hugo Bowne-Anderson
Vanishing Gradients Your browser does not support the audio tag. 00:00:00 / 01:17:30 Share Page Embed Code Subscribe & Share RSS Feed Download (71 MB) February 21st, 2025 Too many teams are building AI applications without truly understanding why their models fail. Instead of jumping straight to LLM evaluations, dashboards, or vibe checks, how do you actually fix a broken AI app?
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Feb 4, 2025 | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Hugo Bowne-Anderson
AI coding assistants are reshaping how developers write, debug, and maintain code—but who’s really in control? In this episode, Hugo speaks with Tyler Dunn, CEO and co-founder of Continue, an open-source AI-powered code assistant that gives developers more customization and flexibility in their workflows. In this episode, we dive into:• The trade-offs between proprietary vs. open-source AI coding assistants—why open-source might be the future.
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Jan 21, 2025 | 
oreilly.com | Hugo Bowne-Anderson |Alan Nichol
Enterprise AI teams are discovering that purely agentic approaches (dynamically chaining LLM calls) don’t deliver the reliability needed for production systems. The prompt-and-pray model—where business logic lives entirely in prompts—creates systems that are unreliable, inefficient, and impossible to maintain at scale. A shift toward structured automation, which separates conversational ability from business logic execution, is needed for enterprise-grade reliability.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Byung-Chul Han |Hugo Bowne-Anderson
Hugo speaks with Jason Liu, an independent AI consultant with experience at Meta and Stitch Fix. At Stitch Fix, Jason developed impactful AI systems, like a $50 million product similarity search and the widely adopted Flight recommendation framework. Now, he helps startups and enterprises design and deploy production-level AI applications, with a focus on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and scalable solutions. This episode is a bit of an experiment.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
vanishinggradients.fireside.fm | Hugo Bowne-Anderson
Hugo speaks with three leading figures from the world of AI research: Sander Schulhoff, a recent University of Maryland graduate and lead contributor to the Learn Prompting initiative; Philip Resnik, professor at the University of Maryland, known for his pioneering work in computational linguistics; and Dennis Peskoff, a researcher from Princeton specializing in prompt engineering and its applications in the social sciences.
