Will Falcon — Making Lightning the Apple of ML

Will Falcon is the CEO and co-founder of Lightning AI, a platform that enables users to quickly build and publish ML models.

In this episode, Will explains how Lightning addresses the challenges of a fragmented AI ecosystem and reveals which framework PyTorch Lightning was originally built upon (hint: not PyTorch!) He also shares lessons he took from his experience serving in the military and offers a recommendation to veterans who want to work in tech.

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-will-falcon

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⏳ Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:00 From SEAL training to FAIR

04:17 Stress-testing Lightning

07:55 Choosing PyTorch over TensorFlow and other frameworks

13:16 Components of the Lightning platform

17:01 Launching Lightning from Facebook

19:09 Similarities between leadership and research

22:08 Lessons from the military

26:56 Scaling PyTorch Lightning to Lightning AI

33:21 Hiring the right people

35:21 The future of Lightning

39:53 Reducing algorithm complexity in self-supervised learning

42:19 A fragmented ML landscape

44:35 Outro

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Connect with Lightning

📍 Website: https://lightning.ai

📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LightningAI

📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pytorch-lightning/

📍 Careers: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightningai

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💬 Host: Lukas Biewald

📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Anish Shah, Cayla Sharp, Angelica Pan, Lavanya Shukla

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