#149 The State of AI with Stanford Researcher Yifan Mai
The freeCodeCamp Podcast
Quincy Larson
5.0 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2024
⏱️ 118 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week's episode of the podcast, freeCodeCamp founder Quincy Larson interviews Yifan Mai, a Senior Software Engineer on Google's TensorFlow team who left the private sector to go do AI research at Stanford. He's the lead maintainer of the open source HELM project, where he benchmarks the performance of Large Language Models.
We talk about:
- Open Source VS Open Weights in LLMs
- The Ragged Frontier of LLM use cases
- AI impact on jobs and our predictions
- What to learn so you can stay above the waterline
Can you guess what song I'm playing in the intro? I put the entire cover song at the end of the podcast if you want to listen to it, and you can watch me play all the instruments on the YouTube version of this episode.
Also, I want to thank the 10,993 kind people who support our charity each month, and who make this podcast possible. You can join them and support our mission at: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate
Links we talk about during our conversation:
- Yifan's personal webpage: yifanmai.com
- HELM Leaderboards: https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/
- HELM GitHub Repository: https://github.com/stanford-crfm/helm
- Stanford HAI Blog: https://crfm.stanford.edu/helm/
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | There's this narrative of like, you know, LAMs, replacing jobs, replacing programmers in particular. |
| 0:05.0 | Especially in terms of like Frico Kemp's, students, I'll say like, even if you want to get into AI, there's always a value in, you know, having good software fundamentals, software engineering fundamentals, programming fundamentals, really understanding, like understanding the foundations of AI, which |
| 0:22.8 | including things like probability and statistics. |
| 0:25.6 | I have a picture pinned to my wall, an image of you and a meme We're laughing |
| 0:38.6 | We're loving it all |
| 0:41.0 | But look at our life now |
| 0:45.7 | All tattered and torn |
| 0:49.8 | We fussing |
| 0:53.3 | We fight and delight And the tears that will cry until done. |
| 1:01.6 | Hold me now. |
| 1:04.7 | Whoa. |
| 1:06.0 | Welcome back to the Free Code Camp podcast. |
| 1:09.3 | I'm Quincy Larson, teacher and founder of freecodecamp.org. |
| 1:12.6 | Each week, we're bringing you insight from developers, founders, and ambitious people getting into tech. |
| 1:18.2 | And this week, we're talking with EFONMai, a senior software engineer on Google's TensorFlow team who left the private sector behind to go to AI research at Stanford. |
| 1:29.8 | EFON is currently lead maintainer of the open source Helm project where he benchmarks the |
| 1:35.5 | performance of large language models. |
| 1:38.0 | EFON, welcome to the show. |
| 1:40.2 | Thanks so much for having me, Quincy. |
| 1:42.7 | It's so honored to be here. |
| 1:44.0 | Yeah, and I'm hyped to have you here because you have the benefit of having worked in the private sector as a software engineer and now also as a researcher at Stanford. |
| 1:54.0 | So you've worked, you know, doing like hardcore software engineering on Google's sensor flow team. |
... |
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