💥 Founder & CEO @ Explosion
👩💻 Developing spacy.io + prodi.gy + ellf.ai
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Articles by Ines Montani
Taking LLMs out of the Black Box: A Practical Guide to Human-in-the-Loop Distillation
Transcript Montani: I'll be talking about taking large language models out of the black box, and a few practical tips that hopefully you can apply in your work today. Some of you might know me from my work on spaCy, which is an open-source library for natural language processing in Python. spaCy was really designed from day one to be used in real products and be used in production.
The AI Revolution Will Not Be Monopolized: How Open-Source Beats Economies of Scale, Even for LLMs
Transcript Montani: GenAI, large language models have been truly transformative. The innovation has always almost been shockingly simple, just make the models a lot bigger. With more bigger models coming out, it's only fair to wonder, are we heading further into a black box era with bigger models obscured behind APIs controlled by big tech monopolies? As you can tell from the title of my talk, I don't think so. I actually think open source software means there is no monopoly to be gained in AI.
The AI Revolution Will Not Be Monopolized: How open-source beats economies of scale, even for LLMs
With the latest advancements in Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models (LLMs), and big companies like OpenAI dominating the space, many people wonder: Are we heading further into a black box era with larger and larger models, obscured behind APIs controlled by big tech monopolies? I don’t think so, and in this talk, I’ll show you why.
A beginner’s guide to making beautiful slides for your talks
I’ve done quite a bit of conference speaking over the years, and I love designing slides and coming up with a new visual theme for each topic. It’s fun and keeps me motivated to put in the work and actually write my talks. People often ask me for tips and tooling recommendations, so in this guide, I’m sharing some of my not-so-secret secrets and three beginner-friendly steps for how you can up your slides game for the upcoming conference season! 1.
My Guide to Berlin
I’ve been living in Berlin since 2010 and making this city my home base and the place to start our company was a very conscious choice. Berlin is vibrant, a bit gritty, very walkable and offers a high quality of life relative to the cost of living. It’s also a city full of culture and history, having been at the centre of modern European history for the past 100+ years, from two world wars to the Cold War and the years spent as a city divided between East and West Germany.
Raspberry Pi, Python and cats: my first foray into embedded development
I love shitty robots. And I love Python, and cats. I never thought I’d be a cat mom myself, but in March 2022 we started hosting a family from Ukraine who brought with them their adorable cat boy Rizhik and we ended up adopting him. And here we are, with two additional fluffy Siberian kittens, Baikal and Tunguska, that we’ll adopt soon to keep him company.
#122 Ines Montani
⚠ The following transcript was automatically generated. ❤ Help us out, Submit a pull-request to correct potential mistakes Ines Montani 0:00 He was like, hey, how would you feel about building a visualizer for syntax. So if you have like a sentence, different words have different types.
spaCy Cheat Sheet: Advanced NLP in Python
Will programmers disappear, or will their roles just be disrupted by the adoption of next-generation AI tools? Javier Canales Luna 8 min LaMDA: Google's family of conversational large language models for natural & intuitive interactions, based on Transformer architecture. Learn about feature learning, an automatic process that helps machine learning models identify and optimize patterns from raw data to enhance performance.
Gooey text background with SVG filters
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CSS-only numbered lists with "drop" shapes
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Gooey button hover effect with SVG filters & CSS
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Simplest & cleanest CSS-only loading ellipsis animation
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termynal.js: A lightweight and modern animated terminal window #2
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termynal.js: A lightweight and modern animated terminal window
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Dynamic duotone SVG images with feColorMatrix and Jade
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The wired brain: How not to talk about an AI-powered future
The way we talk about AI is a mess. It starts with the most obvious, the imagery. Just like stock photos of happy people pointing at whiteboards were a symbol of the modern workplace, wired brains and robots have now come to represent "the AI". But the visual messaging is only a small part of a much larger problem. Illustration is symbolic — it relies on familiarity and evokes associations and expectations.
Supervised learning is great - it's data collection that's broken
Short of Artificial General Intelligence, we'll always need some way of specifying what we're trying to compute. Labelled examples are a great way to do that, but the process is often tedious. However, the dissatisfaction with supervised learning is misplaced. Instead of waiting for the unsupervised messiah to arrive, we need to fix the way we're collecting and reusing human knowledge.
Christiane’s second life
Christiane F. of "Bahnhof Zoo" fame published her long-awaited follow-up memoir last October. As the English translation is still pending, here’s a unique and exclusive look at the book and the woman behind it. The girl from Bahnhof Zoo is now far from a child – and unlikely to be spotted in Charlottenburg, either. Known simply as Christiane F.
Introducing Explosion AI
The problem with developing a machine learning model is that you don't know how well it'll work until you try — and trying is very expensive. Obviously, this risk is unappealing, but the existing solution in the market, one-size-fits-all cloud services, are even worse. We're launching Explosion AI to give you a better option. For the last two years, we've been developing spaCy, one of the leading libraries. Matt left academia to write spaCy in 2014. Ines has been working on it since early 2015.
CSS-only scroll indicator (adapted with more options)
.scroll-indicator main h1 CSS-only scroll indicator p strong Adapted from #[a(href="http://codepen.io/MadeByMike/pen/ZOrEmr" target="_blank") this pen]. I re-wrote the CSS to use an element instead of the body, and added variables to change the bar position (top or bottom), the bar height and the bar colours. For no colour gradient, use the same value for #[code $bar-color] and #[code $bar-color2].
Pure CSS color-changing progress bar
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Halftone Newspaper Effect with SVG Filters (Chrome)
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Vertical color-adapting CSS menu
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Super simple CSS-only terminal window with code
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Pure CSS animated article grid (single element, responsive flexbox)
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Farin Urlaub: A doctor at the races
Those already familiar with Farin Urlaub likely know him as the singer/guitarist of German punk giants Die Ärzte. But he’s also a successful solo artist and has been a consistent personality in German music since the 1980s. At 51, he’s looking back on a three-decade-long career. Starting out as a small punk band in West Berlin in 1982, Die Ärzte went from Kreuzberg squats to big stadium stages. In 2002, Farin Urlaub founded his solo band, Farin Urlaub Racing Team (FURT).
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