If you have been following my journey for a while, you’re probably aware of my fascination with decision-making frameworks. The line between success and failure, whether in businesses or individual...
(Interestingly, this is the first time arXiV has declined a submission from me. I would give the editors kudos for finally taking their role seriously if it wasn’t because I suspect this is simply ...
(This blog post, as most of my recent ones, is written with GPT-4 assistance and augmentation)
The breakneck speed of innovation in the artificial intelligence sector has naturally steered my writing towards AI-centric themes on this blog. Regular readers, however, will recall that my passi...
Exploring the AI-Driven Future of Software Development
In my view, the concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as it’s commonly understood might be a misnomer. Human intelligence itself is not ‘general’; it is inherently constrained by our sen...
The Big Sur Marathon is considered the most beautiful marathon in the US and top ten in the world. However, it did not make it into my top 10 most epic runs
In the landscape of Generative AI (GenAI), we often find ourselves amazed at the rapidity and scale of advancements. GPT-4 stands as a shining example, pushing the boundaries of linguistic understa...
The layers of GenAI development
(I recently turned this guide into a paper. You can find it here)
In this post I summarize the main advances in the area of LLM models, and particularly open source LLMs (including Falcon, LlaMa2, and Free Willy). I describe different leaderboards and what their ...
DALL-E 2: An old professor with a notebook in his hand talking to a futuristic looking robot. 4k. Professional photo. Photorealistic
Introduction to recommender systems: Basics and classic techniques Beyond the basics Ranking Factorization machines Explore/exploit Full page optimization Co...
A few weeks back I shared my thoughts on how things were going to evolve in the race to build better/larger/smarter generative AI models, and particularly LLMs. Here is what I had to say:
Ten years ago, we published a post in the Netflix tech blog explaining our three-tier architectural approach to building recommender systems (see below). A lot has happened in the last 10 years in ...
I have always loved reading. For the past 3 years I have also gotten into audiobooks, which has increased my book consumption dramatically. I listen to many audiobooks, and then buy in paper those...
“We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” - Amara’s law
(Read my cofounder Neal Khosla’s version in Curai’s blog )
I have not written about my running/sports feats in a while. On the one hand I don’t think I have anything more interesting to say than what I said in my 10 Lessons I learned from running. On the o...
In case you are reading this post in my now Medium mirror, you can access the result of this migration here.
A few weeks back, Netflix announced that they were adding a two thumbs up option to give feedback on their content. At the same time I was being asked on Twitter why we had given up on 5 star ratin...
It has been over 10 years since the Netflix Prize finished, and I was not expecting to write a blog post about it at this point. However, just in the past couple of weeks I have found myself talkin...
In case you are not familiar with it, the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) is a federal agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. that is responsible for the control and supervision...
You have probably heard of the butterfly effect: a distant butterfly flapping its wings can have a hard-to-predict effect on a future event. Everything seems to be connected in the world, and tech ...
Curai’s mission is to “provide the world’s best healthcare to everyone”. In order to do so, we strive to scale the reach of an individual physician by creating tools that automate large portions of...
I recently had a candidate I was interviewing to ask about my leadership style. I gave a short answer, but I was left thinking that I would have liked to continue talking about this for a much long...
It has become somewhat of a tradition for me to do an end-of-year retrospective of advances in AI/ML (see last year’s round up for example), so here we go again! This year started with a big recogn...
There is a long history of debate about how much of human knowledge is innate and how much is learned from experience/data. This is also known as the nature vs. nurture debate (See for example some...
It has become a sort of tradition for me to try to summarize ML advances at this time of the year (see here for my Quora answer last year, for example). As always, this summary will necessarily be ...
Some days back I was having a conversation about the importance of memos and documents in an agile/fast-moving startup company. The person I was talking with was surprised with my thoughts and aske...
I haven’t updated this channel in a while. I hope that by now you have already found out elsewhere that about a year ago I co-founded a company in the AI/Healthcare space: Curai. A few weeks back, ...
You have probably heard a lot about Deep Learning and how it is taking over the world in general, and the area of Machine Learning in particular. But, does that mean that Deep Learning will be the ...
Ad blockers might be good for the individual consumers that are using it, short term. However, longer term, if successful, ad blockers will shape the Internet in a way that will end up hurting cons...
This is a great question. As a TLDR; the way to deal with strong differences between engineers is not necessarily to build consensus but to have a clear owner in charge of making the final decision.
There have recently been some articles (e.g. This list of influencers) that have pointed to this blog and lamented that I don’t update it regularly anymore. It is true. I now realize I should have ...
This is not an easy question because there is no common agreement on what “Data Mining” means. But, I am going to say that I disagree with the answer from Wikipedia that Yuvraj Singla points to. I ...
In my previous post, I introduced the ten new lessons and described the first five. Let’s directly dive into the final 5.
Over a year ago, following an original presentation at MLConf, I wrote a blog post entitled “10 Lessons Learned from building ML systems”. At that point, I was leading the Algorithms Engineering te...
2015 has been a great year for me in many ways, but running has been particularly good. This year I ran 2000 miles (3200 km), compared to the 1850 last year. This is even more remarkable if I think...
(This is a blogpost version of a talk I gave at MLConf SF 11/14/2014. See below for original video and slides)
A couple of weeks ago, I gave a 4 hour lecture on Recommender Systems at the 2014 Machine Learning Summer School at CMU. The school was organized by Alex Smola and Zico Kolter and, judging by the a...
I have recently heard complaints that this blog is rather quiet lately. I agree. I have definitely been focused on publishing through other sources and have found little time to write interesting t...
As I have explained in other publications such as the Netflix Techblog, ranking is a very important part of a Recommender System. Although the Netflix Prize focused on rating prediction, ranking is...
A couple of days ago, I attended the Analytics @Webscale workshop at Facebook. I found this workshop to be very interesting from a technical perspective. This conference was mostly organized by Fac...
(Sorry for allowing myself to depart from the usual geeky computer science algorithmic talk in this blog. I owed it to myself and my biggest hobby to write a post like this. I hope you bear with me...
After a great week in beautiful and sunny Dublin (yes, sunny), it is time to look back and recap on the most interesting things that happened in the 2012 Recsys Conference. I have been attending th...
We are just a few days away from the 2012 ACM Recommender Systems Conference (#Recsys2012), that this year will take place in Dublin, Ireland. Over the years, Recsys has become my favorite conferen...
The discussion of whether it is better to focus on building better algorithms or getting more data is by no means new. But, it is really catching on lately. This was one of the preferred discussion...
Last week, I published a post on the Netflix tech blog. The post, entitled “Netflix Recommendations: Beyond the 5 stars” describes how recommendations have evolved at Netflix since the Netflix Priz...
I found Recsys this year of very high quality in general. There were many good papers and presentations. The Industry track was also very high-quality, with very interesting talks from companies s...
In the traditional formulation of the “Recommender Problem”, we have pairs of items and users and user feedback values for very few of those dyads. The problem is formulated as the finding of a uti...
Three weeks ago, I started to work for Netflix. Everything has moved so fast with so many things to do and learn that it seems like I have already been here for a much longer time!
Last week, Denis Parra presented our paper entitled “Walk the Talk: Analyzing the Relation between Implicit and Explicit Feedback for Preference Elicitation” at the UMAP conference. The paper won D...
A few days back, there was an interesting post by Judy Robertson in the Communications of the ACM blog. The post, entitled “Stats: We’re doing it wrong“, builds upon a paper from last year’s CHI co...
That was the main title of a series of talks I gave in different labs and companies during my recent California tour. In this presentation, I talked about many of our recent projects related to how...
I have discussed previously on this blog about how well the Scientific Method adapts to Agile approaches. These ideas also took me to an unfinished effort to draft an Agile Research Manifesto. Howe...
If you are reading this blog I am pretty sure that you know quite a lot about Quora by now. If not, you should sign on and try it a bit before you continue reading the post.
I don’t consider myself to be a great presenter. As a matter of fact, every time I finish a presentation, I find myself thinking about how many things I screwed up and could have done much better. ...
