Amelia & Filip — How Pandora Deploys ML Models into Production

Amelia & Filip — How Pandora Deploys ML Models into Production

Author: Lukas Biewald July 1, 2021 Duration: 40:49
Amelia and Filip give insights into the recommender systems powering Pandora, from developing models to balancing effectiveness and efficiency in production. --- Amelia Nybakke is a Software Engineer at Pandora. Her team is responsible for the production system that serves models to listeners. Filip Korzeniowski is a Senior Scientist at Pandora working on recommender systems. Before that, he was a PhD student working on deep neural networks for acoustic and language modeling applied to musical audio recordings. Connect with Amelia and Filip: 📍 Amelia's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelia-nybakke-60bba5107/ 📍 Filip's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/filip-korzeniowski-28b33815a/ --- ⏳ Timestamps: 0:00 Sneak peek, intro 0:42 What type of ML models are at Pandora? 3:39 What makes two songs similar or not similar? 7:33 Improving models and A/B testing 8:52 Chaining, retraining, versioning, and tracking models 13:29 Useful development tools 15:10 Debugging models 18:28 Communicating progress 20:33 Tuning and improving models 23:08 How Pandora puts models into production 29:45 Bias in ML models 36:01 Repetition vs novelty in recommended songs 38:01 The bottlenecks of deployment 🌟 Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-amelia-and-filip 🌟 Links: 📍 Amelia's "Women's History Month" playlist: https://www.pandora.com/playlist/PL:1407374934299927:100514833 --- Get our podcast on these platforms: 👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​ 👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​ 👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​ 👉 YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​ 👉 Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud​ Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack​​ Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more: https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
Evaluating LLMs with Chatbot Arena and Joseph E. Gonzalez [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:32
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Joseph E. Gonzalez, EECS Professor at UC Berkeley and Co-Founder at RunLLM, joins host Lukas Biewald to explore innovative approaches to evaluating LLMs.They discuss the concept of vi…
Snowflake’s CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy on 700+ LLM enterprise use cases [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

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In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy joins host Lukas Biewald to explore how AI is transforming enterprise data strategies.They discuss Sridhar's journey from Google to Snowflake, diving i…
Elevating ML Infrastructure with Modal Labs CEO Erik Bernhardsson [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:39
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Erik Bernhardsson, CEO & Founder of Modal Labs, joins host Lukas Biewald to discuss the future of machine learning infrastructure. They explore how Modal is enhancing the developer ex…
From No-Code to AI-Powered Apps with Airtable’s Howie Liu [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:57
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Howie Lou, CEO of Airtable, joins host Lukas Biewald to dive into Airtable's transformation from a no-code app builder to a platform capable of supporting complex AI-driven workflows.…
Reinventing AI Agents with Imbue CEO Kanjun Qiu [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 48:37
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Kanjun Qiu, CEO and Co-founder of Imbue, joins host Lukas Biewald to discuss how AI agents are transforming code generation and software development. Discover the potential impact and…
From startup to $1.2B with Lambda’s Stephen Balaban [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:56
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Stephen Balaban, CEO of Lambda Labs, joins host Lukas Biewald to discuss the journey of scaling Lambda Labs to an impressive $400M in revenue. They explore the pivotal moments that sh…