Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey

Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey

Author: Lukas Biewald November 5, 2021 Duration: 49:13

You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform!

In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lukas (CEO) — sit down to tell the company's origin stories, reflect on the highs and lows, and give advice to engineers looking to start their own business.

Chris reveals the W&B server architecture (tl;dr - React + GraphQL), Shawn shares his favorite product feature (it's a hidden frontend layer), and Lukas explains why it's so important to work with customers that inspire you.

The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-wandb-cofounders

---

Connect with us:

📍 Chris' Twitter: https://twitter.com/vanpelt

📍 Shawn's Twitter: https://twitter.com/shawnup

📍 Lukas' Twitter: https://twitter.com/l2k

📍 W&B's Twitter: https://twitter.com/weights_biases

---

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:29 The stories behind Weights & Biases

7:45 The W&B tech stack

9:28 Looking back at the beginning

11:42 Hallmark moments

14:49 Favorite product features

16:49 Rewriting the W&B backend

18:21 The importance of customer feedback

21:18 How Chris and Shawn have changed

22:35 How the ML space has changed

28:24 Staying positive when things look bleak

32:19 Lukas' advice to new entrepreneurs

35:29 Hopes for the next five years

38:09 Making a paintbot & model understanding

41:30 Biggest bottlenecks in deployment

44:08 Outro

44:38 Bonus: Under- vs overrated technologies

---

Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​


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
Scaling LLMs and Accelerating Adoption with Aidan Gomez at Cohere [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:31
On this episode, we’re joined by Aidan Gomez, Co-Founder and CEO at Cohere. Cohere develops and releases a range of innovative AI-powered tools and solutions for a variety of NLP use cases.We discuss:- What “attention” m…
Neural Network Pruning and Training with Jonathan Frankle at MosaicML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:02:00
Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist at MosaicML and Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University, joins us on this episode. With comprehensive infrastructure and software tools, MosaicML aims to help busin…
Shreya Shankar — Operationalizing Machine Learning [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:38
About This EpisodeShreya Shankar is a computer scientist, PhD student in databases at UC Berkeley, and co-author of "Operationalizing Machine Learning: An Interview Study", an ethnographic interview study with 18 machine…
Jeremy Howard — The Simple but Profound Insight Behind Diffusion [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:12:57
Jeremy Howard is a co-founder of fast.ai, the non-profit research group behind the popular massive open online course "Practical Deep Learning for Coders", and the open source deep learning library "fastai".Jeremy is als…
Jerome Pesenti — Large Language Models, PyTorch, and Meta [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:35
Jerome Pesenti is the former VP of AI at Meta, a tech conglomerate that includes Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and one of the most exciting places where AI research is happening today.Jerome shares his thoughts on T…