Will Falcon — Making Lightning the Apple of ML

Will Falcon — Making Lightning the Apple of ML

Author: Lukas Biewald September 15, 2022 Duration: 45:21

Will Falcon is the CEO and co-founder of Lightning AI, a platform that enables users to quickly build and publish ML models.

In this episode, Will explains how Lightning addresses the challenges of a fragmented AI ecosystem and reveals which framework PyTorch Lightning was originally built upon (hint: not PyTorch!) He also shares lessons he took from his experience serving in the military and offers a recommendation to veterans who want to work in tech.

Show notes (transcript and links): http://wandb.me/gd-will-falcon

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⏳ Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:00 From SEAL training to FAIR

04:17 Stress-testing Lightning

07:55 Choosing PyTorch over TensorFlow and other frameworks

13:16 Components of the Lightning platform

17:01 Launching Lightning from Facebook

19:09 Similarities between leadership and research

22:08 Lessons from the military

26:56 Scaling PyTorch Lightning to Lightning AI

33:21 Hiring the right people

35:21 The future of Lightning

39:53 Reducing algorithm complexity in self-supervised learning

42:19 A fragmented ML landscape

44:35 Outro

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Connect with Lightning

📍 Website: https://lightning.ai

📍 Twitter: https://twitter.com/LightningAI

📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/pytorch-lightning/

📍 Careers: https://boards.greenhouse.io/lightningai

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💬 Host: Lukas Biewald

📹 Producers: Riley Fields, Anish Shah, Cayla Sharp, Angelica Pan, Lavanya Shukla

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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
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