Hamza Farooq: World of LLMs, AI, Career Tips - AI Portfolio Podcast

AI Portfolio Podcast

In this first episode you will learn why Hamza left Google as a Senior Research Manager to start a search startup given all the progress of large language models (LLM). He covers some core tenants you need to start building LLM-based systems. More importantly, in this fast-moving field, you learn how Hamza navigated his career and what you can do to make progress.

Hamza Farooq is the CEO/founder of traversaal.ai. Previously, he was a Sr. Research Science Manager at Google, a lecturer at Stanford, and an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota. Hamza has worked at top companies such as Walmart Labs and Gallup and teaches a course on Maven called Building LLMs Applications from Scratch into Production.

📲 Hamza Farooq Socials:
LinkedIn: / hamzafarooq

📲 Mark Moyou, PhD Socials:
LinkedIn: / markmoyou
Twitter: / markmoyou

Startup (Traversaal.ai) - https://www.traversaal.ai/

📒 Chapters

00:00:00 Intro

00:03:01 - LLM Summer

00:04:06 - Falcon AI

00:07:27 - Language Modelling

00:08:33 - Distance Vs Metric Space Modeling

00:11:36 - Context Learning vs fine-tuning

00:14:38 - Benefit of larger LLM

00:17:41 - Lexical, Hybrid, or Neural Approach

00:21:41 - Natural preferences in LLM

00:24:52 - LLM in user reviews

00:27:34 - FOMO of AI

00:30:16 - AI Hype or Innovation

00:34:26 - Generative Models

00:35:40 - Open AI vs open-source models

00:38:36 - Open Source Models monetization

00:40:18 - Mistakes in LLM journey

00:41:53 - What is LLM

00:44:01 - LLM optimization

00:46:09 - NLP or LLM

00:47:35 - LLM consumption

00:49:04 - Models Hosting

00:51:17 - Education

00:53:33 - Open Source work

00:55:29 - ML system design

00:58:14 - Career

01:04:15 - Career Optimization function

01:08:24 - Advice for international students

01:11:06 - MBA and PhD

01:15:06 - Imposter Syndrome

01:16:44 - Perspectives for People in their home country

01:20:24 - Unfair Advantage