With all the talk in the industry today regarding large language models with their encoders, decoders, multi-headed attention layers, and billions (soon trillions) of parameters, it is tempting to believe that good AI is the result of model design only. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Good AI requires more than a well-designed model. It also requires properly constructed training

MLOps, short for Machine Learning Operations, is a set of practices and tools aimed at addressing the specific needs of engineers building models and moving them into production. Some organizations start off with a few homegrown tools that version datasets after each experiment and checkpoint models after every epoch of training. On the other hand, many organizations have chosen to

In my previous post on MLRun, we set up a development machine with all the tools needed to experiment with MLRun. Specifically, we used a docker-compose file to create containers for the MLRun UI, the MLRun API Service, Nuclio, MinIO, and a Jupyter service. Once our containers started, we ran a simple smoke test to ensure everything was working correctly.

MLOps is to machine learning what DevOps is to traditional software development. Both are a set of practices and principles aimed at improving collaboration between engineering teams (the Dev or ML) and IT operations (Ops) teams. The goal is to streamline the development lifecycle, from planning and development to deployment and operations, using automation. One of the primary benefits of

If you are implementing a generative AI solution using Large Language Models (LLMs), you should consider a strategy that uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to build contextually aware prompts for your LLM. An important process that occurs in the preproduction pipeline of a RAG-enabled LLM is the chunking of document text so that only the most relevant sections of a document

Anyone who has worked in a team environment knows that every successful team has one go-to person—that special individual who can help you regardless of the nature of your problem. On a traditional software development team, this individual is an expert programmer and is also an expert in one other technology, which could be a database technology like Snowflake

A chain is as strong as its weakest link - and your AI/ML infrastructure is only as fast as your slowest component. If you train machine learning models with GPUs, then your weak link may be your storage solution. The result is what I call the “Starving GPU Problem.”  The Starving GPU problem occurs when your network or your

Much has been said lately about the wonders of Large Language Models (LLMs). Most of these accolades are deserved. Ask ChatGPT to describe the General Theory of Relativity and you will get a very good (and accurate) answer. However, at the end of the day ChatGPT is still a computer program (as are all other LLMs) that is blindly executing

Over the past few months, I have written about a number of different technologies (Ray Data, Ray Train, and MLflow). I thought it would make sense to pull them all together and deliver an easy-to-understand recipe for distributed data preprocessing and distributed training using a production-ready MLOPs tool for tracking and model serving. This post integrates the code I presented

Most machine learning projects start off as a single-threaded proof of concept where each task is completed before the next task can begin. The single-threaded ML pipeline depicted below is an example. However, at some point, you will outgrow the pipeline shown above. This may be caused by datasets that no longer fit into the memory of a single process.

Introduction Distributed data processing is a key component of an efficient end-to-end distributed machine-learning training pipeline. This is true if you are building a basic neural network for statistical predictions where distributed training could mean each experiment runs in 10 minutes vs. an hour. It is also true if you are training or fine-tuning a Large Language Model (LLM) where

Introduction Generative AI represents the latest technique an enterprise can employ to unlock the data trapped within its boundaries. The easiest way to conceptualize what is possible with Generative AI is to imagine a customized Large Language Model - similar to the one powering ChatGPT - running inside your firewall. Now, this custom LLM is not the same as the

Introduction In a previous post, I presented feature extraction, which is a technique for utilizing pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve a custom problem without having to retrain the model. Feature extraction is one of two ways to use the knowledge a model already has for a task that is different from what the model was originally trained to