Build LLMs From Scratch with Sebastian Raschka #52 Artwork

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Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Data Science and Deep Learning are completely changing the world we live in today. Companies around the world start to make sensible use of big data to influence business decisions and create our future. From video recommendations to autonomous driving, from stock prediction to weather forecasting, the AI revolution is everywhere. The AI stories podcast brings together some of the best Data Scientists, Machine Learning Engineers, Business leaders and researchers that are at the front of this revolution. They are here to talk about their career, how they arrive where they are, give advice and share their vision. They explain how they make use of AI in their daily routine, how they use algorithms to solve business problems and make the world a better place. They are here to share their stories: their AI stories. Hosted by Neil Leiser, Data Scientist at Iwoca. Follow Neil to learn more about career, Data Science, AI and Machine Learning. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/LeiserNeil

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AI Stories

Build LLMs From Scratch with Sebastian Raschka #52

November 21, 2024 • Neil Leiser • Season 4 • Episode 3

Our guest today is Sebastian Raschka, Senior Staff Research Engineer at Lightning AI and bestselling book author.

In our conversation, we first talk about Sebastian's role at Lightning AI and what the platform provides. We also dive into two great open source libraries that they've built to train, finetune, deploy and scale LLMs.: pytorch lightning and litgpt.

In the second part of our conversation, we dig into Sebastian's new book: "Build and LLM from Scratch". We discuss the key steps needed to train LLMs, the differences between GPT-2 and more recent models like Llama 3.1, multimodal LLMs and the future of the field.

If you enjoyed the episode, please leave a 5 star review and subscribe to the AI Stories Youtube channel.

Build a Large Language Model From Scratch Book: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Large-Language-Model-Scratch/dp/1633437167

Blog post on Multimodal LLMs: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/understanding-multimodal-llms

Lightning AI (with pytorch lightning and litgpt repos): https://github.com/Lightning-AI

Follow Sebastian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianraschka/

Follow Neil on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leiserneil/

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(00:00) - Intro

(02:27) - How Sebastian got into Data & AI

(06:44) - Regressions and loss functions

(13:32) - Academia to joining LightningAI

(21:14) - Lightning AI VS other cloud providers

(26:14) - Building PyTorch Lightning & LitGPT

(30:48) - Sebastian’s role as Staff Research Engineer

(34:35) - Build an LLM From Scratch

(45:00) - From GPT2 to Llama 3.1

(48:34) - Long Context VS RAG

(56:15) - Multimodal LLMs

(01:03:27) - Career Advice