Uploaded March 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Erik Gafni builds AI systems and teams. He founded Eventum AI (bit.ly/eventum-ai), an ML consulting company working with high-growth startups. We talked about GenAI projects he worked on, how he built production ML systems, how to scale ML teams, and his journey from biologist to ML researcher. Subscribe to Daliana's newsletter on ⁠dalianaliu.com for more on data science and career.

Daliana's Twitter: twitter.com/DalianaLiu⁠
Daliana’s LinkedIn: ⁠linkedin.com/in/dalianaliu/⁠
Erik’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/erik-gafni-906b0125
Interested in working with Erik: bit.ly/erik-consulting

00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:59 Is GenAI overhyped?
00:04:28 Ascent translation with AI
00:11:58 Social media app with AI
00:14:00 Stable diffusion model evaluation
00:15:57 "Consult-to-hire" model
00:17:35 AI in biotech
00:22:46 Self-supervised learning
00:31:22 How he hires people
00:33:19 Research vs production
00:35:57 Is AGI coming?
00:37:30 New trends in GenAI
00:41:45 Data quality in GenAI
00:42:58 Philosophy in LLMs
00:49:48 OpenAI vs Open Source
00:53:58 Mistakes he made
00:57:41 How did he get into ML