Uploaded July 2023 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Piero Molino was one of the founding members of Uber AI Labs. He worked on several deployed ML systems, including an NLP model for Customer Support, and the Uber Eats Recommender System with graph learning and collision detection. Later, he became a Staff Research Scientist at Stanford University working on Machine Learning systems. He is the author of Ludwig with 8900 stars on GitHub, an open source declarative deep learning framework. In 2021 he co-founded Predibase, the low-code declarative machine learning platform built on top of Ludwig.
Today we’ll talk about his career journey, projects he worked on at Uber AI, how he created Ludwig and built Predibase, as a researcher in NLP, what are his hot takes on large language models and how will it reshape the industry and data scientists day-to-day work. If you enjoy the show, subscribe to the channel and leave a 5-star review. Subscribe to Daliana's newsletter on dalianaliu.com for more on data science and career.
Piero's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pieromolino
Daliana's Twitter: twitter.com/DalianaLiu
Daliana's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dalianaliu
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:54 Journey to machine learning
00:03:51 Recommending system at Uber Eats
00:04:13 Projects at Uber AI
00:09:34 Uber's customer obsession ticket system
00:16:01 How to evaluate online-offline business and model performance metrics
00:17:16 Customer Satisfaction
00:28:38 When do you know whether a project is good enough
00:31:09 Start simple
00:41:50 Declarative machine learning and Ludwig
00:45:32 Ludwig vs AutoML
00:54:44 Working with Professor Chris Re
00:58:32 Why he started Predibase
01:07:56 LLM and GenAI
01:10:17 Challenges for LLMs
01:22:36 Advice for data scientists
01:34:29 Career advice to his younger self
Piero Molino was one of the founding members of Uber AI Labs. He worked on several deployed ML systems, including an NLP model for Customer Support, and the Uber Eats Recommender System with graph learning and collision detection. Later, he became a Staff Research Scientist at Stanford University working on Machine Learning systems. He is the author of Ludwig with 8900 stars on GitHub, an open source declarative deep learning framework. In 2021 he co-founded Predibase, the low-code declarative machine learning platform built on top of Ludwig.
Today we’ll talk about his career journey, projects he worked on at Uber AI, how he created Ludwig and built Predibase, as a researcher in NLP, what are his hot takes on large language models and how will it reshape the industry and data scientists day-to-day work. If you enjoy the show, subscribe to the channel and leave a 5-star review. Subscribe to Daliana's newsletter on dalianaliu.com for more on data science and career.
Piero's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pieromolino
Daliana's Twitter: twitter.com/DalianaLiu
Daliana's LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dalianaliu
00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:54 Journey to machine learning
00:03:51 Recommending system at Uber Eats
00:04:13 Projects at Uber AI
00:09:34 Uber's customer obsession ticket system
00:16:01 How to evaluate online-offline business and model performance metrics
00:17:16 Customer Satisfaction
00:28:38 When do you know whether a project is good enough
00:31:09 Start simple
00:41:50 Declarative machine learning and Ludwig
00:45:32 Ludwig vs AutoML
00:54:44 Working with Professor Chris Re
00:58:32 Why he started Predibase
01:07:56 LLM and GenAI
01:10:17 Challenges for LLMs
01:22:36 Advice for data scientists
01:34:29 Career advice to his younger self
