The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: Boundaries Between Synthetic Data and Prediction Models

Episode Date: February 27, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Alex Watson of Gretel.ai.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel, where we replay a snippet from the show we just recorded. Kostas, are you ready to give people a sneak peek? I am, of course. Let's do it. Let's do it. I think my big takeaway from this show, Kostas, is that Alex is number one, so approachable as

a person, but number two, has such a variety of deep experience in the space from government intelligence to startups to delivering things at scale on a

crazy timeline within AWS. And so I just grew more and more to respect his opinion throughout the show, which made his final thoughts on where these types of deep learning technologies are going, I think, even more poignant for me. And I really agree with him. I

think it was a really fresh, honest take not to say, well, you shouldn't use it for this, or you should use it for this. I mean, he acknowledged outright that these new technologies are always used in ways that humanity probably shouldn't use. And doing things in the open is a really healthy antidote to that. And so I really appreciated his perspective on that. It sounded simple, but I think was very powerful and something that I'll definitely keep from the show. Yeah, 100%.

I totally agree with that. I mean, I think at the end, especially when you're talking about technologies or knowledge in general, that can, I don't know, change in a very foundational way the way that we operate as humans. Yeah, it might be scary.

Obviously, we can make mistakes and use the technology in the wrong way. But at the end, that's how, I don't know, humanity models like to make progress, right? I don't think that we can change that. And I don't think that there's that much value at the end in not taking the risk of having access to these new tools or like this new knowledge.

And again, the best way to protect humanity is to make these things available to everyone. So I totally agree. I think we are going to hear more about these technologies. And okay, there's a lot of, let's say, also kind of hype right now, and we are still just scratching the surface of what can be done with these technologies. But I have a feeling in the next couple of months, we will see much more practical and interesting uses of these technologies. And we'll have more people on the show also

to talk about that stuff. Absolutely. It was a great episode and we want to have them back on but like we said earlier when we were wrapping up the year we want to talk more about some of these emerging technologies like

ChatGPT and Gretel that are forging new ground. So thank you for joining us. Subscribe if you haven't, tell a friend, and we'll catch you on the next one.