The Data Stack Show - The PRQL: How LLMs are Transforming Enterprise Workflows with Mark Huang of Gradient

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

In this bonus episode, Eric and Kostas preview their upcoming conversation with Mark Huang of Gradient.

Welcome to the Data Stack Show prequel. This is a short bonus episode where we preview the upcoming show. You'll hear about the topics we're going to cover. If they're interesting to you, you can catch the full-length show when it drops on Wednesday. Justice, this week's show is with Mark Wong of Gradient.ai. And I'm really excited about this conversation because I think it's a great example of the type of thing that will further accelerate the usage and adoption of LLMs.

So Gradient essentially takes open source LLMs. So let's say like Lama2, right? You want to operationalize Lama2 for some use case. They actually package Lama2 into a service and essentially give you access to it via

an API endpoint. So you get an API endpoint and now you can literally send and receive data from Lama2, and they take care of literally all of the infrastructure, which is pretty fascinating. I think one of the big topics here is what this means for MLOps. But I think there are also implications for data roles that we sort of traditionally see as data engineering, data science workflows, that sort of manage this data lifecycle.

And you're almost jumping over a lot of that, which is fascinating. Yeah, 100%. And unfortunately, I didn't make it on this recording, but I had the luxury to listen to the recording already. So I have to say that's like a very fascinating conversation that you had with Mark there. But yeah, like 100%, like i totally agree with you i think there are a couple of different things here the first one is access to the technology itself right which i mean just putting like a rest api there like it literally makes like literally lowers the bar of accessing such a complicated

technology so much that pretty much everyone can go out there and build anything. Just by being a front-end developer, you can go now and build an AI-driven application, which is amazing in terms of the potential innovation

that can be created. But there's, I think, like another factor there that many people might not think about, and that has to do with infrastructure and primarily like the hardware infrastructure, right? Like it is extremely hard today. Like for someone who wants to go and experiment and build around like these systems,

you just cannot get access to the hardware that you need to go and do that, right? So, sure. Figuring out, using a service that removes this whole, let's say, all the logistics around doing that, I think it's an amazing opportunity. And it is one of the reasons that we see

so much growth right now happening around AI, right? It's not just like the technology. It's also like how the industry manages to react really fast and start like delivering products that pretty much like everyone out there can go like and start like accessing these technologies, which is amazing. All right. That's a wrap for the prequel. The full length episode will drop Wednesday morning. Subscribe now so you don't miss it.