Soumith Chintala needs no introduction in the ML world - his insights are incredibly accessible across Twitter, LinkedIn, podcasts, and conference talks (in this pod we’ll assume you’ll have caught up on his Gradient pod from last year). He’s well known as the creator of PyTorch, but he's also the Engineering Lead on AI Infra, PyTorch, and Generative AI at Meta.
Soumith was one of the earliest supporters of Latent Space (and more recently AI News), and we were overjoyed to catch up with him on his latest SF visit for a braindump of the latest AI topics, reactions to some of our past guests, and why Open Source AI is personally so important to him.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 Introductions
00:00:51 Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Success
00:02:58 Importance of Open Source and Its Impact
00:04:25 PyTorch vs TinyGrad
00:10:23 Why PyTorch is the Switzerland of frameworks
00:12:44 Modular's Mojo + PyTorch?
00:16:12 PyTorch vs Apple's MLX
00:19:46 FAIR / PyTorch Alumni
00:22:38 How can AI inference providers differentiate?
00:25:48 How to build good benchmarks and learnings from AnyScale's
00:29:51 Most interesting unexplored ideas
00:33:23 What people get wrong about synthetic data
00:42:00 Meta AI's evolution
00:45:20 How do you allocate 600,000 GPUs?
00:49:24 Even the GPU Rich are GPU Poor
00:55:49 Meta's MTIA silicon
00:58:56 Why we need open source
01:07:00 Open source's coordination problem for feedback gathering
01:21:16 Beyond text generation
01:29:02 Osmo and the Future of Smell Recognition Technology