Machine Learning Experts - Lewis Tunstall

🤗 Welcome to Machine Learning Experts - Lewis Tunstall

Hey friends! Welcome to Machine Learning Experts. I'm your host, Britney Muller and today’s guest is Lewis Tunstall. Lewis is a Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face where he works on applying Transformers to automate business processes and solve MLOps challenges.

Lewis has built ML applications for startups and enterprises in the domains of NLP, topological data analysis, and time series.

You’ll hear Lewis talk about his new book, transformers, large scale model evaluation, how he’s helping ML engineers optimize for faster latency and higher throughput, and more.

In a previous life, Lewis was a theoretical physicist and outside of work loves to play guitar, go trail running, and contribute to open-source projects.

Very excited to introduce this fun and brilliant episode to you! Here’s my conversation with Lewis Tunstall:

Note: Transcription has been slightly modified/reformatted to deliver the highest-quality reading experience.

Welcome, Lewis! Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with me today about your awesome work!

Lewis: Thanks, Britney. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Curious if you can do a brief self-introduction and highlight what brought you to Hugging Face?

Lewis: What brought me to Hugging Face was transformers. In 2018, I was working with transformers at a startup in Switzerland. My first project was a question answering task where you input some text and train a model to try and find the answer to a question within that text.

In those days the library was called: pytorch-pretrained-bert, it was a very focused code base with a couple of scripts and it was the first time I worked with transformers. I had no idea what was going on so I read the original ‘Attention Is All You Need’ paper but I couldn’t understand it. So I started looking around for other resources to learn from.