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Practical AI LLC

Making artificial intelligence practical, productive & accessible to everyone. Practical AI is a show in which technology professionals, business people, students, enthusiasts, and expert guests engage in lively discussions about Artificial Intelligence and related topics (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neural Networks, GANs, MLOps, AIOps, LLMs & more).

The focus is on productive implementations and real-world scenarios that are accessible to everyone. If you want to keep up with the latest advances in AI, while keeping one foot in the real world, then this is the show for you!

Practical AI: Machine Learning, Data Science

Waymo’s VP of Research, Drago Anguelov, joins Practical AI to explore how advances in autonomy, vision models, and large-scale testing are shaping the future of driverless technology. The conversation dives into the dual challenges of building an onboard driver and testing that driver (via large scale simulation). Drago also gives us an update on what Waymo is doing to achieve intelligent, real-time performance while ensuring proven safety and reliability.

Featuring:

 • Drago Anguelov – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Waymo ResearchNew Insights for Scaling Laws in Autonomous DrivingAI in Motion
Sponsors: 

 • Outshift by Cisco - The open source collective building the Internet of Agents. Backed by Outshift by Cisco, AGNTCY gives developers the tools to build and deploy multi-agent software at scale. Identity, communication protocols, and modular workflows—all in one global collaboration layer. Start building at 
AGNTCY.org • .
 • Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalaiFabi.ai • - The all-in-one data analysis platform for modern teams. From ad hoc queries to advanced analytics, Fabi lets you explore data wherever it lives—spreadsheets, Postgres, Snowflake, Airtable and more. Built-in Python and AI assistance help you move fast, then publish interactive dashboards or automate insights delivered straight to Slack, email, spreadsheets or wherever you need to share it. Learn more and get started for free at 
fabi.ai
Upcoming Events: 

 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

Autonomous Vehicle Research at Waymo

Dan and Chris unpack whether today’s surge in AI deployment across enterprise workflows, manufacturing, healthcare, and scientific research signals a lasting transformation or an overhyped bubble. Drawing parallels to the dot-com era, they explore how technology integration is reshaping industries, affecting jobs, and even influencing human cognition, ultimately asking: is this a bubble, or just a fizzy new phase of innovation?

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links: 

Powell says that, unlike the dotcom boom, AI spending isn’t a bubble: ‘I won’t go into particular names, but they actually have earnings’
Sponsors:

 • Outshift by Cisco - The open source collective building the Internet of Agents. Backed by Outshift by Cisco, AGNTCY gives developers the tools to build and deploy multi-agent software at scale. Identity, communication protocols, and modular workflows—all in one global collaboration layer. Start building at 
AGNTCY.org • .
 • Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalaiFabi.ai • - The all-in-one data analysis platform for modern teams. From ad hoc queries to advanced analytics, Fabi lets you explore data wherever it lives—spreadsheets, Postgres, Snowflake, Airtable and more. Built-in Python and AI assistance help you move fast, then publish interactive dashboards or automate insights delivered straight to Slack, email, spreadsheets or wherever you need to share it. Learn more and get started for free at 
fabi.ai
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

Are we in an AI bubble?

Dan and Chris sit down (again) with Jared Zoneraich, co-founder and CEO of PromptLayer, to discuss how prompt engineering has evolved into context engineering (and while loops with tool calls). Jared shares insights on building flexible AI applications, managing tool calls, testing and versioning prompts, and empowering both technical and non-technical users in AI development. Along the way, they dive into coding agents and the “crawl-walk-run” approach to AI deployment.

Featuring: 

 • Jared Zoneraich – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

PromptLayer
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

While loops with tool calls

In this fully connected episode, Daniel and Chris explore the emerging concept of tiny recursive networks introduced by Samsung AI, contrasting them with large transformer based models. They explore how these small models tackle reasoning tasks with fewer parameters, less data, and iterative refinement, matching the giants on specific problems. They also discuss the ethical challenges of emotional manipulation in chatbots.

Featuring: 

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny NetworksResearchers detail 6 ways chatbots seek to prolong ‘emotionally sensitive events’
Sponsors:

 • Outshift by Cisco - The open source collective building the Internet of Agents. Backed by Outshift by Cisco, AGNTCY gives developers the tools to build and deploy multi-agent software at scale. Identity, communication protocols, and modular workflows—all in one global collaboration layer. Start building at 
AGNTCY.org • .
Fabi.ai • - The all-in-one data analysis platform for modern teams. From ad hoc queries to advanced analytics, Fabi lets you explore data wherever it lives—spreadsheets, Postgres, Snowflake, Airtable and more. Built-in Python and AI assistance help you move fast, then publish interactive dashboards or automate insights delivered straight to Slack, email, spreadsheets or wherever you need to share it. Learn more and get started for free at 
fabi.ai • Miro – The innovation workspace for the age of AI. Built for modern teams, Miro helps you turn unstructured ideas into structured outcomes—fast. Diagramming, product design, and AI-powered collaboration, all in one shared space. Start building at 
miro.com
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

Tiny Recursive Networks

As AI systems move from simple chatbots to complex agentic workflows, new security risks emerge. In this episode, Donato Capitella unpacks how increasingly complicated architectures are making agents fragile and vulnerable. These agents can be exploited through prompt injection, data exfiltration, and tool misuse. Donato shares stories from real-world penetration tests, the design patterns for building LLM agents and explains how his open-source toolkit Spikee (Simple Prompt Injection Kit for Evaluation and Exploitation) is helping red teams probe AI systems.

Featuring:

 • Donato Capitella – 
LinkedIn • , 
X • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Reversec
Sponsors:

 • Outshift by Cisco - The open source collective building the Internet of Agents. Backed by Outshift by Cisco, AGNTCY gives developers the tools to build and deploy multi-agent software at scale. Identity, communication protocols, and modular workflows—all in one global collaboration layer. Start building at 
AGNTCY.org • .
 • Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalaiFabi.ai • - The all-in-one data analysis platform for modern teams. From ad hoc queries to advanced analytics, Fabi lets you explore data wherever it lives—spreadsheets, Postgres, Snowflake, Airtable and more. Built-in Python and AI assistance help you move fast, then publish interactive dashboards or automate insights delivered straight to Slack, email, spreadsheets or wherever you need to share it. Learn more and get started for free at 
fabi.ai
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

Dealing with increasingly complicated agents

Daniel sits down with Chelsea Linder, VP of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at TechPoint, to explore the what AI innovation and impact look like on the ground. They discuss Chelsea's journey from the VC world into economic development/ innovation, the growth of an AI innovation network in Indiana (funded by the SBA), lessons learned from fostering AI communities, and how businesses are actually adapting to AI. Chelsea also shares insights from Techpoints AI workforce impact study, which explored AI related job creation and levels of AI adoption among other things.

Featuring:

 • Chelsea Linder – 
LinkedIn • 
 • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links: 

Techpoint
Sponsors:

 • Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce. 

 • Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalaiFabi.ai • - The all-in-one data analysis platform for modern teams. From ad hoc queries to advanced analytics, Fabi lets you explore data wherever it lives—spreadsheets, Postgres, Snowflake, Airtable and more. Built-in Python and AI assistance help you move fast, then publish interactive dashboards or automate insights delivered straight to Slack, email, spreadsheets or wherever you need to share it.

 • Learn more and get started for free at 
fabi.ai
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

The impact of AI on the workforce: A state-level case study

Longtime friend of the show Rajiv Shah returns to unpack lessons from a year of building retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines and reasoning models integrations. We dive into why so many AI pilots stumble, why evaluation and error analysis remain essential data science skills, and why not every enterprise challenge calls for a large language model.

Featuring:

 • Rajiv Shah – 
LinkedIn • 
 • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

We've all done RAG, now what?

In this episode, Daniel and Chris are joined by Chris Aquino, software engineer at Thunderbird to hear the story of how they developed a privacy-preserving AI executive assistant. They discuss various design decisions including remote (but confidential) inference, local encryption, and model selection. Chris A. does an amazing job describing the journey from "let the big LLM do everything" to splitting apart the workflow to be handled by multiple models. 

Featuring:

 • Chris Aquino – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links: 

ThunderbirdThunderbird Pro
Sponsors:

 • Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce.

 • Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalai
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

Creating a private AI assistant in Thunderbird

In this Fully Connected episode, we dig into the recent MIT report revealing that 95% of AI pilots fail before reaching production and explore what it actually takes to succeed with AI solutions. We dive into the importance of AI model integration, asking the right questions when adopting new technologies, and why simply accessing a powerful model isn’t enough. We explore the latest AI trends, from GPT-5 to open source models, and their impact on jobs, machine learning, and enterprise strategy. 

Featuring:

 • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links: 

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025MIT Report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
Sponsors:

 • Miro – The innovation workspace for the age of AI. Built for modern teams, Miro helps you turn unstructured ideas into structured outcomes—fast. Diagramming, product design, and AI-powered collaboration, all in one shared space. Start building at 
miro.com • Shopify – The commerce platform trusted by millions. From idea to checkout, Shopify gives you everything you need to launch and scale your business—no matter your level of experience. Build beautiful storefronts, market with built-in AI tools, and tap into the platform powering 10% of all U.S. eCommerce.

 • Start your one-dollar trial at 
shopify.com/practicalai
Upcoming Events: 

 • Join us at the 
Midwest AI Summit • on November 13 in Indianapolis to hear world-class speakers share how they’ve scaled AI solutions. Don’t miss the 
AI Engineering Lounge • , where you can sit down with experts for hands-on guidance. Reserve your spot today!
 • Register for 
upcoming webinars here • !

Cracking the code of failed AI pilots

Daniel and Chris sit with Citadel AI’s Rick Kobayashi and Kenny Song and unpack AI safety and security challenges in the generative AI era. They compare Japan’s approach to AI adoption with the US’s, and explore the implications of real-world failures in AI systems, along with strategies for AI monitoring and evaluation.

Featuring:

 • Rick Kobayashi – 
LinkedIn • Kenny Song – 
LinkedIn • Chris Benson – 
Website • , 
LinkedIn • , 
Bluesky • , 
GitHub • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Links:

Citadel AI
Register for upcoming webinars here!

GenAI risks and global adoption

Model sizes are crazy these days with billions and billions of parameters. As Mark Kurtz explains in this episode, this makes inference slow and expensive despite the fact that up to 90%+ of the parameters don’t influence the outputs at all.

Mark helps us understand all of the practicalities and progress that is being made in model optimization and CPU inference, including the increasing opportunities to run LLMs and other Generative AI models on commodity hardware.

Join the discussion

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Sponsors:

Fastly • – 
Our bandwidth partner. • Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at 
fastly.comFly.io • – 
The home of Changelog.com • — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at 
fly.io/changelog • and check out 
the speedrun in their docs • . 

Featuring:

 • Mark Kurtz – 
LinkedIn • , 
X • Daniel Whitenack – 
Website • , 
GitHub • , 
X
Show Notes:

Neural MagicSparseMLSparseZooNeural Magic Scales up MLPerf™ Inference v3.0 Performance With Demonstrated Power Efficiency; No GPUs NeededDeploy Optimized Hugging Face Models With DeepSparse and SparseZooSparseGPT: Remove 100 Billion Parameters for Free
Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Large models on CPUs

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