This episode features co-founder and CEO of Explosion, Ines Montani. Ines is a software developer working on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies. Listen in as we discuss the evolution of the web and machine learning, the development of SpaCy, Natural Language Processing vs. Natural Language Understanding, the misconceptions of starting a software company, and so much more!
She's the co-founder and CEO of Explosion, the company behind SpaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for NLP in Python and Prodigy, an annotation tool to help create training data for Machine Learning Models. Ines has an academic background in Communication Science, Media Studies and Linguistics and has been coding and designing websites since she was 11. She's been the keynote speaker at Python and Data Science conferences around the world.
Learning from Machine Learning, a podcast that explores more than just algorithms and data: Life lessons from the experts.
Listen on your favorite podcast platform
When I started getting really deep into NLP, I watched videos featuring Ines Montani on using Spacy to do Named Entity Recognition and visualizing text with DisplaCy. Her realness, approachability and expertise helped draw me to the field.
Some of my favorite quotes:
💬 "Yes, I'm a person on a podcast but I'm just saying things"
💬 "I had no idea what I was ever gonna be. I think even when I was younger, I kind of had no real concept of what it would actually be like to have a job."
💬 "After refusing to believe in the universe, it really woke up my entrepreneurial spirit."
Some highlights:
* Ines' journey to co-founding and leading Explosion
* The evolution of web development and machine learning
* Growth of Explosion and SpaCy
* Natural Language Processing vs. Natural Language Understanding - "You need the P for U"
* Misconceptions about startups
* "T-Shaped" vs. "Tree-Shaped" skillsets
* The Power of small teams
* Incorporating LLMs into your ML workflow
* Finding your inner drive to use technology to do great things :)
It was such an honor to have Ines on Learning from Machine Learning. Her wisdom and humility are so inspiring.
Don't forget to subscribe and share with others who are interested ❤️
I will be unpacking it more over the coming weeks. Enjoy!
References in the Episode
https://explosion.ai/
https://spacy.io/
https://ines.io/
Ines Montani - How to Ignore Most Startup Advice and Build a Decent Software Business Ines Montani: Incorporating LLMs into practical NLP workflows
Share this post