5-minute interview with Derrick Mwiti

“We get to see the bleeding edge of it, we can see it happening right in front of our eyes. For example with Chat GPT, you can see it take shape and you have an opportunity to make a small contribution to it.”

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Time for episode 8 of 5-minute interviews! Derrick Mwiti, Machine Learning Developer Advocate at Neural Magic, talks about his work within the field of ML and Deep learning.

Tell us a little bit about yourself

Derrick: My name is Derrick Mwiti and I’m based in Nairobi, Kenya. I work as a Machine Learning Developer Advocate for a company called Neural Magic, previously I’ve been doing similar work for other companies. Just like the name suggests, Neural Magic helps companies and individuals to run deep learning models faster. For example, we are able to specify Llama 2 and run it on CPUs. So we're all about making deep learning models run faster on different types of hardware. For example, running on low compute hardware by reducing the precision of these models without impacting accuracy.

How did you get into the ML field?

Derrick: For me it was a path that followed. First I studied mathematics and computer science, then majored in statistics and after that I started learning about data science and machine learning. So that’s basically how I got started and now I’ve been working in the ML field for a couple of years.

Something that you find particularly interesting in the field? 

Derrick: It’s a very interesting field, because we get to work with the latest models in the space and work with new machine learning models every other day. We get to see what they call the bleeding edge of it, we can see it happening right in front of our eyes. For example with Chat GPT, you can see it take shape and you have an opportunity to make a small contribution to it if you would like. 

Do you have any interesting resources to recommend? 

Derrick: There's some accounts on Twitter and newsletters that I follow for daily news in the field. For example “The Rundown AI”,  they're very good at posting about the latest news within AI on twitter and in their newsletter. I also subscribe to “The Alpha Signal" which also sends a very nice newsletter about the latest happenings within deep learning and machine learning.

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