High Signal: Data Science | Career | AI - Episodes Tagged with “Llms”

Episode 18: High-Stakes AI Systems and the Cost of Getting It Wrong

Delphina — Thu, 19 Jun 2025 05:15:00 -0400

Sudarshan Seshadri—VP of AI, Data Science, and Foundations Engineering at Alto Pharmacy—joins us to explore what it takes to build high-stakes AI systems that people can actually trust. He shares lessons from deploying machine learning and LLMs in healthcare, where speed, safety, and uncertainty must be carefully balanced. We talk about designing AI to support pharmacist judgment, the shift from bottlenecks to decision backbones, and why great data leaders are really architects of how irreversible decisions get made.

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Episode 16: How Human-Centered AI Actually Gets Built

Delphina — Tue, 13 May 2025 02:00:00 -0400

Fei-Fei Li—co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute and one of the most respected voices in the field—reflects on AI’s evolution from the early days of ImageNet to the rise of foundation models. She explains why spatial intelligence may be the next major shift, how human-centered design applies in practice, and why AI should be understood as a civilizational technology—one that shapes individuals, communities, and society at large.

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Episode 15: Why Good Metrics Still Lead to Bad Decisions — and How to Fix It

Delphina — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 01:00:00 -0400

Eoin O'Mahony—data science partner at Lightspeed, former Uber science lead, and one of the early architects of the system that kept NYC’s Citi Bikes available across the city—argues that positive metrics are meaningless if you don’t understand the mechanism behind them. At Uber, he was careful to make sure his launches both looked good on paper and made sense in practice. Now in venture, he’s applying that same rigor to unstructured data—using GenAI to scale a kind of work that’s long resisted systematization.

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Episode 14: Why Most Companies Aren’t Actually AI Ready (and What to Do About It)

Delphina — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 23:00:00 -0400

Barr Moses—co-founder and CEO of Monte Carlo—thinks we’re headed for an AI reckoning. Companies are building fast, but most are still managing data like it’s 2015. In this episode, she shares high-stakes failure stories (like a $100M schema change), explains why full-stack observability is becoming essential, and breaks down how LLM agents are already transforming data debugging. From culture to tooling, this is a sharp look at what real AI readiness requires—and why so few teams have it.

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Episode 13: The End of Programming As We Know It

Delphina — Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:00:00 -0400

Tim O’Reilly—founder of O’Reilly Media and one of the most influential voices in tech—argues we’re not witnessing the end of programming, but the beginning of something far bigger. He draws on past computing revolutions to explore how AI is reshaping what it means to build software, why real breakthroughs come from the edge—not incumbents—and what it takes to learn, teach, and build responsibly in the age of AI.

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Episode 7: What Lies Beyond Machine Learning and AI: Decision Systems and the Future of Data Teams

Delphina — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 22:00:00 -0500

In this episode of High Signal, Chris Wiggins—Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times, Professor at Columbia University, and co-author of How Data Happened—shares how organizations can move beyond prediction to actionable decision systems. Drawing on his work at The New York Times and in academia, Chris explains how to scale data teams, optimize systems, and align data science with organizational impact.

Key topics from the conversation include:
• From Prediction to Prescription: Why organizations need to focus on interventions that drive outcomes, illustrated with insights like, “Imagine a hospital prescribing treatments instead of just diagnosing conditions.”
• The AI Hierarchy of Needs: Foundational practices, such as data logging and engineering, that enable advanced machine learning and AI.
• Personalization and Optimization: How reinforcement learning and exploration-exploitation methods help optimize KPIs and adapt to user context.
• Scaling Data Teams: Strategies for attracting and retaining talent by emphasizing autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
• Empathy as a Data Science Skill: The importance of collaborating with other teams and understanding their goals to drive adoption and success.

🎧 Tune in to learn how to build decision systems, integrate causality into workflows, and develop scalable data science teams for real-world impact.

You can find more on our website: https://high-signal.delphina.ai/

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Episode 6: What Happens to Data Science in the Age of AI?

Delphina — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 13:00:00 -0500

In this episode of High Signal, Hilary Mason—renowned data scientist, entrepreneur, and co-founder of Hidden Door—shares her unique insights into the evolving world of data science and generative AI. Drawing from her pioneering work at Fast Forward Labs, Bitly, and Hidden Door, Hilary explores how creativity, judgment, and empathy are reshaping the data landscape.

Highlights from the discussion include:

Judgment as a Competitive Edge: Hilary emphasizes the enduring importance of human judgment in framing problems and evaluating AI outputs.
The Future of Generative AI: She discusses its transformative potential while cautioning against over-reliance on prompts, advocating for systems rooted in rich context.
Building for Creativity with Hidden Door: Hilary shares how her company turns generative AI’s liabilities into assets, creating immersive, bias-aware storytelling experiences.
The Shifting Role of Data Science Careers: With automation redefining entry-level roles, Hilary outlines how data professionals can focus on transferable skills to stay ahead.
Navigating AI Strategy in Leadership: She offers pragmatic advice on balancing the hype of AI with practical business impact, aligning leadership expectations with achievable goals.

The conversation concludes with Hilary’s optimistic take on how the data science community can continue to thrive by embracing creativity, empathy, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

🎧 Tune in to gain practical insights into building robust AI systems, navigating career shifts, and leveraging generative AI for meaningful innovation.

You can find more on our website: https://high-signal.delphina.ai/

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