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Unknown: and tell them Tobias sent you. Your host is Tobias Macy. And today, I'm interviewing Tuohin Srivastava
about Base 10, an ML application builder for data science and machine learning teams. So, Tuheen, can you start by introducing yourself?
Unknown: Yeah. Hey. I'm Tuheen. I'm the CEO and 1 of the cofounders of Base 10. I I have a background in machine learning, have been
founded a couple of companies. I've been working on Base 10 since 2019.
Unknown: And do you remember how you first got started working in the space of machine learning?
Unknown: In 2012?
No. 2011, actually, I was working in finance, pretty unhappy in my job. I studied electrical engineering
in college and done a bunch of information theory.
I was looking to figure out how to get out of finance. And I came across this opportunity to go do research with a neurologist in
Boston who was trying to figure out how they can use noninvasive biomarker to track the prog progression of
neuromuscular disease.
So I went over there, joined this lab company, and, you know, we end up doing a bunch of really cool stuff and around predicting
onset of disease and how that disease progressed. You published a bunch of papers, worked on a small company
with regards to it, and, you know, I was off to the races.
Unknown: And so in terms of what you're building at base 10, can you give a bit of an overview about what you're focused on and some of the story behind how it came to be and why you decided that that was a problem that you wanted to spend your time and energy on? Based on the machine learning application builder for data science and machine learning teams, I think the best way for users to think about
Unknown: base 10 is kinda like a toolkit
to get your models out of notebooks and into value.
We started base 10
really out of, you know, a pain point that we saw for for ourselves is that, you know, we were working
in machine learning teams at very, very small companies
where we didn't,
you know, necessarily
have all the resources we needed
to bring those models to market. So, you know, as to make it a bit more concrete, you know, we're working at a start up called Gumroad that
was working on fraud detection and content moderation.
Hence, as a machine learning engineer myself, you know, it took me about, you know, 3 or 4 weeks to, you know, get this great dataset together and come up with my first model. I realized really, really quickly after that was that I'd have to become a full stack engineer to be able to actually get this model to value for the business
because we just didn't have the resources to figure out how to deploy that model, how to build the back end as part of that model, how to build the internal tools that operate off the output of the model.
And so, you know, I think
back in, you know, 2012 to 2015,
I and our team went and basically learned that skill set. So in the absence of those resources, and that was great for me for frankly, but pretty horrible as a investment for the company.
And, you know, fast forward
to 2018 into that 19, and we're talking to a bunch of our friends who, you know, run machine learning team that do machine learning at larger companies or at, you know, midsized companies. And what we realized was that the results
from machine learning efforts and initiatives haven't really
lived up to all the hype. We went pretty deep
on
what we found at least was that there's, like, all these great tools and machine learning operations,
like the MLOps
space where
they make it really easy to, 1, train your model, experiment with your models, and figure out how to get
those models, you know, behind some sort of API. What we found was missing was that once that model is behind some API,
you'd still need a whole full stack team, which is exactly the problem we ran into. And so, you know, we kind of
conditioned upon the set of use cases and tried to see if we could abstract out that toolkit, that kind of product had that skill set that I went and learned or our team went and learned
back in the day. And that's really, you know, what base 10 is today.
Unknown: In terms of the
problems that you're solving, you made it pretty clear that, you know, there's the initial step of, I've got a model and I can put an API in front of it, but then how do you actually build the whole application around it? And so
in terms of the solution for that problem, I'm wondering if you can speak to the type of user that you're focused on addressing
to fill that requirement and some of the types of organizations
that
might rely on that capability rather than maybe having their own in house team to productionize
these applications around these models or sort of what the typical flow is from, I've got a model and I've got a prototype built with this, you know, full stack app builder in the form of base 10. And then now I actually want to, you know, bring the feature set even further.
Unknown: You know, the target users for base 10
are data scientists and machine learning engineers.
For us, you know, we've done a lot of work
on figuring out where these users and teams sit. And for us, it's usually
you know, they work at companies or at teams where they don't have support of machine learning platform team.
For us, that makes it super easy because there's only, you know, like, 10 or 15 companies in the world with proper machine learning platform teams. Or, like, the way I would kinda characterize it is,
you know, you're part of a scrappy team. You have a machine learnable problem. Do you know what that first version of our model is gonna look like? You know, maybe you have somewhere between 1 and 10 data scientists
on your team, but you don't necessarily have, you know, a complete platform team built out to support that data science function.
In terms of,
you know, like, where they are from, like, a sophistication perspective, I think that's a good question. I think,
you know, for us, it's kinda what I said. Like, they need to have a machine learning problem. Like, what's a really bad target for us is that if a data engineer picks up base 10 because, you know, what we find is that, you know, you're still focused on getting that data in the right form, which is a big problem in itself. You need to kind of be past that stage and more in the I have a model. In terms of, like, the climates from those users,
we make 1 assumption of our user, which is, you know, Python,
and we lean very, very heavily into that assumption. You know, we find Python to be very, very powerful, but what we try to abstract away is all the infrastructure
required to work with Python
and to give you a set of other tools that allow you to leverage Python to solve real business problems. So, you know, I'm just gonna maybe this is not the right time for it, but I can just jump into, like, how we do that if that's helpful. You know, firstly,
we have kind of, like, 3 pillars to base 10. The first 1 is around model deployment. So, you know, you have a model sitting in your notebook somewhere. Base 10 has a low SDK. You know, you can call from your Python notebook
or your Python shell
that wraps most types of models. So that's scikit learn TensorFlow Keras and so on and so forth. And, you know, within
really, like, a few minutes, you can have a model deployed behind an API and ready to go. But that's really where the value of Bastion starts to come. You know, we think deployment's actually a commodity. We're not super interested in being a machine learning deployment company. That's integration costs for us. We just happen to have an added benefit there. The next step though, is that you need to build some sort of API that sits around that model. So, you know, the inputs and outputs of the model don't really map to the business requirements.
You need to do some preprocessing or postprocessing. You need to write that data somewhere. You need to combine it with some other data. And so we kinda give you this thing that looks like AWS land though, GCP,
where you can, you know, write Python code that interacts with that model in base 10. And all of a sudden, you know, you've gone from a model in your notebook to a model behind an API to a model with some pieces of logic around it behind an API.
And then the 3rd pillar is kind of like that more front end application building part of it, which is, you know, you have a model let's go back to that fraud example, is that your model says,
hey. I am 80, 90% sure that this is fraud. Great. But when your model says 40% sure, 50% sure it's fraud, you want a human
to be able to review that. And so base end kind of gives you the low code UI builder to be able to interact with that business logic that I described earlier, but also put together these UIs quite quickly.
Unknown: As far as the
overall process for being able to build these full stack applications with base 10, as you said, it gives you, you know, a lot of useful tools that are all tightly integrated to be able to manage that end to end flow of, I've got a model. Now I need to build the app around it. In the absence of base 10, what are some of the strategies
and utilities and kind of development patterns that teams have
built up to be able to solve that problem and some of the pain points that they're experiencing
as far as trying to integrate all of those components on their own?
Unknown: What folks have come up with is kinda like 2 solutions. 1 is to hire consulting teams, especially when you go to larger companies.
You know, they just hire application building teams to sit on top of these ML models.
We think that's really bad. I understand the need for it, but the fact that these machine learning teams can be so far removed from the products that they're powering, I think, actually leads to worse outcomes overall. I hit that's approach 1. Approach 2 is just to stitch together a bunch of different solutions.
So, you know, like what we've seen is, you know, you would deploy your model with like SageMaker
or something on GCP's vertex
all of sudden. You then go and spin up a Flask application
and run that in in AWS,
or you use AWS Lambda or GCP Cloud Functions to interact with that model. And then, you know, you pipe that pipe that to some database,
and then you'll, again, either rely on a consulting team or a different product engineering team to build with that data, or you will use something like Streamlit or retool to sit on top of that data. Now
I think that is probably the scrappiest,
you know, most productive teams that are able to do that. Most teams just get stuck. Data scientists don't really know infrastructure
that well. They know infrastructure around models. They shouldn't need to know infrastructure. This is not what their core skill set is. And so as a result, what happens is that, you know, these models just end up
somewhere running on local notebooks and and don't really get really beyond that. I think the other approach, which I think the most successful companies have taken, is to really
start to work with machine learning platform team. But as I said, that's really a champagne,
like, problem where you're doing really well when you have the resources
to be able to put together a machine learning platform team.
Unknown: In terms
of the
actual process of
running a model in the context of an application beyond just being able to wire together the UI or build the API, what are some of the
sort of core technical requirements that are needed to be able to actually support that model as it's operating and ensure that you're able to scale it as usage grows or ensure that you're able to
monitor it or manage the integration of the API endpoints into the actual model execution and any sort of, you know, supporting storage or the other sort of technical components that are required just to be able to say, I have a model, I have an application, and everything is running and happy. I feel like you just outlined everything yourself there. But
Unknown: in terms of,
like, without base 10, you know, the truth is you need, like, a DevOps here. Right? You need folks who know how to configure
configure servers, how to manage storage. You know, oftentimes, models can be quite big. So even unpickling them and can, you know, take up too much memory. And so I think without base 10, you end up requiring to do a lot of the same sort of DevOps engineering
that you're required with a traditional web app at scale or traditional API at scale. But you have to do it a bit earlier because
you run into the memory requirements a bit earlier than you traditionally would. I think,
you know,
what's interesting is that machine learning models kind of also bring in, like, a second set of considerations around performance of that model. I'd say, like, that performance of that model is probabilistic and not deterministic, which is interesting. And, you know, that just brings a whole new set of monitoring constraints
around that model. It's like, okay. Is this model running? Great. How fast is it running? Fantastic.
Now,
you know, the harder questions to answer is, like, is this model doing the thing that we want it to do? And the answer to that is probabilistic. You know, it brings up a whole new set of challenges.
With base 10, you know, what we try to do is try to abstract all that stuff away. So, you know, our goal is to make, you know, the easy thing super easy, yet make the hard thing still possible.
And so for us, what that means is that machine learning teams and data scientists can, you know, deploy a model with a few lines of code, and the default is sensible. You don't need to think about scaling stuff up because we have a auto scaling strategy for your model. Our models don't go down. And when they do, we have code to take care of that for you, and we provide you monitoring dashboards and health dashboards to be able to look at that. That being said, you know, as an engineer myself and someone who's struggled over the years with, you know, dealing with stuff like Heroku,
you know, it can get really frustrating when a lot of these platforms just abstract so much away that you guys can't configure anything that you want at all. So we actually provide the knobs necessary for you to be able to change things underneath you if you need more compute, if you need a GPU behind it based on, like, gives you those knobs. But the default is sensible
and good enough. And, you know, we've thought about how to stop the color scaling and load balancing, but you don't need to think about that as a data science machine learning team. You mentioned a couple of other projects that are
Unknown: in sort of
a neighboring space of making it easier for a machine learning engineer or a data science team to be able to go from, I have a hypothesis, I will build a model, and now I just want to be able to wire this up to, you know, prototype something. So you mentioned Streamlit. I know that there's also the HEX platform. There are a few other projects and platforms and systems that are available in the ecosystem
to reduce the barrier to entry for somebody who's very heavy in the sort of statistical and machine learning capacity to say, I just want to put this in front of somebody to do something with it. And I'm wondering if you can just give your kind of characterization
of the space and maybe some broad categorization
of how these tools might be used and applied and where base 10 fits in that overall spectrum.
Unknown: From my perspective, at least, you know, the emergence of all these tools has been, you know, truly fantastic. It is amazing that we are creating these tools to make this thing actually very difficult and a lot easier. I'd say that, you know, I am a big fan of streamline and I'm a big fan of HEX. I feel like, you know, just by design, they're more suited to, like, BI use cases as opposed to operation machine learning use cases. And so, you know, what I mean by that is that
what we're going after is these real human loop workflows
where, you know, we're trying to build the tooling that allows you to combine humans with machine learning models and make decisions.
You know, that is, you know, base, 10, bread, and butter, like fraud detection, content moderation, where there's a model making a decision and you need a human to work with that model
to kinda make a better decision. I'd say that,
you know,
even beyond streamlining the hex, I think products like retail have just been fantastic and really
more than anything, just destigmatizing
this idea of we're at a point now with software nearing that we can
abstract away a lot of these things, especially if you condition on, like,
a certain set of use cases. You know, I guess, like, retail is big,
maybe, realization with it. Hey. All internal tools actually have, like, 7 or 8 primitives.
In other words, they don't you know, they have a button, they have a form, they have maybe some BI to them. And so I think, like, you know, I'm really excited by all these UI builders that have come up and, you know, whether they come in the form of, you know, streamlet, which is very much like write Python, get a visual app, or hex, which is, you know, kinda streamlet plus,
you know, the drag and drop ability to make into a narrative and make it really easy to a narrative. Or retool, which is like, hey. You can just build internal tools, you know, very internal. Great. I'd say, you know, base 10 definitely fits into,
you know, 1 side of that, which is, you know, very much
that, you know, we make it easy for you to build these user facing applications.
But I think we're also focused on the back end, which I'd say some of these other projects or companies aren't to focus on today. And then maybe they will probably go there at some point, but it's like, you know, with the retool, you still need to set up your own back end. We'll set up your own database that you can query against, but it very much is the front end. Like, With base 10, we allow you to build APIs.
I think that, you know, I don't know if there's that many faster ways to execute a blob of Python code behind an API than maze 10. It's literally pasting it into something like building an orchestration graph in a point and click manner, so no Yammer required, and you have an API ready to go. But really what that allows us to do and the intuition with the model side allows us to do is be a lot more focused on workflows
as opposed to maybe kind of single use applications or single use dashboards.
Unknown: Digging into the base 10 platform itself, can you talk through some of the
implementation and architecture and custom engineering that you've had to build to be able to support this workflow of
take a model, build an application around it, and put it into production?
Unknown: I think a few things. So the first thing I'll start with the model
building side model. And so, like, the first thing we did was, like, you know, built this
cool way to,
like, SDK in Python that you call with your Python client. With 1 line, you can deploy a model. And what we're doing there was actually inspecting your environment,
looking kind of like what are the requirements you need and spinning up a Kubernetes cluster somewhere to run that code and then give you an API to access that Kubernetes cluster. Our goal here was to make it so that the amount of
custom code per se necessary to be able to build that for the user was as minimal as possible. The second pass part of base 10 is a bit more interesting, right, where it's like very much like replit, but we are running user provided code. So in some isolated environment. And that has all sorts of security concerns
as you might imagine. But really, again, what we're doing here is that, you know, you provide us some blob of Python code. You know, we have some pretty intuitive way to assemble that. But, you know, again and you give us requirements to a txt, which might be the requirements
to run that code. And, again, we go and create a cluster
somewhere with that isolated environment, run your code, and provide you the interface
to do that. Like, you know, we have to go through a few rewrites of that because I think the actual core problem of running that code was difficult from an infrastructure perspective.
But the harder problem was, like, what is the user experience for writing code on base 10, and what does that look like? And so, like, what we wanted to do is build a way that you could write code locally. You could push to base 10 as opposed to have to write your code in base 10. And I think while the infrastructure behind is definitely very impressive, like, I think what's more impressive about what we've built is kind of, like, then user interface to writing code so that, you know, you feel like it fits into your developer workflow.
I think
skipping over to the front end side of things,
what's been really interested is like, you know, how do you build the drag and drop tool so that, you know, your data scientists
can build a UI without having to know JavaScript. And, you know, that's not purely reactive or display UI itself with event handlers.
So what are the abstractions required? So you can, you know, bind the button to run some code without knowing any JavaScript.
That was actually harder than I thought it'd be. I thought this was odd. This is, you know, sounds hard in practice. Like, we can probably, you know, put something out there pretty quickly. Turned out, took us 2 or 3 different rewrites
to get it right. But, you know, like, our problems really have or, like, the solutions we've come up with have really ranged from deep infrastructure problems of, like, how do you run, you know, deep models or these blobs of code somewhere
and create the API in a performant way to security, to how do you isolate
users' courage from 1 another so they can't access it. So how do you protect users from users, and how do you protect base 10 from users? I think these are hard security problems that, you know, spent way too many hours scratching your head against a wall's fault, but, you know, I think we've come up with good solutions. And to them all, what are the attractions required or what are the framework required so a data scientist can build UI without knowing your JavaScript and complex UI? And I think, you know, the range of problems there is actually quite complex and tying them all together in a performing manner so it doesn't feel like 1 jump would nest. You know, that's been even harder, which is like, you know, the UI and the user flow, if you may.
Unknown: And you mentioned that you went through a few different iterations of how to tackle this problem. I'm wondering if you can talk through some of the ways that the original design and goals of the project have changed and evolved since you first started working on it to bring you to where you are today? I'd say, like, when we started the company in the end of 2019,
Unknown: we weren't really sure
where we sat in terms of what we required of our users, and this actually put us in a really bad spot. So, like, oh, let us astray for a second where,
you know, for a long time, we were like, oh, you know, the user knows Python, but maybe they don't need to know Python or they need to know a little bit of Python.
I think
what we realized maybe, like, a year into the project is that actually code's amazing and, like, we shouldn't try to hide
cutaway. Like, we are going for a very technical audience who is pretty proficient with Python, and we should lean really heavily into that. And I think that's probably when that was, like, a big almost like paradigm shift for us when we stopped trying to, you know, build for the lowest common denominator,
if you may, and instead just we're like, how user knows Python really well. They They can even think about infrastructure. Maybe they don't know the language of infrastructure, but they can't even think about these things completely into that. So that changed even just,
like how you wrote code, how you orchestrated,
you know, running code, you know, what the APIs look like.
Even for the UI builder, like, what did we
require from the user to be able to bind
data to a table?
You know? Is it okay if they have to write a snippet of code? And I think once we've laid into that, a lot of those, you know, ideas became a lot clearer. And, you know, I kinda like leaned pretty heavily on 1 of our developers, Saran, who's, He does a lot of open source work, and he's the primary maintainer of the React Monaco library, which we use very heavily. But talking to him, I remember asking him, like, how do you decide what should be part of the project and what shouldn't? And he talked about, you know, really early defining the philosophy
and the user of your project and, you know, being really, really crystal clear around kind of what your philosophy you know, what your utility function is. You know, for us, that came a bit later than I would have hoped. But once we had that utility function in place, like it became really, really easy
to not only prioritize features, but, like, design the software and the underlying abstractions.
Unknown: Because of the fact that you do allow for users to submit arbitrary
code to customize the behavior of their back end, that always brings in a lot of interesting challenges around security
and performance and
making sure that somebody doesn't try to either try to bring your platform down or do it inadvertently because they accidentally enter into an infinite loop. And I'm just curious how you handle some of those additional complexities of being able to appropriately sandbox the user's code and then maybe also
ensure that you'd provide some limitations and constraints to make sure that you don't end up in these infinite loops or accidental
explosion of, performance consumption?
Unknown: I can't speak to a lot of that. Beyond my hate, you're gonna have taken it far away from me. No. I can't say that, you know, it's kind of managed in 3 different stages. 1 was from a security perspective,
which was that, you know, how do we protect users from other users, how do we protect users from base 10, and how do we protect base 10 from users.
You know, we have a lot of customers who give us quite a lot of sensitive data, and, you know, it is very important for us to be able to solve it, and these are the existential problems for base 10 if we get them wrong, frankly. I'd say I think 1 a bit more interesting is
the more usability side of it. It's like, how do we protect users
from doing,
you know, things that will make them end up in infinite, like, in that states or in infinite loops.
I think this all comes down to, like, you know, having, like, sensible time outs, knowing when to stop running code. I think probably most importantly, like, making it really easy to do the right thing as opposed to, you know and making it hard to do the wrong thing. And I think, you know, we spend a lot of time to ensure
that, you know, if you do get into a bad state with things that you've not lived, it's likely because, you know, you kinda did it on purpose. So, like, you got there by accident. So, again, just to reiterate, like, from, like, infrastructure perspective,
spend a lot of time just because it's so important protecting users and making sure that our current stand scale and from a usability perspective, just making it really easy to do the right thing.
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Unknown: e.
Unknown: As far as the
overall design and
interaction patterns for people who are building an application using base 10,
I'm wondering what the
kind of discovery and design process looked like for figuring out this is the
maybe not necessarily optimal workflow, but this is a workflow that is understandable and accessible for our target audience. And
some of the, maybe, initial
false starts, we'll say, that you ran into as you were starting to say, okay. This is what we think is the right way to go about it, but now we're actually going to put this in front of some of our early design partners, get some feedback, and then figure out, oh, actually, that was not the right way to do it. What led you to the current approach of breaking it into the different kind of core kind of concepts and base components that you ended up with now? I think
Unknown: we saw it from the user stories, and we kinda thought about, like, what are all the things that user needs to do. And, again, you know, it really helps being, you know, perceived user of your own product because, you know, we can we could've we thought about it that way. Like, okay. We wanna deploy a model. We wanna build APIs, and we wanna build front ends. And then, you know, we kinda took a 1 simple like, okay. We wanna build APIs in Python. We don't wanna think about AWS. We don't wanna think about Docker.
And I think we really decided to, like,
start from that top level and kept breaking it down to, you know, more and more,
like, lower level stories until it kinda matched into, okay,
how would this work for a given product? So what we did for a long time was that we had these 2 or 3 different use cases. We basically
every, like, week or 2, we'd have our abstractions,
and then we'd basically say, how do we build this top to finish with base 10? And then, honestly, we test that against ourselves
for a long time before it felt really right when we started building it. I'd say in terms of customers, you know, we started working with customers
probably 4 or 5 months, if not,
into building the product. You know, it should have been soon enough, for sure. Like, I think that's something
1 of the things we've been too good before we started. But as soon as we started going to the customer, it became really clear what worked and what wouldn't work. And so, like, you know, as an example,
and I alluded to this earlier,
you know, 1 of the things that we didn't have before was that you were just writing code directly into this orchestration graph, and then that code would be executed.
You know, 1, you know, feedback we got was, hey. How does this fit into my developer workflow? Like, how does it fit into my local workflow?
You know, how does this work with version control?
How is this gonna scale? I think, you know, all these things ended up just, you know, changing how we thought about things and really mapping it back to the existing development workflow.
Like, to reiterate, like, 1 of the things that helped us a lot as developers and data scientists ourselves, you know, it was really easy, at least, early on, for us to find our North Star in terms of building things by just, you know,
engineers are pretty harsh critics of software, as you know. And, you know, we would just ask ourselves, does this pass the bar or something we would choose? And we just kept iterating until we at least hit that, and then then we started going to other design process. And what we found is we've kinda gone through those couple of higher orders of thinking by ourselves. It just made those conversations a lot easier.
Unknown: In terms of the actual
process of somebody
discovering BaseTet and saying, I wanna build an application. Can you just talk through the overall workflow of,
you know, taking the model, building the application, wiring the components together, and some of the decision points and design questions that they'll need to answer as they go through that process?
Unknown: So to get started, it's super easy. Right? So you pip install base and
You configure your API key and you start you deploy your model. And once your model is kind of in base 10, and you can start without a model, we also give you, like I said, pre trained models. We have, like, a lot of buggy based models on base 10 that you can start to play with. But once you have that, just couple of quick to where you could start creating files
to orchestrate using that model. You know, we give you, for our models, for the API endpoints you're building around those models, we give you a way to test everything in line before you even have to call it with an API. You know, we give you a way to look at, like, logging
in line so that, you know, you can see exactly what's happening start to finish before you have to call it somewhere else. But, really, the idea is that you can go, honestly, from I have a model to deploy a model to I have an API endpoint with some, you know, preprocessing and postprocessing code with Python
and that's ready to call from an API.
And, you know, you're off to the races. I think, you know, once you have that API endpoint configured,
you know, really it's just going and thinking about what are the application on the front end you need to support that. You know, it's drag and drop. You can, like, pick a table. You can just pick a button. You can pick image gallery, a text input. You can wire it up to those API endpoints, so you could take some input from the user, run it against the model, show the output.
But, really, it's a horizontal product with the 3 different pillars, and I think it's, like, worth saying that we had users starting at all different spots. So some people start without a model. And 1 of the customers we're really proud of is Patreon.
They started with the data labeling app. So they started very much in the UI builder. But a lot of our customers don't even have UI, and they just deploy the model and start building the apps around it. So it really is kind of pick your own adventure. We have a guided way.
How I think about it and how I use it, you know, which makes sense, which is, you know, starting from your model and then building the workflow and then sorry, the API endpoint, then building kind of the front end applications that sit on top of the endpoints.
Unknown: And the UI aspect is always interesting when you throw some sort of, like, design capability in front of engineers because some of them are, you know, very design oriented, and they'll build something that makes sense. And some of them will just throw everything at the wall and say, it does what I want it to do, but then, you know, you throw put it in front of an end user, and they say, my goodness. What have you done?
And I'm wondering if you can just talk through some of the guardrails that you've put in place to maybe
prevent some of that experience of, you know, just throwing everything on a canvas and then saying, you know, good luck and just helping people think about that kind of end user experience for the application that they're putting together?
Unknown: There's nothing to stop you from creating a monstrosity in baseband. It's not even internally. We have some engineers who, you know, build apps. You're
like, that's beautiful. And other ones, they're just like, what what is this? But I think what's
more important to us is that we're just trying to make it easy to do the right thing as much as possible. So I think, like, right now, we have a very limited template, so that's a very important part of, you know, of our road map, which is, like, creating this template to the UI. If you need something to, you know, test the inputs and outputs of your model for a vision model, You know, we'll have a template for that. If you need something that uploads an audio file and transcribes a transcription model, we'll give you a template for that. If you need something for, you know, content moderation or workflow where you need, like, an inbox type view so you can look at cases, we'll give you something that looks, you know, quite nice,
you know, at least from a design perspective. It's simple enough that someone can start to build with it as a template. And I think that is, like, that's a really good way to, like, kinda point people in the right direction. I think, you know, a little less technical, but I think Airtable has done a fantastic job with this. We love their software, which is around, you know, like, if you wanna use Airtable database. Right? And so if you wanna use it for a CRM, they give you a CRM.
If you wanna use it for, like, a recruiting CRM, they give you a recruiting CRM that you could start to play with. And I think it makes it easier.
It just takes some of that down burden of those design choice out of the hands of that user. In terms of the model specifically,
Unknown: I'm wondering if you can talk to some of the
limitations or constraints that you've had to impose as far as the size or scale or complexity of the model or
some of the types of models that work better where maybe you do well with a, you know, vision transformer or a, you know, natural language model, but it's more difficult to deploy a, you know, real time computer vision app model? Just some of the ways that you think about the categories of models that people are building and deploying and some of the limitations you've had to impose to make sure that you're able to actually
provide a positive experience for your end users?
Unknown: Honestly, no. Like, there are obviously limitations. Like, if you told me that if you tried deploying DALL E 2
on base
10, it would be pretty pretty difficult.
But, you know, it actually scaled up pretty well, and we've seen people deploy all sorts of stuff from language models to computer visual models just simple linear regressions. Like, we have pretty needed support for all of that. Just as an example, there's a pretty big open source model that's GPT j with 6 billing parameters,
which is kind of like a open source version of GPT 3. We were able to get that deployed to be in, you know, in less than an hour. So, you know, like, we do scale up pretty well. I'd say that,
like, from, like, a use cases perspective, like, the more real time stuff with things that are very, very large latency for these large models based on helping other great fit for that. But
that aside,
we really are quite flexible and can handle most types of models.
Unknown: The other aspect of using something like base 10 where it's very easy and quick to get something up and running is that a lot of people will rely on it as initial prototyping where you say to your machine learning team, you go ahead and do what you want and tell me when you've got something that's gonna provide value, and then we'll build around it. And for the case where,
you know, you build an application, it proves some utility, and then you say, actually, I wanna invest in this further and, you know, build it into the core of our product.
What are the either
extension points for hooking into base 10 to be able to add additional customizations
or the options for being able to take your base 10 application and then export it and, you know, customize it to fit into,
you know, whatever frameworks and tool chains you're using for the product development?
Unknown: A truthful answer to this question. So the optimistic version of myself would say that, you know, we should be able to scale with our customers, and I think over time, we'll see more and more of that. That being said, you know, there's 3 pillars to base 10, which I've kind of said a few times now. All of them are kind of very modular, so you can kinda pick and choose which ones you want. Like, this is really important to us that hey. Like, maybe you already have a front end team or you wanna maybe use Retool when you're a big user of Retool at your company. Like, why do you have to use BaseSense? So the models have their own APIs. The API endpoints are obviously modular and have their own APIs, and the front end can be used with any back end as well. So all of those aspects, you can switch in and out as necessary. I think, you know, it's a necessity for us to be successful going forward, which is that there are it's very, very cheap to get started with base 10. And what that means is that you don't need to use base 10 for everything to start with,
but also there are escape patches out of base 10. So, you know, you can call the different parts of base 10 and benefit from them without having to buy into the whole platform.
Unknown: Going back to the model question,
you know, 1 of
the continuing complexities that people experience as they put their models into production is the challenge of how to monitor it, how to understand
what degree of concept drift it's dealing with, when I need to retrain and redeploy the models.
And I'm wondering if you can talk through some of the ways that different model types or some of the different frameworks that somebody will use to build a model will influence the integration points that are available for pulling out some of those useful model specific metrics and then what the sort of life cycle management looks like for
when somebody says, okay. This model has gone through enough drift that I actually need to retrain it and redeploy it and just being able to
Unknown: version the models in the base 10 environment and being able to push them up? Yeah. So we've tried monitoring out of the box. Like, frankly, it's something we haven't invested
the most in right now, and we will continue to invest more in it as we go forward.
You know, I think
it's pretty tricky. I think you've alluded to it, but, like, you really have to condition your monitoring on the type of model. It's very, very different to model, like, something that they're putting a simple probability as opposed to a complete computer vision model. As we invest more on that, we're gonna have to figure out which ones, like, we are best to right now, we have really, really good request level monitoring, and, you know, you can browse your outputs over time to see how they are drifting.
You know, as you go over to the next question, though, I think, you know,
like, based on has really, really good version management
with models.
So, you know, you have a model and you have a new version. It's very, very easy for you to deploy that over the top of it to kind of have some sort of strategy when you when you shadow it, basically, run it in the background
for a while, and then when you're happy, it's very, very flexible so you can do these things.
Again, like,
this building a horizontal tool is very difficult because pick and choose your battles and that's it. Right? Like, with the marketing itself and the version management stuff, we are very much like, I think it's you know, we are still far ahead of what the industry average is, but, like, you know, we have a lot of work to do in terms of making these 2 things
really tightly linked to 1 another.
Unknown: And so for people who are using Base 10 for building out applications
and experimenting
with how to put their models into production or maybe just using it as an on ramp to experiment with machine learning as a capability before they go down the process of building their own models. What are some of the most interesting or innovative or unexpected ways that you've seen it used? You know, we've always had a bunch of interest from
Unknown: people building crypto things on top of us. It's just the state of the market. We didn't expect that. It's not something that you know, it's not something that we are super privy on. It's cool seeing, like, base end being used
in ways that the market is evolving. I think some of the more, like, exciting ways is, you know, people using it for user verification. So, you know, we have a customer. They use it. They have a platform for children
to talk to each other, and they try and, like, make sure that only children participate. And
so they use it to basically run their participants through a model
and try to guess the age of the person. And if they think that this person is an adult, then they had, you know, someone verify it. I think that's super cool. I think, you know,
that
a European company uses to figure out, you know, the optimal placement of offshore energy sources.
And I think, like, to me, like, these are the more exciting places that, you know, while we hope from base tenant that we're enabling all these, you know, kind of the long tail use cases
of machine learning and by just lowering the cost
to get things working end to end.
Unknown: In your experience of building this business and
exploring the different ways that people are using machine learning and the types of applications that they're building around it, what are some of the most interesting or unexpected or challenging lessons that you've learned in the process?
Unknown: The expectations of software as a developer, this is an amazing thing because you have such great software to choose from. It feels like we're still, so early innings there. But what it has also meant is that you truly have to build something that feels intuitive and solves a problem, and that just takes a long grind.
You know, like, the reason why I think you see so many companies,
you know, have to go and raise large amounts of venture money today is because of, you know, people's expectations
of software higher than ever. It's something I underappreciated
for sure, you know, a couple years ago, but, you know, I'm realizing more and more. I think what's the most interesting
thing that we've learned working on Base 10
is how many ideas people have for machine learning can do for them, either right and wrong.
And I think, you know, that's what makes it so exciting to work with BaseSense is that, you know, ideally, we can
Unknown: end up empowering a whole new set of use cases that, you know, we didn't think about. I'm curious. What are some of the ways that you're using base 10 inside of base 10 to build base
Unknown: 10? 1 thing which is rare in the machine learning software tooling community today. I think there's kind of an open source product and there's some weighted biases for this tool. Not that meant that much software which is easily accessible by developers, sign up and use it, and that was really important to us. So, you know, at the same time, we're kind of running the business of reselling compute. Right? Like, you can run off great code. And so, you know, when a user signs up, when it we try to figure out, like, likelihood of this person doing
malicious things as quickly as possible while trying not to, you know, ruin that person's parents. And that's a base 10 app that, the moderation queue, it's it post back to Slack, the heuristics and the model, and the actions are all deployed using base 10. That's pretty cool.
Unknown: And so for people who are interested in being able to just get started with using machine learning, either with 1 of your pretrained models and they just wanna build an app around it and see what's possible, or they have a model and they just wanna get an app up and running? What is the cases where base 10 might be the wrong choice?
Unknown: I think when you go to, like, super real time
use cases,
like, based on
probably just in the right choice, like, internal build today is better. We'll get there. Which is not there today?
I'd say that,
you know, when you have more optimization
models as opposed to creation models, you know, based on long break choice. And then I'd say
if inside companies, if you care a lot about they've been on prem, you know, based on to pull up that. But it's, like, it's more painful for us and more painful for the customer. You know? Like, it will be more painful than if you just use a cloud offering. So I'd say, you know, there are 3 cases of web based, and it's probably not we haven't dealt with those things
as our number 1 priority for where we are today. They are all possible,
Unknown: but higher order questions that you need to answer before using base 10 for those things. Now that you have launched and your product is available for people to start onboarding and experimenting with, what are some of the things you have planned for the near to medium term or any areas of focus that you're excited to dig into?
Unknown: Yeah. I think the biggest 1 is, like, the entire integration with developer workflow.
So can you write it in your Versus code and there's, like, a little base engine extension that deploy that, you know, we're gonna be open sourcing a bunch of stuff we've worked on, which I'm super excited about. But right now, you know, like, I think over the next, like, 12 months, you know, we're just really focused on getting people value. And I think, you know, whatever that entails, whether that means more models where we're really investing in that, whether that means,
you know, investing in monitoring,
We're really excited about that, but I think, you know, the thing that comes to mind straight away is, like, how do we get even more embedded into the developer workflow today?
Unknown: Well, for anybody who wants to get in touch with you and follow along with the work that you're doing, I'll have you add your preferred contact information to the show notes. And as a final question, I'd like to get your perspective on what you see as being the biggest barrier to adoption for machine learning today.
Unknown: Really just getting buy in from all the stakeholders. I think today, like, machine learning has has, like, this dual class status
of having a ton of hype around it and also having a lot of skepticism around it. And I think, you know, what's
important to adoption today, I think, is just educating people about, you know, what's possible in the state of the art,
where realistically most organizations are, and what it'll take for those things to converge
over time. And I think, you know, that just will require, you know, more success stories, more failure stories,
and just making it driving down the cost data rate, which I hope I contribute to in some way in the fall.
Unknown: Absolutely. Well, thank you very much for taking the time today to join me and share the work that you've been doing at Base 10. It's definitely a very interesting platform,
definitely
reduces the time and energy required to invest in getting an application up and running to prove out ideas. So appreciate all of the time and energy that you and your team have put into that, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on the show.
Unknown: Thank you for listening. And don't forget to check out our other shows, the Data Engineering Podcast, which covers the latest in modern data Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. You can
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