The unexpected realities of living the “dream life.” — I was living the dream. Six-figure salary. Working at a great company. And I was endowed with the coveted title of “Data Scientist.” So why would I walk away from it all? — Storytime. Background After finishing grad school, I joined Toyota Financial Services (TFS) as a data scientist. What attracted…

Data Curation, Transformers, Training at Scale, and Model Evaluation — This is the 6th article in a series on using large language models (LLMs) in practice. Previous articles explored how to leverage pre-trained LLMs via prompt engineering and fine-tuning. While these approaches can handle the overwhelming majority of LLM use cases, it may make sense to build an LLM from…

What they don’t teach you in statistics — Statistics is the bedrock of data science and analytics. It gives us a powerful toolbox to objectively answer complex questions. However, many of our favorite statistical tools become useless when applied to a particular class of data — Power Laws. In this article, I will provide a beginner-friendly guide to…

Lessons from the top 1% of data freelancers — I paid freelancers to talk to me (again) 6 months ago, I interviewed 10 top data science freelancers on Upwork and wrote an article summarizing my key learnings. While this might sound like an expensive way to learn, I’ve found it to be an unreasonably effective way to accelerate my journey as a recent full-time entrepreneur. There is…

What entrepreneurs need to know about using LLMs in practice — Three months ago, I walked away from my corporate data science job to pursue entrepreneurship full-time. While many factors went into that decision, one was the realization that if you work in AI & analytics, now is not the time to be on the sidelines. (IMO) we are in the…

A conceptual overview with example Python code — This is the 5th article in a series on using Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice. In this post, we will discuss how to fine-tune (FT) a pre-trained LLM. We start by introducing key FT concepts and techniques, then finish with a concrete example of how to fine-tune a model…

7 prompting tricks, LangChain, and Python example code — This is the fourth article in a series on using large language models (LLMs) in practice. Here, I will discuss prompt engineering (PE) and how to use it to build LLM-enabled applications. …

A 10-year Retrospective — 10 years ago today, I got the worst (and best) birthday gift of my life. I dropped acid with my friends and spiraled into existential confusion and panic (colloquially known as a “bad trip”). …

A quick-start guide to using open-source LLMs — This is the 3rd article in a series on using large language models (LLMs) in practice. Here I will give a beginner-friendly guide to the Hugging Face Transformers library, which provides an easy and cost-free way to work with a wide variety of open-source language models. …