Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI23 Joulu 2021

Chris Padwick — Smart Machines for More Sustainable Farming

Chris Padwick is Director of Computer Vision Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere. Their core product, See & Spray, is a weeding robot that identifies crops and weeds in order to spray only the weeds with herbicide.

Chris and Lukas dive into the challenges of bringing See & Spray to life, from the hard computer vision problem of classifying weeds from crops, to the engineering feat of building and updating embedded systems that can survive on a farming machine in the field. Chris also explains why user feedback is crucial, and shares some of the surprising product insights he's gained from working with farmers.

The complete show notes (transcript and links) can be found here: http://wandb.me/gd-chris-padwick

---

Connect with Chris:

📍 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-padwick-75b5761/

📍 Blue River on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlueRiverTech

---

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:09 How does See & Spray reduce herbicide usage?

9:15 Classifying weeds and crops in real time

17:45 Insights from deployment and user feedback

29:08 Why weed and crop classification is surprisingly hard

37:33 Improving and updating models in the field

40:55 Blue River's ML stack

44:55 Autonomous tractors and upcoming directions

48:05 Why data pipelines are underrated

52:10 The challenges of scaling software & hardware

54:44 Outro

55:55 Bonus: Transporters and the singularity

---

Subscribe and listen to our podcast today!

👉 Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts

👉 Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts

👉 Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(138)

He's Building an AI That Can't Lie | Dan Klein

"We are going to switch from the problem in AI being that nothing works to the problem being that everything works."Dan Klein has been studying language models for over two decades and is now a profes...

16 Kesä 1h 14min

He Raised $70M to Cure Every Disease With AI | Samuel G. Rodriques, Edison Scientific

Samuel Rodriques left physics because there were no unsolved problems left.Instead, he built an AI scientist named Kosmos to cure every disease, solve aging, and map the human brain.In this episode:Th...

26 Touko 1h 14min

Uber, Nissan, and Mercedes Chose This Self-Driving Startup | Alex Kendall, Wayve

"Every vehicle is capable of driverless operation. That's clearly the steady state of where we're going."Wayve started in a rented house in Cambridge with $1.5M, a car in the garage, and an aim to int...

15 Huhti 45min

Why Netflix, Uber, and Spotify Never Lag: The Database Nobody Talks About | Aaron Katz

"Companies designing for agents, not humans, are going to get a lot of lift."ClickHouse started as an internal tool at Yandex. Today it's the database Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Tesla all run on.In t...

31 Maalis 43min

The $64M Bet on an AI That Has to Be Right | Carina Hong, CEO of Axiom

Formal verification already consumes years of human effort.In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with Carina Hong, Founder & CEO of Axiom, about why verification is becoming the real bottleneck in high...

5 Helmi 50min

What a $42B Software Co. Really Spends on AI Tools

“I don't worry about being replaced by AI. I worry about being replaced by someone who's really good at using AI.”Atlassian has 10,000+ engineers currently split-testing the world’s top AI coding tool...

20 Tammi 1h 7min

Inside the $41B AI Cloud Challenging Big Tech | CoreWeave SVP

The future of AI training is shaped by one constraint: keeping GPUs fed.In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks with CoreWeave SVP Corey Sanders about why general-purpose clouds start to break down under...

6 Tammi 53min

Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack

The future of AI is physical. In this episode, Lukas Biewald talks to Nikolaus West, CEO of Rerun, about why the breakthrough required to get AI out of the lab and into the messy real world is blocked...

16 Joulu 20251h