Transformation of the Week
Ashwin Patti

Transcript

Lusk: Hey Ashwin, thanks for joining me today and congrats on winning the Transformation of The Week, tell me a little bit more about your background.

Ashwin:Hey Lusk thanks a lot. I am Ashwin, I work at ServiceNow and I’m currently a senior staff Software Engineer, at ServiceNow. I have 18 years of experience in the software industry, and I’ve been working, initially at Intel, dealing more with software for hardware. Then I moved into cloud and working with ServiceNow past five years.

Lusk: So what first got you interested in Gen AI specifically?

Ashwin: Back at Intel We were working on cloud solutions, and then we moved on to using computer vision like cameras. And our biggest thing is how can we use those cameras to help out every, everyday users. So we were looking into it and this was back in 2012 to 14. We used CNN and other algorithms to get stuff working, but we couldn’t achieve what we really wanted to do. And then finally in 2018 and 19, when as soon as the more large language models, everything started kicking in. But now with all these advancements, there’s a lot more we can do. And that’s what piqued my interest and I started looking into it.

Lusk: Now, you graduated from the AI Engineering Bootcamp Cohort number 5, about a week ago, have you been able to put anything that you learned into practice, whether at work or on personal projects?

Ashwin: Hey, thanks. Yeah, it was a rewarding journey, especially the last ten weeks working on AIE cohort 5. I was explaining to a bunch of folks on how things worked, and then using all the knowledge we gained, I was able to make them break it down and explain how an LLM is built and how a ChatGPT actually works. And the other one is within the work to I was not able to go and talk more and understand and tell, like when we say deep research, what is it? How can it be useful? I was able to do it after the course.

Lusk: So what are some interesting things that you’re currently doing with Gen AI?

Ashwin: I’m loving and digging digging more into deep research, especially with Google making it available for everyone. That’s been like a new toy for me. I wanted to see how to explain intuitively key KVQ vectors in transformers. So I went to Google Deep Research, asked this question. “hey explain to me KVQ RS” then the magic happened and came out with the full blown research explaining everything. And also it gave me an option for the audio overview. What was amazing is I just put the prompt, went and continue watching my TV, and after five minutes, voila! The whole answer was here. I could have done it, but this saved at least a week of my time.

The other example was I was talking to one of my weightlifting coach. I was telling her, “hey look, this is a deep research, you should try it out.” Currently, she’s trying to research about building a sauna at home. We put this into Deep Research and it came back with exactly what to be done, and what really impressed her and me was it also told her how much will be the cost estimate, what is the size, limitations, everything. And she was telling me like this would have at least taken me a month to do it, now I got it in five minutes.

Lusk: So what are some words of wisdom that you have for people out there watching this who are considering a move into Gen AI?

Ashwin: First and foremost, just move in, don’t think about it. Yes, when I was starting all of and I talked to my wife of my friends, they always say like, oh I’m not an ML guy or I’m not an AI guy, or I’m a DevOps guy. Trust me, once we go into it and look into it, you will realize that LLM and Gen AI it’s there everywhere. It has all the components. Like for example, we have AIOps or MLOps, we have DB, we have vector DB and all these different things I’m talking about. The main point is just come into it. We can utilize whatever skillset we have to make Gen AI applications better. Similarly, we can make use of Gen AI, make our life and whatever we are doing much, much better.

Lusk: Ashwin, congrats again on winning the Transformation of The Week, you are out there building, shipping and sharing like a legend. Where can people connect with you and chat about Gen AI?

Ashwin: Thanks a lot again once again Lusk for having me and giving me the opportunity to talk to folks and explain what I’m doing. You can talk to me anytime in Bay Area, any meetups. You can follow me on LinkedIn, also follow my GitHub.