Transcript
Lusk: Hey Pano, congratulations on being chosen for transformation of the week. Tell everybody out there a little bit more about your background.
Pano: I’ve been in the AI field for two and half years now before becoming a senior AI engineer, which I currently am. I spent one year as a student with the AI Makerspace, and then one and a half years as an employee. My previous works work experience is completely different. I come from a different trajectory. I was still in the SAAS industry, but in a different field focusing on computational mechanics.
Now I’m here and I work as a senior engineer at a company called Chaptr, and I also hold the position of AI that lead for one of our products.
Lusk: What first got you interested in Gen AI?
Pano: I became interested in Gen AI when I saw the the sheer power it brought to the table the potential to open up new horizons. And I was a student finishing my machine learning studies when GPT 3.5 was released, I got instantly hooked.
Gen AI also aligned with my personal goal of transitioning my career into the AI field. It was a rapidly growing area with immense potential and great impact, and I wanted to be part of that.
Lusk: So you graduated from our LM ops course about a year ago. Have you been able to put anything that you learned into practice, either at work or on some personal projects?
Pano: AI Makerspace class helped me land my current role. During the job interview process I could showcase my expertise in transformers, training autoregressive models, and using Lora adapters, which at that point was the new hot stuff. And the Build, Ship, and Share mentality of AI Makerspace helped me build a really solid portfolio.
From day one, I started leveraging LLM’s through API integrations, prompt engineering, and evaluation of AI results. Retrieval.Augmented Generation was another concept that was under construction at that moment from the development team, and it was exciting to contribute to that.
Lusk: So what are some challenges that you faced in recent projects and what challenges are you preparing for?
Pano: I was recently participating in a global hackathon with my team, when we had to build swarms of AI agents that could extract, distill and visualize information from long context documents. This required advanced knowledge of orchestration of agents, and deploying this solution on Google Cloud. We successfully built and deployed the AI solution for it, and we’re still waiting for the results, and I hope we win.
Pano: What I’m preparing for is the changing nature of the AI engineer role. The role has evolved to stacking different APIs, deploying solutions quickly, and all of this while ensuring reliability and safety.
Pano: It’s a really ever changing and fast paced environment and you need to remain active, keep learning and interacting with the community.
Lusk: You’re located in the Netherlands, English is your second language and you’ve been in the space for a couple of years. What words of wisdom do you have for people out there who have a similar profile as you?
Pano: Well, my advice is simple Build, Ship, and Share! That’s the best way to learn and grow their career in Gen AI. It’s something you need to keep doing. Like my own personal story, it doesn’t matter where you come from. My trajectory was from computational mechanics into this world. And I live in the Netherlands, so I had to stay long hours overnight.
I didn’t have the best programing skills, but it doesn’t matter. The knowledge you get will build your portfolio, and go out there and grow your career to be a member of the AI community, it will take you a long way. Be systematic in your approach and don’t get swept up by the hype. Instead, focus on building your portfolio and transforming your knowledge into skills.
Lusk: Pano, congrats again on winning the transformation of the week award. Keep building, shipping and sharing like a legend.
Pano: Thanks for having me.