Andrei Lopatenko: Scaling AI to Billions

Andrei holds a PhD in Computer Science, and is the Director of Search and the AI Lab at Neuron7. Prior to that, he was the VP Engineering and AI at Zillow. He’s also held key leadership roles at Google, Apple, Walmart and eBay.

In this episode, Andrei shares insights and advice, based on his experience deploying large-scale, high-load NLP and search applications to billions of customers (5 billion queries per day, 10 billion pages per day). Along the way, he describes how a high-quality engineering culture and a high-quality science culture were nurtured during early his days at Google as one of the first 60 PhDs in 2006, and how he has applied what he learned there later in his career. You’ll also hear a discussion about critical success factors for a transition from POC to production for a large-scale projects, such as 100 million or a billion queries per day – including a discussion about evaluation metrics for LLMs. Andrei also emphasizes the importance of continuous learning for leaders of teams that do AI, and he describes a great approach for staying on top of current research. The episode concludes with valuable career advice for data scientists who are in the early stages of their career.