Guide to Data Annotation and Synthetic Data
We recently examined the landscape of tools for building training datasets – specifically tools for data annotation and synthetic data generation. Taking into account emerging trends in machine learning and artificial intelligence, we assembled guidelines to help you navigate the explosion of tools in these areas.

Data Exchange podcast
- How DALL·E works: Mark Chen is a Research Scientist at OpenAI and part of the team behind DALL·E 2, a new AI system that can create realistic images and art based on natural language descriptions.
- Scalable, end-to-end machine learning, for everyone: Jules Damji is lead developer advocate, and Richard Liaw is an engineering manager at Anyscale, the startup founded by the creators of Ray, the open source project that makes it simple to scale any compute-intensive workload.
- Orchestration and Pipelines for Data Scientists: Rick Lamers is co-Founder and CEO at Orchest, the startup behind an open source project that enables data scientists to create, manage, and execute complex end-to-end data pipelines.
2022 Ray Summit
Ray Summit is next month! I helped put together the program and it features presenters who are at the forefront of AI and are scaling their machine learning products and services. We also have great networking activities in store so come join us in San Francisco (August 23 and 24). Save 25% on your pass with the discount code Ben25 :

Book Recommendations: Summer Reading List
Finance Triad: I’ve had a soft spot for finance books ever since my stint as hedge fund quant years ago. Here are a few recent titles that will help you make sense of the global financial system – Bond King (a biography of Bill Gross); The Revolution that Wasn’t (GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors); The Power Law (a history of the VC industry)
Chums: A must-read primer on the group of politicians, journalists, and academics that formed at Oxford university in the late 1980s, and later led the charge on Brexit and altered the UK’s political scene.
The Metaverse (And How it Will Revolutionize Everything): This is a detailed look at how the Metaverse might function in practice and why it could ultimately be very exciting and enabling.
Rogues: A brilliant collection of profiles from New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Each chapter examines a specific character and dives into what motivates them, their background, choices, follies, and moral values.
Whole Earth: John Markoff’s seminal biography of Steward Brand, environmentalist and builder of one of the earliest online communities.
The Man from the Future (The Visionary Life of John von Neumann): It gets technical in certain places, but this is the book on von Neumann that I’ve been waiting for.
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