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Lukas Biewald

Co-founder & CEO, Weights & Biases · 2 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineerscientistinvestorhost@l2k ↗LinkedIn ↗lukasbiewald.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Lukas Biewald is an entrepreneur best known for co-founding Weights & Biases, a widely adopted developer platform for machine learning experiment tracking. Previously, he co-founded and led Figure Eight, originally CrowdFlower, a crowdsourced data labeling company acquired by Appen.

21statements → 8claims → 1claims resolved → 3.71/5average certainty → 1.9/5average debate potential → 4.1/5argument clarity · the sources → 8said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 7 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

8 assertions · 7 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Lukas argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Biewald: Most enterprises have not deployed LLMs into production yet
“I think that LLMs in particular, we talk to a lot of the people and we don't see a ton of people getting them into production yet. And I think it's funny, like VCs are always surprised, like when we tell them that I think that I don't know. I'm bullish on LMS,…”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 18:09 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.1 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.2 · precision 3.8 · compression 3.4

redirected or did not address 1 of 12 assessed questions (8%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

287 words/min while actually speaking · 41.9 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 12,657 words across 2 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Lukas Biewald said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Biewald: Most enterprises have not deployed LLMs into production yet
“I think that LLMs in particular, we talk to a lot of the people and we don't see a ton of people getting them into production yet. And I think it's funny, like VCs are always surprised, like when we tell them that I think that I don't know. I'm bullish on LMS,…”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 18:09 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Biewald estimates 99% of Global 2000 use ML for core operations
“I bet 99% of the global 2000 is using machine learning for something that they actually really care about.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 25:37 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Insight
Biewald: PyTorch beat TensorFlow through developer empathy, not eager execution
“I don't think they really, I think people tell this, the story of sort of the silver bullet. Of like you know, the eager execution model. But I think the reality is they just built a product with so much more empathy.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 47:35 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Biewald: Almost all major LLMs were trained using Weights & Biases
“I think all of the major LLMs out there, almost all were trained using weights and biases.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 12:17 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Insight
Biewald: Simple operational errors cause more model failures than data drift
“People talk a lot about data drift in the industry. And that's this idea that like, you know, like language changes over time and you want to know that it's changing and sort of like have your model you know, notice that and update it. But I guess like what I …”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 16:21 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Biewald: OpenAI is a W&B customer with a small number of production models
“OpenAI has been, like, a longtime customer. I mean, I consider them, like, extraordinarily sophisticated, and they have a pretty small number of models in, in production, so.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 21:23 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Increasing dataset accuracy from 90% to 95% repeatedly halves error rates
“So this is my same data set that I published online, but if you take it from 90% to 95%, you actually have the error rate, and then going up to a hundred percent, you have it again, right?”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 4:43 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Insight
Biewald: Data labeling software requires a top-down sales model
“Data labeling, I think really wants to be a top down sale”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 3:09 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Insight
Biewald: LLM API developers are less mathematically specialized than traditional ML engineers
“Even the people Working with a lot of these APIs you know, are, like, less huge math nerds than, you know, some of the people that have been training, you know, models for a long time.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 14:22 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Insight
Biewald: Developers building with LLMs focus heavily on qualitative anecdotes over metrics
“In the LL world, like the anecdote is something people really pay attention to.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 15:00 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Disclosure
Biewald: Traditional ML methods like boosted trees remain a large share of W&B usage
“A lot of people still running, you know, boosted trees or, you know, random forests inside of weights and biases. So we, you know, it's like actually huge. We should probably do a block, but it's still a big fraction of our You know, of our user base.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 23:10 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Biewald: Pharma is investing far more in deep learning than realized
“I think pharma is investing way more in deep learning than people realize.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 26:42 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Insight
Biewald: Technical buyers don't want sales dinners, they just want facts
“Nobody wants to golf or anything. I mean, that's for sure, right? Like, I mean, there's people like a super aggressive salesperson. Some of my salespeople are really competitive. I am actually really competitive myself, but they kind of like suppress it in a w…”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 42:31 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Insight
Biewald: Only five out of 100 feature engineering attempts actually improve models
“Every task that you work on has kind of different different features work better or worse, and I spent, when I first was working as a data scientist, I spent all my time on this feature selection, and as you guys know, you try a hundred things and maybe five o…”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 2:45 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
CrowdFlower pays all global crowd workers the same flat compensation rate
“We pay everyone the same regardless of what country you come in from.”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 19:13 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
Biewald: No single industry accounts for over 15% of W&B revenue
“No one vertical is more than like, you know, 15% of our usage or revenue or anything like that.”
Lukas Biewald Aug 9, 2023 ▶ 22:18 Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVIDIA & More
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Thirty percent of CrowdFlower's crowdsourced workforce is based in the US
“It's also 30% US-based.”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 19:28 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
CrowdFlower charges a platform fee plus up to a 20% take rate
“We have a platform fee to use our software, and then we take a, up to a 20% cut of the work that, that flows through our platform.”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 22:41 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
CrowdFlower spent just $100 to collect 10,000 initial color labels
“We collected that data. It maybe cost us a hundred bucks to get 10,000 labels.”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 6:55 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Disclosure
CrowdFlower supplied raw Apple Watch survey data to journalists instead of PR
“Instead of sending out to journalists the our, like, the crowd flower analysis, we actually sent them the data and kind of let them draw their own conclusions.”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 9:57 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
CrowdFlower claims to have the largest dataset determining if images are funny
“We have a gigantic, maybe the biggest data set available on, isn't image funny?”
Lukas Biewald Sep 14, 2015 ▶ 14:12 Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)

The other half of the tape: Lukas Biewald's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 5 episodes on the MAD Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Matt Turck 4Mike Knoop 2Rebecca Lynn 1Brandon Duderstadt 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
002132201720182019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions
012201720182019202020212022202320242025episodes it came up in
001122201720182019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions per episode
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2017 2 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (2)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Startup to Industry Standard: Lukas Biewald Explains How W&B Scaled MLOps for OpenAI, NVID Aug 9, 2023 37m
Lukas Biewald, CrowdFlower // Enriching Your Data (Hosted by FirstMark Capital) Sep 14, 2015 18m
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