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William Falcon

Founder & CEO, Lightning AI · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutiveengineerscientist@_willfalcon ↗LinkedIn ↗williamfalcon.com ↗

William Falcon is the founder and CEO of Lightning AI. He created PyTorch Lightning during his PhD research at New York University.

15statements → 9claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 3.73/5average certainty → 2.53/5average debate potential → 4.2/5argument clarity · the sources →

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 4 assertions · 3 insights · 2 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 6 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 William 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
Falcon: Stability AI trained Stable Diffusion using PyTorch Lightning
“Who's heard of stability, AI, and stable diffusion? That was trained using Lightning, right?”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 7:51 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
100% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

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

4.2 / 5 directness 4.4 · coherence 4.4 · precision 4 · compression 3.5

answered every one of 8 assessed questions directly

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? →

288 words/min while actually speaking · 18 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,891 words across 1 episode 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 William Falcon said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated
Falcon: Open-source AI will quickly catch up to proprietary models
“So I think all, all roads lead to open source at the end of the day. No matter what you do or how much money you have, you cannot compete with the world's resources put together to do something. So some companies will have an edge for a bit, yes, but open sour…”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 16:26 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Insight
Falcon: Scaling massive AI models compensates for gaps in scientific understanding
“I kind of think that the whole large scale model thing, It's really a gap in our scientific understanding of these models. Instead of looking at the math and coming up with a better loss function, we figured out that we could throw a compute at it, and get us …”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 21:48 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Falcon: Mathematical advances will eventually make future AI models small
“I think the math field will catch up, and we'll have some fancy regularizer that will make all this go away, and now we're back to, like, a small model. So I guess, I think that the future is small, large language models, I guess, that are specialized”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 22:03 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Falcon: There will not be a god-like AGI
“I don't think there's gonna be like a god AI roaming around.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 27:10 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Disclosure
Falcon: Lightning AI will not offer hosted model APIs
“But no, we're not gonna be offering like services and APIs and all of that. And really that's so that we can have the same incentives as the open source community.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 11:30 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Falcon: Solving AI hallucination will take roughly five years
“So I think it's still going to be, I don't know, like five years, probably like, I don't think it's going to be like one day suddenly it's solved. I think it's going to unlock industries sequentially. So like, year one, maybe we can do this industry, and then …”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 15:00 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Disclosure
Falcon: Lightning AI rebuilt Meta's LLaMA from scratch under Apache 2.0
“So we took the Lama, like, paper and implemented from scratch completely in Apache two, and we open sourced it. So it's fully, fully usable for enterprises, but we also gave you the training code, not just inference, and we also gave you fine tuning methods as…”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 9:58 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Falcon: Probably only 1% of emerging generative AI tools will endure
“I think it's a lot of research. Like, what's gonna last from there? I'm not sure. Like, probably one percent of the things.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 18:35 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Assertion Supported
Falcon: Stability AI trained Stable Diffusion using PyTorch Lightning
“Who's heard of stability, AI, and stable diffusion? That was trained using Lightning, right?”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 7:51 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Assertion Supported
Falcon: Nvidia NeMo services are powered by PyTorch Lightning
“NVIDIA just announced all these Nemo services. Those are all powered by Lightning.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 8:04 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Insight
Falcon: Avoid full enterprise LLM deployment without human-in-the-loop
“So I wouldn't go all in on this unless you can have like a human in the loop who's like helping.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 13:13 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
What-if
Falcon: Modern generative AI would not exist without open-source research
“None of this wouldn't exist if Google hadn't put published transformers and put the paper out there, right? None of this would have existed if Ah, the attention stuff would have been out there if the Anno hadn't been created, if TensorFlow hadn't been created.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 17:37 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Falcon: PyTorch Lightning's original tooling was insufficient for post-GPT-3 architectures
“The tool that we had was good for 2016 through 20 19 deep learning, but as of GPT three deep learning, it wasn't good enough, and so we had to upgrade to this kind of new paradigm that we introduced.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 19:52 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Insight
Falcon: AI development continuously cycles between scaling up and compression
“There's always going to be a pattern of go big to get some result and then compress it back.”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 21:11 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Assertion Supported
Falcon: Lightning AI hired core Meta PyTorch leads
“We have an in-house PyTorch team, so we hired a lot of the core leads from Meta”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 25:33 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon May 1, 2023 20m
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