This episode welcomes Nils Reimers, Director of Machine Learning at Cohere and former research at Hugging Face, to discuss Natural Language Processing, Sentence Transformers and the future of Machine Learning. Nils is best known as the creator of Sentence Transformers, a powerful framework for generating high-quality sentence embeddings that has become increasingly popular in the ML community with over 9K stars on Github. With Sentence Transformers, Nils has enabled researchers and developers (including me) to train state-of-the-art models for a wide range of NLP tasks, including text classification, semantic similarity, and question-answering. His contributions have been recognized by numerous awards and publications in top-tier conferences and journals.

Resources to learn more about Nils Reimers and his work:

https://www.nils-reimers.de/

https://www.sbert.net/

https://scholar.google.com/citations?...

https://cohere.ai/

Resources to learn more about Learning from Machine Learning:

https://www.linkedin.com/company/learning-from-machine-learning

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethplevine/

https://medium.com/@levine.seth.p

Contents

02:29 What attracted you to Machine Learning?

06:32 What is sentence transformers?

28:02 Benchmarks and P-Hacking

33:53 What’s an important question that remains unanswered in Machine Learning?

38:41 How do you view the gap between the hype and the reality in Machine Learning?

50:45 What advice would you give to someone just starting out?

52:30 What advice would you give yourself when you were just starting out in your career?

57:22 What has a career in ML taught you about life?