Maciej Gryka
ML Engineer
Maciej works at distil labs doing all kinds of AI-related things: machine learning, infrastructure, good ol’ software development. After getting a doctorate in computer vision and machine learning from University College London, he worked as a developer, computer vision engineer, had a detour through product management and founding a startup and more recently went back to more individual technical contributions.
Talk:
Drunk Snakes, Why Python and Elixir Are a Great Pairing
Nobody here needs convincing that Elixir is an amazing programming language. I’m here to insist that Python is also a great fit for some scenarios and that it’s pretty easy to combine the two languages to get the most out of them.
We’ll start with a brief demo to motivate why you might want to attempt this: a toy language model finetuning system, where the orchestration is done by Elixir and the fine-tuning itself in Python using Unsloth. Then, we’ll walk through how to call both Elixir from Python (shelling out & Pyrlang) and Python from Elixir (Pythonx). We’ll learn how to easily set up fault-resistant, highly-distributed systems, while taking advantage of a massive ecosystem of existing software. We’ll also talk about what kinds of problems might benefit from combining the two ecosystems and which will not.
Key Takeaways:
- both Elixir and Python are cool
- they have complimentary strengths
- interoperability between them is good (though maybe not great yet)
Target Audience:
- Anyone interested in developing highly-available systems taking advantage of recent AI advances.