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**José Valim:** \[31:59\] To give you an idea... So Sean has been working on it in his free time. He started working on Axon as soon as we announced Nx. So he has been working on it for two months on his free time, and it already has a bunch of stuff. If you check the readme, it already has the -- I won't be able to sa... |
The other thing is also that I think one of the reasons - I'm speculating here, to be clear. I think maybe one of the reasons why some of those libraries - it takes a lot of time for them to implement a layer, it's because they are implementing everything; they are going maybe like from Python all the way down to the S... |
For us it's a very layered approach where Axon just works about Nx, Nx is the tensor of abstraction, and then we have the tensor compiler stuff that compiles for our XLA. And working those different layers - when you're working at Axon or in Axel, you are really at the high level; you are not really worrying about C, C... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I cloned the repo, and his first commit was January 25th of 2021... |
**Daniel Whitenack:** It's pretty amazing. |
**Jerod Santo:** ...with a few to follow. And it's funny, because the first commits are like "Add some functions. More functions. Adding even more common functions." So he's just like cranking out these functions, like you said. |
**José Valim:** Yeah. So that was in January. Okay. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. So a couple of months. |
**José Valim:** Yeah. But while working on that, he was still working on XLA and Nx with me. We started in November; in November it was Sean and I, we were working part-time, so it took us about three months to release Nx and XLA. And then Sean - he's still working with Nx and XLA, and then his focus after we announced... |
One of the things that I really want to work on is streaming. So Elixir is really good for streaming, and I want to have very good abstractions, so we can start streaming data to be inferred into the GPU, so we don't have to load everything into memory. Or for example if you have a webcam or a camera that it's either a... |
**Jerod Santo:** I think it speaks to the power of a solid abstraction too, and like a layered approach when done well, when you get to those higher layers... Like you said, unless you have to change the topology; if you're just adding and building on top, and not having to drill down through each time, then you can mo... |
\[36:04\] There's probably also an aspect of this where it seems like Axon's API is trying to be familiar, and so a lot of times, at least for me, the slow part of software is getting that API figured out, and rewriting that API so that it's better... And maybe there's a step-up because of all these other projects that... |
**José Valim:** Exactly. That's a very good point. And I think on the Axon side, one of the inspirations - I think there's a project Think AI in Python, which is a functional approach... |
**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, there's a team in Europe that writes the SpaCy library, which is an NLP library, and I think their main backbone for that is Think. |
**José Valim:** I see, yeah. So that has been one of the inspirations as well, and I think there's PyLightning, or LightningTorch, or something like that, that has also -- so yeah, that's a very good point. So if you can look at what people are doing and say "Hey, this is what I think is good, this is what I think is g... |
**Break:** \[37:10\] |
**Daniel Whitenack:** I mean, there's just such diversity in the AI world in terms of the types of models that people are building... But there is a fairly consistent -- if you look at the implementations, whether it's TensorFlow, or PyTorch, or these other frameworks, you can kind of get a pretty quick sense of how th... |
I'm just looking at some of the layers that are implemented in Axon, and like I said, I think you've done a good job at -- like, I don't know how to read Elixir; I can sort of get the sense of what's happening here, and I think that's a testament to following some of the good inspiration that's already out there in the... |
I know that some of data science/AI world kind of operates with a weird set of tooling, that includes these things called Notebooks, and other things... There's even some functionality related to interactive coding, and cells, and that sort of thing too, isn't there? |
**José Valim:** \[40:02\] Yeah. So there is a separate project; another person has been working on this project, Jonatan Kłosko. When Sean and I started talking like "Hey, we want to build this foundation for machine learning, numerical computing" and then we mapped a bunch of things that we have to do... And there are... |
And to give you a bit more context, Daniel - so we have the Phoenix web framework in Elixir, and the Phoenix Web Framework two years ago launched something called LiveView, which makes it really easy for you to build interactive, real-time applications, but on the server; so without having to write JavaScript... Which ... |
And I said "I wanna do this. We wanna build this notebook thing as well", which we called LiveBook. So that's the LiveBook project. And the way it started was very funny... So we have a project called ExDoc, which generates documentation for Elixir, and we are really proud of it. We think that our documentation just lo... |
And then out of nowhere, somebody sends a pull request. They didn't ask if they should do it, they just sent a pull request. They replaced jQuery by JavaScript. And I was like, "This is great." I reviewed the code, the code was flawless... I reviewed like the best of my power (since it's JavaScript) and then I went to ... |
At about the same time, John (another Jonatan) had released something like a notebook for Elixir as well, a very barebones one; so he had some experience from Python and we brought him in, like "Hey, if we are going to do this, how are we going to do it? What are the benefits?" And then we were like "Okay, so one of th... |
There is a video on YouTube of me announcing LiveBook, and it's really cool, because it shows how LiveBook works, it shows Axon, so there are some good examples... So it's like "Hey, it needs to be collaborative from day one", and we really wanted it to be interactive, because one of the things -- so for those who are ... |
\[44:06\] So we wanted to be interactive not only for people that are working with machine learning and numerical computing, but if you want to get data out of an Elixir system, like a production system, and try to say like "Hey, where is my bottleneck?" you should be able to do all that; you should be able to interact... |
And then I said, "Well, what do people complain about in Notebooks?" That's always part of the research. So if you go to like Jupyter, what people usually complain. |
**Daniel Whitenack:** A lot. \[laughter\] |
**Jerod Santo:** What DON'T they complain about? |
**José Valim:** What we heard was like "Well, the format that it writes to disk - it's not good to diff, it's not easy to version-control. So how are we going to solve that? The dependencies are not explicit and the evaluation order is not clear as well, so how can we solve all those things? We brought our set of inspi... |
A couple weeks ago we announced it (maybe 1-2 weeks ago), we announced LiveBook. Or maybe it was last week. Anyway, it's there. Our vision is not complete; you can see the important parts included there, of like it's fully reproducible, the evaluation order is clear, your dependencies need to be explicitly listed, so e... |
John - he created a format called LiveMarkdown, which is a subset of Markdown that we use for the notebooks... Which is really change, because now if we change a notebook, we are just changing a markdown file, which means you can put it on version control, people can actually review your changes without having to spin ... |
And there are other things happening in the space... There's Jupyter Notebooks, there's also Pluto.jl, coming from the Julia folks. There is also Deepnote, which is a software-as-a-service... So we're kind of looking at everything and coming up with our own takes and ideas as well. |
**Daniel Whitenack:** That's awesome. I'm glad that when you looked at this, you took that perspective of not "We need notebooks." People love notebooks, but what's wrong with them? Because I think there have been a lot of -- there's notebook kernels for all sorts of different things for Jupyter, but they all suffer fr... |
It also seems like you release something cool every week. I don't know how that works... I don't release something cool every week, so I'm feeling really deficient right now... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] I'm with you. |
**José Valim:** I don't have anything new to release for now... |
**Daniel Whitenack:** Until next week. |
**Jerod Santo:** Daniel, what we need to do is find some really talented university students and inspire them to work on some stuff for you. |
**Daniel Whitenack:** I guess so, yeah. |
**José Valim:** Yeah, Jonatan has been excellent at this... And it was his first LiveView application, so I think it's both a testament to Jonatan and to LiveView, the fact that he could build this thing in three months, while still studying, working part-time. And go check it out, go check the video. I'm really excite... |
For example, we just merged autocompletion, so when you're writing code, there is now autocompletion as you would get from VS Code, with the Monaco editor. And everything's collaborative; if we have multiple people working on it, it changes our broadcast. And based on this idea that it's built on LiveView, where you do... |
\[48:25\] One thing about the notebook is that in my opinion it was a very different approach to how we approach Nx and Axon. For Nx and Axon we were like "Okay, let's build this and see where this leads us." But for notebook it was like "This is an area that Elixir is really good at, and I really want to have our take... |
Just to make it clear - out of the box it works distributed as well. For example, if you have a bunch of people using notebooks, for some reason, and you want to start five machines in production, and have people connect to those machines from anywhere they want, it just works, out of the box. There's no need for exter... |
**Jerod Santo:** How does it do that? Because it looks like it only runs on local host. Maybe there's a way to -- how do you tell it "Hey, I've got ten nodes that I want you to run across"? Is that just configuring Phoenix? |
**José Valim:** By default, we run it on local host. By default, if you run your own machine, you don't want to expose that and have somebody access the notebook... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, it's like a public-facing eval, right? |
**José Valim:** Yes, right. Imagine you're at an ElixirConf and somebody would just be "Who is running notebooks here? I can't--" Right now I think we just need to trick the configuration file. But one of the things that we are working on, we are going to get in the release - we are going to ship both Docker images and... |
And most likely, what people want to do is that they want to say "Hey, I am deploying this to Kubernetes, so I'm going to use something that uses the Kubernetes DNS manager to connect the nodes." In Elixir you would use something like Peerage or Libcluster, that figure out the topology and connects everything for you. |
**Daniel Whitenack:** Yeah, and I can definitely confirm that people will want to spin these things up everywhere. Now I'm not surprised when I hear this, but the first time I started hearing production notebooks, I was like "How do you have a production notebook? It's a notebook. How are you running a notebook in prod... |
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