AI, Community, and the Future of Generative Applications

In this engaging conversation at the All Things Open conference, Tim Spann, Principal Developer Advocate at Zilliz, discusses the importance of community collaboration in advancing AI technologies. He emphasizes the need for diverse perspectives in solving complex problems and highlights his work with the Milvus open source vector database. Tim also explains the evolving landscape of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and its applications and shares insights into the future of AI development. The conversation concludes on a lighter note with Tim describing his creative use of Milvus in a fun Halloween project to catalog and identify ghosts.

00:00 Introduction
00:41 Meet Tim Spann: Principal Developer Advocate
01:35 The Importance of Community in AI
02:56 Advanced RAG and Multimodal Models
06:17 The Future of Agentic RAG
09:04 Challenges and Excitement in AI Development
13:35 Building AI the Right Way
17:50 Fun with AI: Capturing Ghosts
19:24 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

 

Guest:

Tim Spann is a Principal Developer Advocate for Zilliz and Milvus. He works with Apache NiFi, Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar, Apache Flink, Flink SQL, Apache Pinot, Trino, Apache Iceberg, DeltaLake, Apache Spark, Big Data, IoT, Cloud, AI/DL, machine learning, and deep learning. Tim has over ten years of experience with the IoT, big data, distributed computing, messaging, streaming technologies, and Java programming. Previously, he was a Principal Developer Advocate at Cloudera, Developer Advocate at StreamNative, Principal DataFlow Field Engineer at Cloudera, a Senior Solutions Engineer at Hortonworks, a Senior Solutions Architect at AirisData, a Senior Field Engineer at Pivotal and a Team Leader at HPE. He blogs for DZone, where he is the Big Data Zone leader, and runs a popular meetup in Princeton & NYC on Big Data, Cloud, IoT, deep learning, streaming, NiFi, the blockchain, and Spark. Tim is a frequent speaker at conferences such as ApacheCon, DeveloperWeek, Pulsar Summit and many more. He holds a BS and MS in computer science.