Explosion 💥

I was interviewed for a German article on it-daily about efficient AI development in industry, the role of open source, and using Generative AI to create systems and data for smaller models. Thanks Silvia for the feature!

www.it-daily.net/it-managemen...

What a great meetup! Thanks to everyone who came by yesterday for an evening of real-world AI and bullshit-free strategies for building LLM applications.

Recap and highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

I'm back from a busy four days in London! 💜 I had a great time at @pydatalondon.bsky.social‬ and you can read my recap and highlights here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

At #PyData London @inesmontani.bsky.social confirms our suspicions that we should try not to work with PDFs directly. Do the expensive extraction upfront into a unified structured format and build all your analysis and #NLP components yourself so you can better modularise
@pydatalondon.bsky.social

Hi Berlin people! @hugobowne.bsky.social is in town & we're celebrating by hosting a meetup together 🎉 This one is all about building with AI & we'll also open the floor for lightning talks. If you're around, come hang out with us!

📆 June 16, 18:00
📍 Native Instruments (Kreuzberg)
🎟️ lu.ma/d53y9p2u

YouTube video by Explosion Streaming spaCy (May 19, 2025): Working on Python 3.13 compatibility

Back to streaming spaCy! Working on Python 3.13 compatibility today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgjQ...

Developer Trends in 2025 What trends and technologies should you be paying attention to today? Are there hot new database servers you should check out? Or will that just be a flash in the pan? I love these forward looking epi...

Awesome new episode with a bunch of fun and smart people:

Episode #504: Developer Trends in 2025

Featuring @foosel.net, @richcampbell.bsky.social, @calvinhp.com, @inesmontani.bsky.social, and @mkennedy.codes #python

talkpython.fm/episodes/sho...

Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text NLP and data science could be so easy if all of our data came as clean and plain text. But in practice, a lot of it is hidden away in PDFs, Word documen…

Here are the slides for my talk "Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text": speakerdeck.com/inesmontani/...

Another great @pyconde.bsky.social is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and feel very inspired! ⚡

Here are my personal highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

In Darmstadt for @pyconde.bsky.social 🐍✨

Tomorrow I'll be speaking about conquering PDFs and document understanding, and Thursday I'm joining the fireside chat panel on enterprise AI & open source. And I'll be around for the @feminist-ai.bsky.social LAN Party open hours to hack LLMs. See you there!

Feminist AI is coming to @pyconde.bsky.social! If you're around, drop by at any time during the open hours and join us for workshops on hacking LLMs and data development, or contribute to our DIY PyCon zine ⚡

Follow for updates: @feminist-ai.bsky.social
Details: feministai.party/events/2025-...

How to advocate for modular NLP in the age of Generative AI · Explosion With all the hype around Generative AI, many are led to believe it’s the solution to everything. So how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that...

This is another great and short read from @inesmontani.bsky.social at spaCy. It has a lot of implications for those who work in the humanities and industry.

explosion.ai/blog/modular...

#MachineLearning

The episode is now out on youtube, coming to podcast channels in a few weeks. Great show, thanks Ines!

Enjoying my train ride to Münster for data:unplugged!

Tomorrow I'll be speaking about real-world use cases of AI, how to navigate black-box models and why open source means that nobody can monopolize AI (unless we let them) ✊

I will be around all day, so if you're attending, come and say hi!

My friend @hugobowne.bsky.social launched new course on Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers! I'll be joining for a guest lecture on human-in-the-loop development and distillation workflows.

You can get 10% off with my code + lots of perks: maven.com/hugo-stefan/...

Announcing a new event initiative: Feminist AI LAN Party! Katharine and I did a pilot event last year and we're now taking it to @pyconde.bsky.social.

We've also open-sourced event kits to make it easy to host your own, including:

💣 hacking LLMs
📑 data development
✂️ zine making

feministai.party

I don't normally write advice columns but this question I got deserved its own post: With all the hype around Generative AI, how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that are better, easier and cheaper?

explosion.ai/blog/modular...

So many good events coming up this season. Here's my schedule – hope to see you there!

Apr 10: data:unplugged (Münster)
Apr 23: @pyconde.bsky.social (Darmstadt)
May 31: @pyconit.bsky.social (Bologna)
Jun 5: ECONDAT (London)
Jun 7-8: @pydatalondon.bsky.social (London)

📆 Details: explosion.ai/events

@explosion-ai.bsky.social

Only the best companies will send you stickers if you are a fan and beg for them!

Thank you so much, Ines and Matt!!!!

TIL: Incorrect music metadata is a huge problem and is causing artists to lose millions in royalties. This disproportionaly affects independent musicians. But structured NLP can help!

explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

New case study: How Love Without Sound built innovative AI-powered tools for the music industry and law firms, and helped publishers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for artists.

explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

Out now: Prodigy v1.18! New features include:

✍️ edit text during span annotation
💬 fully custom UI translations
🎛️ new JavaScript events and functions
✅ various small fixes and docs

More details: prodi.gy/docs/changelog

These are the kinds of NLP stories I love! TFW you "accidentally" train a great 2 MB (!) task-specific model 🤯 @strickvl.bsky.social

Look what arrived in the mail today! 🎉

This is the 2nd edition of "Mastering spaCy" by Duygu Altinok and Déborah Mesquita, featuring how to build structured NLP solutions with custom components, and updated content on using models powered by LLMs.

You can get it here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVBTX2BL

YouTube video by Explosion Streaming spaCy (Feb 6, 2025): Updating Confection for Python 3.13 and more

spaCy development live stream continues today! Today I'll be looking at getting Confection updated, to allow Python 3.13 support and add a file-management feature. Playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEW...

The spaCy+PyTorch design has been going well, but we need that file management feature now.

YouTube video by Explosion Streaming spaCy (Jan 31, 2025): Continue exploring PyTorch+spaCy

Matt is also live now, by the way 👀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKi...

Now that @honnibal.bsky.social is live-streaming spaCy development (check it out if you haven't!) I tidied up our YouTube and added our latest talks & interviews.

I forgot how much content there is and it makes me want to get back into doing videos when I have time ✨

youtube.com/c/ExplosionAI

What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI · Explosion How will AI development look in the future? There is a lot we can learn from another groundbreaking technology: the web. This blog post takes a look at what the history of the web can teach us, and wh...

Enjoyed giving my keynote on "What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI" at PyCon+Web. I wrote it up as a blog post because I think there are many interesting parallels and lessons we can learn:

explosion.ai/blog/history...

Here are the most important points 🧵

Okay let's try this again -- Live now!

Streaming software issues hopefully sorted 🤞

Will do another short (~2h or so) stream this afternoon, at 13:00 CET.

Last week I was limited in what I could do because the main thing I was working on was build system stuff, and OBS was crashing when I tried to create a desktop view. This week we can look at a more interesting topic.