Democratizing Intelligence - Sri Ambati, CEO & Co-Founder, H2O.ai
- Predictive AI
- H2O Driverless AI
Overview
In this H2O World 2017 keynote, H2O.ai co-founder and CEO Sri Ambati unveils Driverless AI, the company's GPU-accelerated automatic machine learning platform, and lays out the philosophy behind it: making real intelligence accessible to as many people as possible. He walks through what the product automates, feature engineering, model tuning, and interpretability, shares early adoption numbers, and introduces team members behind it, including Kaggle Grandmaster Dmitri Larko. The talk closes with H2O's broader open source roadmap and a reflection on trust, hype, and community as the foundations of the company.
Key takeaways
- How Driverless AI automates feature engineering and model tuning using GPU-accelerated XGBoost, with the team citing an example run that generated and tested around 4,000 engineered features, work that would otherwise take months.
- Early adoption numbers shared at launch: around 1,200 downloads in the product's first two months, with roughly 285 to 300 installations actually running, and early customer feedback citing accuracy gains as high as 10 percent overnight.
- How the product's machine learning interpretability (MLI) view explains models through a surrogate decision tree, K-LIME, and partial dependence plots, aimed at building trust in automated model output.
- How automatic visualization surfaces correlation graphs, outlier detection, and other charts without requiring the user to build them manually.
- Community numbers cited at the time: around 12,500 companies and 100,000 data scientists using H2O's open source products, alongside a broader portfolio spanning H2O-3, Sparkling Water, data.table, and an upcoming Auto ML for GPUs.
- How Sri credits the team by name, including Kaggle Grandmaster Dmitri Larko (automatic feature engineering) and Arno (the live Driverless AI demo), framing the release as a community and team effort built on an open source philosophy.
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