Machine learning, faster

I recently gave a couple of conference presentations about how we are thinking about speed when developing machine learning systems at Monzo. This post covers some of the background to the points I was making in my talks, as well as what we're doing in the Monzo machine learning team to speed up our own work. Speed is not a word that is regularly associated with machine learning teams. When we talk and write about accomplishments in machine learning, there is often a focus on the problem, the algorithmic approach, and the results - but no mention of the time that it took to get there. I remember once speaking with a machine learning researcher who worked at a large company.