Weights & Biases raises $5M to build development tools for machine learning

Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that nearly every tech company likes to throw around nowadays -- but according to Lukas Biewald, it represents a genuinely new approach to programming. "Software has eaten a lot of the world, and machine learning is eating software," Biewald said. In his view, there are "fundamental" differences between the two approaches: "One important difference is if all you have is the code you used to train the program, you don't really know what happened … If I had all the code that was used to train a self-driving car algorithm but I don't have the data, I don't know what went down." Along with Chris Van Pelt, Biewald previously founded CrowdFlower (now known as Figure Eight), which launched nearly a decade ago at the TechCrunch 50 conference, and which has created tools for training artificial intelligence. Biewald (who I've known since college) and Van Pelt, plus former Google engineer Shawn Lewis, have now started a new company called Weights and Biases to build new tools for machine learning developers.