About — in the speaker's own words
I am a Machine Learning Researcher at distil labs, where I work on knowledge distillation and tool calling for small language models. I did my PhD at Charles University in Prague, focusing on Neural Architecture Search and surrogate models. I believe not every problem needs a large and complex model. Both during my PhD and at distil labs, I have been exploring how small models fare compared to state of the art. I enjoy analyzing the problem first - understanding the limitations of both small and large models is what helps us really solve it.