Interviewing Tim Dettmers on open-source AI: Agents, scaling, quantization and what's next

Tim Dettmers does not need an introduction for most people building open-source AI. If you are part of that minority, you’re in for a treat. Tim is the lead developer behind most of the open-source tools for quantization: QLoRA, bitsandbytes, 4 and 8 bit inference, and plenty more. He recently finished his Ph.D. at the University of Washington, is now a researcher at the Allen Institute for AI, and is starting as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in fall of 2025.

Tim is a joy to talk to. He thinks independently on all the AI issues of today, bringing new perspectives that challenge the status quo. At the same time, he’s sincere and very helpful to work with, working hard to uplift those around him and the academic community. There’s a reason he’s so loved in the open-source AI community.

Find more about Tim on his Twitter or Google Scholar. He also has a great blog where he talks about things like which GPUs to buy and which grad school to choose.

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and where ever you get your podcasts. For other Interconnects interviews, go here.

Show Notes

Here's a markdown list of companies, people, projects, research papers, and other key named entities mentioned in the transcript:

* QLoRA

* Llama 3

* Claude (AI assistant by Anthropic)

* Transformers (Hugging Face library)