Miata-bot - Part 2 - getting the data

The internet offers a wealth of information on the different generations of the Mazda Miata. Sources include Mazda’s official website, enthusiast forums, social media platforms (such as Facebook and Reddit), technical documentation, news sites, vendor sites, and more. For this bot, we will primarily focus on text data, along with relevant images and links.

The first step in creating any bot is data collection, but as with any data-driven task, this can be quite challenging. In this post, I will outline some key considerations for gathering the necessary data.

Miata-bot - Part 1

Teaching at Wharton has been incredibly rewarding, especially covering the latest advances in NLP. However, teaching and building an application are vastly different experiences. This contrast inspired me to embark on an NLP/LLM-based project that lets me explore the practical applications of the techniques I teach. Enter the Miata-bot—my Miata chatbot project, which I aim to develop over the next few months.

Why a Miata-bot?

I own a 2019 Miata, and as the saying goes, “Miata is always the answer” :)

Visualizing images between text prompts

Even though StableDiffusion has been available for a couple of years, I still find diffusion models to be fascinating. I won’t go into too much detail on how they work, as others have already covered it extensively and in greater depth (further reading + code used is at the end of this post).

A quick summary - when a prompted with some text, a diffusion model starts with an image containing white noise, and then works its way backwards by removing the noise, ultimately resulting in an image that best represents the text prompt. The same process can be used to create images that depict the transition from one text prompt to another, as shown in the images below.

Prompt 1

This gif was created using the 2 prompts below, and then using stable diffusion magic (interpolation), images are generated from the transition between the first prompt and the second, those images are then stitched together into a .gif file.

• A watercolor painting of a Golden Retriever at the beach
• A still life DSLR photo of a bowl of fruit

Generative AI & jobs

When the topic of Generative AI arises, my friends and family often joke about the possibility of losing their jobs to an AI. So this is an opinion post on what factors influence the effects of generative AI on jobs.

I usually hear two viewpoints regarding the impact of Generative AI on jobs:

• The first viewpoint argues that job losses are inevitable.
• The second viewpoint suggests that Generative AI will assist and enhance workers’ productivity, and the job losses are being exxagerated.

So which one is it?

Creating this website (Part 2)

I wanted to customize the look and layout of my site, this post details the steps needed to get something similar. The next steps are entirely optional and dependant on how you want to structure / this site.