Stefan Webb: Why I Joined Zilliz
Hello! I'm Stefan, a newly appointed Developer Advocate at Zilliz, creators of Milvus—the leading open-source vector database. You might wonder, "What does a Developer Advocate do?" Simply put, we help software developers succeed with specific technologies through various means, including public speaking, content creation, and direct community engagement.
In this post, I'd like to share my journey to becoming a Developer Advocate at Zilliz.
After completing my graduate studies, I spent over three years in industry as an Applied ML Researcher at Meta and Twitter, where I was fortunate to work with exceptional teams. However, in November 2022, my career trajectory unexpectedly shifted. Like many others, I was astounded by ChatGPT upon its release. It was the first time since my youth that I'd been truly amazed by a technological advancement—reminiscent of the leaps from 16-color EGA graphics to 256-color VGA to 16 million color SVGA.
My Ph.D. research focused on the intersection of Bayesian Statistics and Deep Learning, with a heavy emphasis on Deep Generative AI Models. At that time, word2vec for word embeddings and RNNs for language modeling were considered state-of-the-art. I was astonished to see how rapidly language and image modeling had progressed in the few years since I left academia.
Inspired by these advancements, I decided to immerse myself in the new landscape of Generative AI, exploring LLMs, text-to-image generation, prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and RAG, to name a few. Throughout 2023, I contemplated how to pivot my career towards Generative AI, experimenting with a consumer product idea and advising startup founders and investors in finance.
Upon reflection, I realized that the aspects I enjoyed most in my previous roles were face-to-face interactions and community engagement, particularly in developing and managing open-source software and sharing knowledge about new technologies. I loved giving talks on emerging research ideas and interacting with the open-source community. Discovering that there were roles dedicated to these activities in a deeply technical field was eye-opening.
Why Zilliz, specifically? At the heart of the Generative AI revolution lies the critical need for efficient, scalable data storage and retrieval—a challenge that vector databases are uniquely positioned to address. Zilliz, through its open-source vector database Milvus, is democratizing this powerful technology, once the exclusive domain of tech giants. As the most widely adopted open-source vector database, Milvus offers a robust feature set that's proving invaluable across diverse industries.
I'm excited to contribute to the growth of the Milvus open-source community, leveraging my passion for knowledge sharing and open-source development. If you or your company are interested in collaboration, please reach out to me on LinkedIn. Also, I’m the new host for our regular Unstructured Data meetups in San Francisco and the South Bay and would love to see you there and learn about what you’re building. Hope to see you there!
Stefan WebbStefan Webb is a Developer Advocate at Zilliz, where he advocates for the open-source vector database, Milvus. Prior to this, he spent three years in industry as an Applied ML Researcher at Twitter and Meta, collaborating with product teams to tackle their most complex challenges. Stefan holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and has published papers at prestigious machine learning conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML. He is passionate about generative AI and is eager to leverage his deep technical expertise to contribute to the open-source community.
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