MLOps is like air-traffic control for machine learning: It provides the support and safety zones—and connects all the different teams working to make sure the plane, well, doesn’t crash.

Zoom in: The field is all about cementing best practices for machine learning—thus the name, short for machine learning operations—and it has grown quickly over the past five years. Amazon debuted an MLOps product in 2017, Google debuted one last year, and MLOps startups have increasingly raised large-scale funding rounds from headline investors.

• “It is the scaffolding that keeps it all together,” Diego Oppenheimer, EVP of MLOps at DataRobot, told Emerging Tech Brew. “So you can get machine learning into production without MLOps, [but] you can’t do it at scale—at all.”

Put it in practice

About 96% of CIOs and tech executives either had AI “in their deployment pipelines or had initiated projects,” according to a recent Gartner survey, but the firm’s 2021 research suggests that “only half of AI projects make it from pilot into production.”

There’s a significant gap there, and some MLOps professionals believe the field can help.

Patrick Butler, a senior research associate at Virginia Tech, and Oppenheimer both told us the field is increasingly the bridge between best-practices research and reality, helping codify the processes that make ML work sustainably and securely. But they believe there’s plenty of room to grow.

“There are already [MLOps] frameworks out there that are…toddlers in the software-engineering arena—and they are going to grow up a bit and get stronger,” Butler said.

Read the full primer on MLOps here.—HF

A few days ago, we had a Twitter Spaces conversation about everyone’s favorite topic: food. Specifically, food grown from animal cells in stainless-steel cultivators. Using fancy biotech. We’re talkin’ about cultivated meat.

We caught up with Amy Chen, COO of Upside Foods, which recently announced a $400 million Series C—the biggest-ever funding round for a cultivated-meat company.

• As COO, Chen, who joined last year after 15 years at PepsiCo, is spearheading the company’s efforts to accelerate production.
• Last month, Upside announced plans to build a massive facility that can produce tens of millions of pounds of cultivated meat per year.

“We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress over the last five years in terms of demonstrating out what I would call the sort of proof of concept, and the most fundamental basic questions: ‘Can you grow meat?’ ‘Can animal cells actually grow outside of an animal’s body in a way that is safe and delicious?’ And I think we’ve crossed a lot of those thresholds already,” Chen told us.

Now, she added, “the real question is getting from those smaller, mid-scale proofs of concept to much larger scale.”

One challenge to scaling? Building a brand-new supply chain for cultivated meat. Upside’s animal cells, depending on the product, need to “eat” between 50 and 80 components, ranging from different vitamins to salts, Chen said, and each potential source of those inputs needs to be vetted for safety, quality, scale, logistics, and reliability.

Click here to read more.—DM

Coworking is a weekly segment where we spotlight Emerging Tech Brew readers who work with emerging technologies. Click here if you’d like a chance to be featured.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in tech?

I’m a product manager working on hardware, specifically optical sensors. I support the team with feature prioritization to improve the customer experience. I also work on the device’s current and long-term strategy. That is the creation, optimization, and sunset of a device.

What’s your favorite emerging tech project you’ve worked on?

The product I am currently working on: VergeSense’s EN-1. I joined VergeSense because I wanted to be a part of the application of emerging technology. The device is an optical sensor in the ceiling that counts visitors entering and exiting a building or floor. Customers use it to manage capacity or better understand the overall space usage.

What’s the best piece of tech-related media you’ve read/watched/listened to?

I really enjoy reading The Atlantic’s Technology section. The narrative is always engaging and provides real life context.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile?

I am very involved in local politics. It’s important to me to stay engaged and to help provide a platform to elevate our community members’ voices.

What do you think about when you’re not thinking about tech?

I just got my first beehive. I’m spending my free time educating myself and making sure they’re healthy and alive. Lots of hobbyists are out there sharing their experience, and I hope to pay it forward as someone trying in a cold, mountainous area. Wish me luck!

Stat: Global venture funding for AI startups fell 12% quarter over quarter to $15.1 billion, per CB Insights…but it was still the fifth-best quarter for AI funding.

Quote: “You need to find the asteroid before the asteroid finds you.”—Davide Farnocchia, navigation engineer at NASA, told us

Read: Forget the IoT; it’s all about the IoP (Internet of Plants).

Voice is becoming vital: Why are so many enterprises now investing in voice innovations, and how important will voice technology be to your specific industry in the new work-from-anywhere era? Find out in RingCentral’s ebook here.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

This month, we launched IT Brew specifically for IT professionals looking to stay in the know—and have a little fun while doing it.

From cybersecurity to big data to software development to gaming, IT Brew drops all the latest industry news, trends, and insights right into your inbox twice a week.

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This editorial content is supported by Robin.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• How a smart city platform created for Pittsburgh became a nationwide business
• NASA’s Planetary Defense team builds software to detect asteroids before they hit
• Behold: The internet of plants