In town for PyData Amsterdam! Who will be there? 🙋‍♀️ Looking forward to chatting about NLP and more, some cool Feminist AI hacking and catching up with everyone. I also have some brand new and exciting dev tooling to demo for those interested ✨

I was interviewed for a German article on it-daily about efficient AI development in industry, the role of open source, and using Generative AI to create systems and data for smaller models. Thanks Silvia for the feature! www.it-daily.net/it-managemen...

What a great meetup! Thanks to everyone who came by yesterday for an evening of real-world AI and bullshit-free strategies for building LLM applications. Recap and highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

I'm back from a busy four days in London! 💜 I had a great time at @pydatalondon.bsky.social‬ and you can read my recap and highlights here: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

At #PyData London @inesmontani.bsky.social confirms our suspicions that we should try not to work with PDFs directly. Do the expensive extraction upfront into a unified structured format and build all your analysis and #NLP components yourself so you can better modularise @pydatalondon.bsky.social

Hi Berlin people! @hugobowne.bsky.social is in town & we're celebrating by hosting a meetup together 🎉 This one is all about building with AI & we'll also open the floor for lightning talks. If you're around, come hang out with us! 📆 June 16, 18:00 📍 Native Instruments (Kreuzberg) 🎟️ lu.ma/d53y9p2u

Back to streaming spaCy! Working on Python 3.13 compatibility today: www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgjQ...

Awesome new episode with a bunch of fun and smart people: Episode #504: Developer Trends in 2025 Featuring @foosel.net, @richcampbell.bsky.social, @calvinhp.com, @inesmontani.bsky.social, and @mkennedy.codes #python talkpython.fm/episodes/sho...

Here are the slides for my talk "Conquering PDFs: document understanding beyond plain text": speakerdeck.com/inesmontani/...

Another great @pyconde.bsky.social is over and I'm exhausted but happy, and feel very inspired! ⚡ Here are my personal highlights: www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

In Darmstadt for @pyconde.bsky.social 🐍✨ Tomorrow I'll be speaking about conquering PDFs and document understanding, and Thursday I'm joining the fireside chat panel on enterprise AI & open source. And I'll be around for the @feminist-ai.bsky.social LAN Party open hours to hack LLMs. See you there!

Feminist AI is coming to @pyconde.bsky.social! If you're around, drop by at any time during the open hours and join us for workshops on hacking LLMs and data development, or contribute to our DIY PyCon zine ⚡ Follow for updates: @feminist-ai.bsky.social Details: feministai.party/events/2025-...

This is another great and short read from @inesmontani.bsky.social at spaCy. It has a lot of implications for those who work in the humanities and industry. explosion.ai/blog/modular... #MachineLearning

The episode is now out on youtube, coming to podcast channels in a few weeks. Great show, thanks Ines!

Enjoying my train ride to Münster for data:unplugged! Tomorrow I'll be speaking about real-world use cases of AI, how to navigate black-box models and why open source means that nobody can monopolize AI (unless we let them) ✊ I will be around all day, so if you're attending, come and say hi!

My friend @hugobowne.bsky.social launched new course on Building LLM Applications for Data Scientists and Software Engineers! I'll be joining for a guest lecture on human-in-the-loop development and distillation workflows. You can get 10% off with my code + lots of perks: maven.com/hugo-stefan/...

Announcing a new event initiative: Feminist AI LAN Party! Katharine and I did a pilot event last year and we're now taking it to @pyconde.bsky.social. We've also open-sourced event kits to make it easy to host your own, including: 💣 hacking LLMs 📑 data development ✂️ zine making feministai.party

I don't normally write advice columns but this question I got deserved its own post: With all the hype around Generative AI, how can you, as a developer, communicate the nuances and advocate for new and modular solutions that are better, easier and cheaper? explosion.ai/blog/modular...

So many good events coming up this season. Here's my schedule – hope to see you there! Apr 10: data:unplugged (Münster) Apr 23: @pyconde.bsky.social (Darmstadt) May 31: @pyconit.bsky.social (Bologna) Jun 5: ECONDAT (London) Jun 7-8: @pydatalondon.bsky.social (London) 📆 Details: explosion.ai/events

@explosion-ai.bsky.social Only the best companies will send you stickers if you are a fan and beg for them! Thank you so much, Ines and Matt!!!!

TIL: Incorrect music metadata is a huge problem and is causing artists to lose millions in royalties. This disproportionaly affects independent musicians. But structured NLP can help! explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

New case study: How Love Without Sound built innovative AI-powered tools for the music industry and law firms, and helped publishers recover hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue for artists. explosion.ai/blog/love-wi...

Out now: Prodigy v1.18! New features include: ✍️ edit text during span annotation 💬 fully custom UI translations 🎛️ new JavaScript events and functions ✅ various small fixes and docs More details: prodi.gy/docs/changelog

These are the kinds of NLP stories I love! TFW you "accidentally" train a great 2 MB (!) task-specific model 🤯 @strickvl.bsky.social

Look what arrived in the mail today! 🎉 This is the 2nd edition of "Mastering spaCy" by Duygu Altinok and Déborah Mesquita, featuring how to build structured NLP solutions with custom components, and updated content on using models powered by LLMs. You can get it here: www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVBTX2BL

spaCy development live stream continues today! Today I'll be looking at getting Confection updated, to allow Python 3.13 support and add a file-management feature. Playlist: www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTEW... The spaCy+PyTorch design has been going well, but we need that file management feature now.

Matt is also live now, by the way 👀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeKi...

Now that @honnibal.bsky.social is live-streaming spaCy development (check it out if you haven't!) I tidied up our YouTube and added our latest talks & interviews. I forgot how much content there is and it makes me want to get back into doing videos when I have time ✨ youtube.com/c/ExplosionAI

Enjoyed giving my keynote on "What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI" at PyCon+Web. I wrote it up as a blog post because I think there are many interesting parallels and lessons we can learn: explosion.ai/blog/history... Here are the most important points 🧵

Okay let's try this again -- Live now! Streaming software issues hopefully sorted 🤞

Will do another short (~2h or so) stream this afternoon, at 13:00 CET. Last week I was limited in what I could do because the main thing I was working on was build system stuff, and OBS was crashing when I tried to create a desktop view. This week we can look at a more interesting topic.

My video on spaCy layout is now out! This is probably my favorite update from @explosion-ai.bsky.social (and that's saying something!) This package makes it simple to do region detection, table detection, and OCR with just 1 line of Python. Video: youtu.be/quJtzVxoMtE #MachineLearning

Going live now! Join me for the first pilot stream on YouTube: www.youtube.com/live/kViiI5B...

Trying something new this year: I'm going to stream spaCy and other open-source development and maintenance twice a week! I hope this will give the community a better inside look while things are in progress. I'll also answer your questions and chat about NLP, OSS and more.

Writing a new talk on "What the history of the web can teach us about the future of AI" 🔮 I've wanted to do this for so long because I think there are some great lessons and analogies here. I'll be presenting it for my keynote at PyCon+Web in Berlin on Jan 25 – hope to see you there!

New plugin coming to Prodigy soon: a visual data dashboard! 📊✨ Manage, view and filter annotations and access data analytics and progress all in a neat web app. If you're using Prodigy and want to beta test it, check out this post for more details: support.prodi.gy/t/prodigy-da...

Happy Birthday to me! 🥳 It feels like a good opportunity to look back at 2024, an eventful but also difficult year for me. So here's my personal review, including travel, talks, writing and various things I did and enjoyed. ines.io/blog/year-in...

Looking forward to joining the panel on PyLadies entrepreneurs and career development at @pyladiescon.bsky.social on Saturday 💖 It's a fully online conference with many cool people and talks, and you can still register! pretalx.com/pyladiescon-...

New post: From PDFs to AI-ready structured data 📃✨ A deep dive into document processing, layout analysis and a modular workflow for building end-to-end document understanding and information extraction pipelines using PDFs, Word documents, scans and more. explosion.ai/blog/pdfs-nl...

PyData London 2024: A practical guide to human-in-the-loop distillation @inesmontani.bsky.social LLMs have enormous potential, but modularity, transparency & data privacy in industry are challenging. Ines shows us how to use the latest models in real world applications. youtu.be/pgLLgvjZ_FA?...

I definitely want to check this out - new repo for zero-shot REL. Also integrates seamlessly with spaCy! CC @explosion-ai.bsky.social

Many of you have been asking about PDF table extraction and I finally got around to experimenting with it 👀 Here's tabular data converted with Docling + TableFormer, anchored within the document text and accessible as a pandas.DataFrame:

I am so excited for this spaCy update!! I have wanted to see this for years. This allows you to pass a PDF to a spaCy pipeline which means you can do not only layout parsing but also NLP tasks all in a single workflow. On my list to test out this week! #NLP #MachineLearning #DigitalHumanities

I create a starter pack of current and former @explosion-ai.bsky.social. Give some of the people who made spaCy, Prodigy, Thinc, etc. a follow: go.bsky.app/VngRFva

The first version of my spaCy + Docling integration is here: 📚 process PDFs, Word documents & more 📝 structured text-based output via spaCy's Doc object 🏷 layout spans for sections, headings etc. 🔮 apply NLP pipelines to PDF contents ✂️ chunk your data for RAG github.com/explosion/sp...

NEW: Prodigy now supports multi-page documents in a single view, without losing the efficiency of its card-based design ✨ It's especially cool for images and PDFs, and for building fully custom interfaces. And it was quite fun to build! More details, examples and docs here: prodi.gy/docs/custom-...

I've been experimenting with Docling + spaCy for PDFs and Word docs, and it's really promising so far 🔥 A big missing piece for end-to-end NLP, and it gives you clean & workable structured output. Will publish this soon and really want to work on data collection and annotation recipes next!

If anyone has a reason to hype up language interfaces and LLMs, it’s @inesmontani.bsky.social—founder of Explosion, the company behind the Python NLP tools spaCy and Prodigy. But her take? Sometimes, a simple form does the job better. Let’s build more alarm clocks and less automated window knockers!

With Bluesky picking up steam, here's a quick intro: I'm Ines, co-founder of @explosion-ai.bsky.social, and I work on spacy.io and prodi.gy. I post about NLP, open source, dev tools, UX, data collection, LLMs, software & applied real-world AI beyond the hype. 👩‍💻 Blog: ines.io 💥 Work: explosion.ai