Everett Kleven
Everett Kleven is a Solutions Engineer and Public Speaker at Daft, an open-source distributed query engine providing simple and reliable data processing for any modality and scale. Previously a Big Data TPM at Lucid Motors and Flight Controls Engineer at Boeing, he stewards community engagement curating technical content and demos on the latest advancements in multimodal AI. Everett holds advanced degrees in Aerospace Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Applied Physics from Washington University in St. Louis and Whitworth University in Spokane WA.
Session
Most AI pipelines still treat models like Python UDFs, just another function bolted onto Spark, Pandas, or Ray. But models aren’t functions: they’re expensive, stateful, and difficult to configure. In this talk, we’ll explore why this mental model breaks at scale and share practical patterns for treating models as first-class citizens in your pipelines.