Meet Weights & Biases

Weights & Biases is the go-to tool for AI developers, trusted by over 500,000 AI researchers and engineers worldwide, including those at companies like OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Meta. It's no exaggeration to say that many of the cutting-edge models powering today's most popular AI apps, such as ChatGPT and Midjourney, have been built using Weights & Biases from from Day 1. The platform addresses the most foundational step in AI development — tracking and measuring how well models perform as they are trained with more data and compute.

This global adoption calls for a global-scale operation. While much of this work occurs online, engaging users and customers in person is equally important. To better serve their rapidly growing user base in Asia, Weights & Biases opened their first APAC office in Tokyo in 2023.

Cue the flashback sequence

The partnership between Cuckoo and Weights & Biases began in July 2024, when W&B hosted its first-ever meetup in Seoul. With the Korean AI community rising to one of the top five countries by user count, the team knew that community meetups were the best way foster developer relationship. Co-founder & CISO Chris van Pelt wanted to personally kick off the series by speaking at the meetup, alongside speakers from leading AI teams in the region.

However, W&B faced a unique challenge. While the Korean AI community is competent in English, the event's focus on the latest trends in Generative AI & LLMs, filled with technical terms and product names, made real-time communication difficult. With a small team operating out of Japan, finding a local interpreter who possessed both language fluency and the necessary technical expertise proved to be a significant hurdle.

Where Cuckoo stepped in

This is where Cuckoo stepped in. Just minutes before the talk, the team swiftly input terms like RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and W&B Weave as keywords. Cuckoo instantly learned these terms and acted as the in-house interpreter for Weights & Biases for the day. By simply sharing a QR code, the team provided the audience with access to real-time interpretation transcript on the fly.

Handling complex topics like LLM agents and AI-generated UI with ease, Cuckoo allowed Chris to deliver his talk without any technical details being lost in translation. With Cuckoo, they had a solution that just worked, allowing them to focus on what mattered most: showcasing their platform’s value and engaging with the community. There was also an added benefit for Chris and the W&B team to fully engage in the follow-up sessions led by Korean speakers, which would have been difficult to follow without Cuckoo's real-time interpretation.

What's next?

The W&B team was so impressed with Cuckoo that they used it again the following week for the same talk that Chris gave to the Tokyo AI community. In fact, Cuckoo will power W&B's largest APAC conference in October, providing English, Japanese, and Korean interpretations for 600+ AI developers. This will be the largest event we’ve supported, and we’re excited about the opportunity.

Weights & Biases will also be among the first beta users of Cuckoo’s Zoom app, which will help their team engage with users and customers in Korea and beyond. It has quickly become the APAC team's favorite tool for multilingual conversations. With Cuckoo, less time is spent is going back and forth trying to coordinate multi-language communication, and more time is spent to building authentic relationships with local communities and clients.