The Intersection of Academia and Industry in Reinforcement Learning and LLMs

Today we’re joined by Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, a staff researcher at Nvidia, to continue our AI Trends 2024 series. In our conversation, Kamyar updates us on the latest developments in reinforcement learning (RL), and how the RL community is taking advantage of the abstract reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Kamyar shares his insights on how LLMs are pushing RL performance forward in a variety of applications, such as ALOHA, a robot that can learn to fold clothes, and Voyager, an RL agent that uses GPT-4 to outperform prior systems at playing Minecraft. We also explore the progress being made in assessing and addressing the risks of RL-based decision-making in domains such as finance, healthcare, and agriculture. Finally, we discuss the future of deep reinforcement learning, Kamyar’s top predictions for the field, and how greater compute capabilities will be critical in achieving general intelligence.

The complete show notes for this episode can be found at twimlai.com/go/670.