Epic Games: A New Venture

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Dr. Michael Capps is a well-known technologist and CEO of Diveplane Corporation. Before co-founding Diveplane, Mike had a legendary career in the videogame industry as president of Epic Games, makers of blockbusters Fortnite and Gears of War. His tenure included a hundred game-of-the-year awards, dozens of conference keynotes, a lifetime achievement award, and a successful free-speech defense of videogames in the U.S. Supreme Court. Mike began his career with postgraduate degrees at UNC, MIT, and the Naval Postgraduate School; for his research in VR, he was featured in SIGGRAPH’s historical documentary on computer graphics. He remains a regular host of multiple television series on the Discovery and Science Channels.

Episode Links:  

Dr. Mike Capp’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikecapps/ 

Dr. Mike Capp’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/solidfog?s=20 

Dr. Mike Capp’s Website: https://diveplane.com/  

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Outline: 

Here’s the timestamps for the episode: 

(00:00) – Introduction

(02:33) –Gaming is a hobby industry that has turned into a massive industry. A really interesting space dealing with rapid onset of AI, just like every other technology businesses

(03:15) – Explainable AI and understanding AI and for consumers this is often quite challenging. The education systems in China or Finland put base level understanding of what AI is and what it can do 

(04:20) – Academic pursuit is important, but it comes down to a mix of nurtured talent and a set of skills that you could get at home, and that shifted into world design

(06:45) – There's AI already built into the unity engine that you can use to drive avatars. It is a “democratization of capability”

(09:49) – Dr. Capps’ advises: Get enough sleep and ‘throw away the first pancake’

(12:23) – Educational games open up the technology to academia, to use for nonprofit projects. The focus at Epic isn't uneducation, but to facilitate more user created content

(14:05) – Education comes from engagement, and if you don't understand what engages people, you can't educate. It's understanding what it is that is going to connect with that audience

(14:46) – Diveplane: trying to build an open framework for interchange in VR, AI and super intelligence. Chris Hazard’s tech is specifically designed to explain step by step why it worked and then help figure out how to beat that, and we apply it to the commercial sector

(17:38) – Empowering consumers is based on the best data we had with no intention of bias. It'll show the most important features, not overall a data set. It technically catches the bias that's happening systematically inside of a system and then try to provide contra positives

(21:08) – Facial Recognition Systems are not perfect and they tend to have clustered errors. Banning this technology might be making a mistake in the name of freedom against security

(23:43) – Data itself isn’t the problem, but the use for good or ill

(25:15) – Diveplane has traceable auditability in their technology, but their focus is on human understandability

(29:59) – Games are just one example of an adversarial approach to machine learning

(33:28) – Cannons are maybe less hackable than certain neural nets. When you can really generate creative ideas mathematically it's a dramatically beautiful framework

(36:18) – Synthesizing entirely new data sets to train up a machine learning model and then generate new data points that could theoretically be within it and what that lets us. A clean private data out of a data set

(38:41) – We're so rapidly grabbing onto technology solutions that seem to work and as soon as it works enough, it's thrown into production

(41:06) –The paradigm in Cybersecurity will not shift to AI powered defense being better than AI power to tech