No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

What is the role of academia in modern AI research? With Stanford Professor Dr. Percy Liang

Mar 9, 2023

Dr. Percy Liang, a Stanford computer science professor and director of the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models, discusses the pivotal role of academia in AI research. He highlights the shift from human-like to superhuman intelligence ambitions. The conversation delves into innovative language models like GPT-3 and the necessity of transparency in AI development. Liang also advocates for community-driven AI initiatives and the use of decentralized computing to propel future advancements, stressing the ethical responsibilities that come with these technologies.

46:37

Creator website

Episode guests

Percy Liang

Highlights

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Get better ChatGPT results: Chain of Thought

00:36

To trust AI which surpasses human level performance, we need statistical evidence.

01:17

Intro

2min

Journey Through Language Models

12min

Exploring Computational Semantics and Its Impact on Language Models

2min

Navigating AI's Future: Foundations and Challenges

24min

The Importance of Transparency in AI Development

2min

Building Community-Driven AI: Lessons from Open Source Development

4min

When AI research is evolving at warp speed and takes significant capital and compute power, what is the role of academia? Dr. Percy Liang – Stanford computer science professor and director of the Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models talks about training costs, distributed infrastructure, model evaluation, alignment, and societal impact.

Sarah Guo and Elad Gil join Percy at his office to discuss the evolution of research in NLP, why AI developers should aim for superhuman levels of performance, the goals of the Center for Research on Foundation Models, and Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence.

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Show Links:

See Percy’s Research on Google Scholar
See Percy’s bio on Stanford’s website
Percy on Stanford’s Blog: What to Expect in 2023 in AI
Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence
Foundation AI models GPT-3 and DALL-E need release standards - Protocol
The Time Is Now to Develop Community Norms for the Release of Foundation Models - Stanford

Show Notes:

[1:44] - How Percy got into machine learning research and started the Center for Research and Foundation Models at Stanford

[7:23] - The role of academia and academia’s competitive advantages

[13:30] - Research on natural language processing and computational semantics

[27:20] - Smaller scale architectures that are competitive with transformers

[35:08] - Helm, holistic evaluation of language models, a project with the the goal is to evaluate language models

[42:13] - Together, a decentralized cloud for artificial intelligence

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