Yoav Shoham on What Machines Understand About Us, Leading AI in Israel & Stanford, AI21 Labs Innovations, and How We’re Wrong About AGI

On this episode of Invested, Michael hosts Yoav Shoham, Co-founder and Co-CEO at AI21 Labs.

Yoav is professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. He is Fellow of AAAI, ACM and the Game Theory Society, and among his awards are the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the AAAI/ACM Allen Newell Award, and the ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award. Prof. Shoham has co-founded several AI companies, including TradingDynamics (ARBA), Katango and Timeful (GOOG), and AI21 Labs. Prof. Shoham is the founding chair of the AI Index initiative, and chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee of Israel’s National AI Initiative.

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KEY TOPICS 

• [00:00:00] Intro 
• [00:01:35] Discovering AI in the ‘80’s
• [00:08:00] When LLMs are Wrong 
• [00:12:10] Think Critically While Using AI
• [00:16:00] What it Means to Understand
• [00:20:20] Is AGI Around the Corner? 
• [00:24:40] What Worries Yoav About AI
• [00:28:28] Starting AI21 Labs
• [00:32:50] AI Agents
• [00:38:00] The Price of Model Training
• [00:46:00] AI Policy Recommendations
• [00:50:05] The “Other Office” at Timeful
• [00:54:45] Becoming a Computer Scientist
• [00:55:00] The Situation on College Campuses
• [01:01:25] Computer-Science-Philosopher
• [01:05:28] What Makes Us Human

RESOURCES

Follow Yoav Shoham on X: https://x.com/yshoham 

Follow Yoav Shoham on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoavshoham/ 

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For the transcript of this episode, go to: https://content.aleph.vc/podcast-episodes/yoav-shoham---episode-27

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CREDITS

Executive Producer: Erica Marom 

Producer: Sofi Levak & Yoni Mayer

Video and Editing: Ron Baranov

Music and Art: Uri Ar 

Design: Rony Karadi