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The Robot Brains Podcast

Latest episodes

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Jun 8, 2022 • 44min

Twitter Q&A with Geoff Hinton

Last week, we were honored to have Professor Geoff Hinton join the show for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Hinton’s journey in academia, as well as past 10 years with Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the AlexNet/ImageNet breakthrough moment; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.As you might recall, we also gave our audience an opportunity to contribute questions for Geoff via Twitter. We received so many amazing questions from our audience that we had to break down our time with Geoff into two parts! In this episode, we’ll discuss some of these questions with Geoff.Tune in to get Geoff’s answers to the following questions AND MORE:Are you concerned with AI becoming too successful?What is the connection between mania and genius?What childhood experiences shaped him the most?What is next in AI?What should PhD students focus on?How conscious do you think today's neural nets are?How important is embodiment for intelligence?How does the brain work?SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Jun 1, 2022 • 1h 23min

Geoff Hinton on revolutionizing artificial intelligence... again

Over the past ten years, AI has experienced breakthrough after breakthrough in everything from computer vision to speech recognition, protein folding prediction, and so much more.Many of these advancements hinge on the deep learning work conducted by our guest, Geoff Hinton, who has fundamentally changed the focus and direction of the field. A recipient of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel prize for computer science, he has over half a million citations of his work. Hinton has spent about half a century on deep learning, most of the time researching in relative obscurity. But that all changed in 2012 when Hinton and his students showed deep learning is better at image recognition than any other approaches to computer vision, and by a very large margin. That result, that moment, known as the ImageNet moment, changed the whole AI field. Pretty much everyone dropped what they had been doing and switched to deep learning.Geoff joins Pieter in our two-part season finale for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Hinton’s journey from academia to Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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May 25, 2022 • 57min

Clement Delangue of Hugging Face on building the GitHub of machine learning

Originally created to be an open domain conversational AI, your own ‘artificial BFF' that you could chat with when your real friends weren’t available — fast forward six years, and Hugging Face is the leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) start-up. The company is currently valued at $2B with over 10,000 companies using the open-source AI platform - including Bing, Apple, and Monzo.Our guest, Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, believes in the sustainable long-term benefits of open-science and open-source collaboration and has built a community that fosters this goal. And while Hugging Face was initially mainly aimed at NLP, recently it is expanding to more machine learning domains, including computer vision and reinforcement learning. SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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May 18, 2022 • 45min

Amit Aggarwal of THE YES is making AI fashionable

As we all re-entered society over the last year, after months of WFH sweatpants and t-shirts, a personal stylist would have been helpful. Well, now there’s AI for that - THE YES. By taking a quick style quiz, you’ll have daily product and brand recommendations and a personalized feed displaying exactly what you’re looking for — in your size, budget and preferences. The more you say “yes”, the more personalized your feed gets. Right now, the company only offers women clothes but may expand in the future. The CTO of THE YES, Amit Aggarwal, joins the show to share how the company uses ML to create millions of unique stores daily for each one of their users.SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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May 12, 2022 • 53min

Spotify's Gustav Söderström on machine learning to personalize user experiences

Music is universal. It transcends language. Melodies have the power to trigger strong emotions. In fact, our brains release dopamine - the “feel good” hormone - when we listen to music. Today’s guest, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström, has been helping to bring the magic of music, personalized playlists, and more recently, podcasts to people around the world. He’s also led the platform to personalize individual content experiences with the help of artificial intelligence. Pieter and Gustav discuss the platform’s early approach to AI & ML, how he wants to help content creators reach more listeners and the technological details of Spotify’s ability to automatically generate millions of new playlists every day. SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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May 4, 2022 • 48min

Adam Bry of Skydio is leading the next generation of autonomous drones

When you are skiing down a mountain, riding your bike along a forest trail, or surfing 6-footers, it is hard enough just to concentrate on what you are doing, let alone try to capture a video of the moment. But what if you could hire a professional videographer to follow you and capture every move?Well, now you can in the form of AI-powered drones from Skydio. While personal use is just one application, the company has found success across a multitude of use cases. In this episode, we’re joined by Adam Bry, co-founder and CEO of the unicorn startup Skydio, which produces drones that are fully autonomous with AI software as their pilot. SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Apr 27, 2022 • 42min

Catapult Sports on AI that is changing the game

Sports and artificial intelligence aren’t two areas that often intersect. That has begun to change as IoT and wearables have begun to be adopted by more professional sports teams. The data that’s produced can be used to identify areas of performance improvement, potential future injuries and insights about team structure on the field. Today’s guest, Param Hegde, former CTO of Catapult Sports joined the show to share how the company is using data-driven intelligence to help athletes reach the top of their game. Please note: this interview was taped in late 2021. Since then, Param Hegde has moved on from Catapult to another endeavor. Originally founded in Australia, Catapult Sports has been a leader in the sports analytics sector for some time. This year, the winner of the 2022 Super Bowl, the Los Angeles Rams, even wore Catapult Sports tech demonstrating just how far the company has come. Param and Pieter discuss the technicalities of building such software and other areas of sports that AI may be applied. SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Apr 20, 2022 • 55min

Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions

Every business wants to be a data-driven business these days; basing decisions on tangible facts derived from historical precedents and clear-cut numbers. But that’s a lot easier said than done.This episode’s guest, Amit Prakash, is on a mission to change that. Based on his experience working on Microsoft’s Bing and then at Google working on Google Brain, he co-founded Thoughtspot to make querying data as easy as having a simple conversation. Thoughtspot provides artificial intelligence (AI) and search-driven analytics.The Sunnyvale, California-based company reached unicorn status in 2019, its latest valuation is $4.2B, and counts Nike, Walmart, and Apple among its clients.Amit shares the story behind building the massive search system, his views on relational search, and how to teach a machine what a user thinks is most interesting.SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Apr 13, 2022 • 58min

Eric Horvitz of Microsoft on AI for the greater good

On Episode 15 of Season 2, we’re joined by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s first ever Chief Scientific Officer. His research spans theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason. He’s the company’s top inventor since joining in 1993 with over 300 patents filed.  He has been elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He was a member of the National Security Commission on AI and he also co-founded important groups like the Partnership on AI, a non-profit organization bringing together Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft to document the quality and impact of AI systems on things like criminal justice, the economy, and media integrity. In his interview, he discusses everything from Microsoft’s relationship with AI to his own personal views on security implications of a future in which AI is ubiquitous. SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Apr 6, 2022 • 47min

Andrew Song of Whisper AI on solving hearing loss with AI

The five senses...touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. They are critical to how we perceive the world around us. Without them, we are lost. And as we grow older, they tend to weaken particularly when it comes to sight and hearing. Today’s guest, Andrew Song, is the co-founder and CEO of Whisper AI, and he is on a mission to help give people great hearing regardless of their age.After graduating from the University of Waterloo with degrees in mathematics and computer science, Andrew went to work at Facebook. While there, he saw firsthand the positive benefits gained from connecting with family and friends but wanted to make more of a direct impact.After watching his grandfather lose his hearing and consequently, his connection to others and ability to engage socially, he wanted to create a better hearing aid that was smart enough to deduce what was most important for the user to hear. Listen to his whole story as Pieter explores the inspiration and technology of Whisper AI.SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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