Eye On A.I.

In this week's episode, I talk to Pedro Domingos, author of the bestselling book, The Master Algorithm, which is about the ongoing effort to unify machine-learning paradigms in a single model. But the conversation was much broader than that. Pedro believes strongly that the great powers are engaged in an AI arms race with America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, pitted against China's military and industrial dynamo. We also talked about the future of democracy and authoritarianism in an AI-driven world.

Resurrecting the Tower of Babel with machine learning: In this week’s episode, we talk to Liang Huang, principal scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley about his breakthrough in simultaneous translation technology, which promises to erase language barriers. Baidu’s system can already translate speech to text with as little as a three-second delay. Soon, Liang says, the technology will translate speech to speech, enabling a future in which people from different languages can speak fluidly with each other.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I continue my review of AI research in different regions of the world with a focus on Europe. Europe, with its strong academic tradition, faces unique challenges in scientific research because of the continent's fragmentation and the weakening of the European Union. Given the growing dominance of North America and China, Europe risks being left behind. To understand what Europe is doing to avoid this, I talk to Bernhard Schölkopf and Matthias Bethge, two machine learning researchers from Tübingen, Germany, who have been working to bring machine learning research in Europe under one umbrella.  I hope you find Bernhard and Matthias as interesting as I did. 

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Ben Rosman, who runs Africa’s largest machine learning lab at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is focused on reinforcement learning. Ben has been instrumental in unifying and upgrading the continent’s machine-learning capabilities in hopes of making Africa a player in the artificial intelligence revolution. If you wanted to know what’s going on with AI in Africa, Ben will fill you in. I hope you find him as interesting as I did.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Julian Togelius,  perhaps the most prolific researcher at the intersection of video games and artificial intelligence. Julian works on AI for games and games for AI. Some of his most significant work is in training deep neural networks to play video games and generalize what they have learned, a critical step toward artificial general intelligence. For those of you who don't understand the importance of video games to artificial intelligence research, Julian will enlighten you. For those of you who do his recent work will surprise you.  I hope you find Julian as interesting as I did.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Miles Brundage, who studies the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and works on the policy team of OpenAI, the nonprofit A.I. research company founded by Elon Musk. When I spoke to Miles, he was a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, where he remains an associate. We talked about the policy side of AI security and whether he is optimistic that regulations can steer machine learning applications away from the nightmare scenarios popularly imagined. I hope you find Miles as interesting as I did.

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Kaifu Lee, a thought leader on AI in China. Kaifu just published the book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order. We talked about the premise of the book, which is that China has already caught up with the US in the field of AI and is poised to surpass it. While China may lag on basic research, it has the formula to excel in implementation. I hope you find Kaifu as interesting as I did.

In Episode 3 of Eye on AI, I talk to Misha Bilenko, head of AI at Yandex, the Google of Russia, about Vladimir Putin’s claim that whomever dominates AI will rule the world; about Yandex’s chatty virtual assistant, Alice; and how AI has made the dead poet Pushkin relevant today.

In Episode 2 of Eye on AI, I talk to Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, a nonprofit A.I. research company, in a wide-ranging conversation off of things highlighted in Jack’s popular Import AI newsletter. Topics include whether A.I. will be used to trade cryptocurrencies; about A.I. used to speed up the creation of A.I. systems and how long will it be before A.I. does it all; evolution strategies as an alternative to reinforcement learning; the great global divide between ‘low compute’ and ‘high compute’ camps, with only a handful of companies and nation states controlling the bulk of the computing power; and when will the A.I. healthcare revolution finally begin as well as what does A.I. see when it looks at our tongues.

In Episode 1 of Eye on AI, I talk to Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, a nonprofit A.I. research company, in a wide-ranging conversation off of things highlighted in Jack’s popular Import AI newsletter. Topics include Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s comment that the advent of artificial intelligence to man’s discovery of fire; the chances that the world’s nation states can create and adhere to international norms governing A.I., preventing the spread of dangerous applications of the powerful technology; whether A.I. is escaping the labs of the tech giants and becoming more democratic; and whether A.I. eventually become a cognitive mirror to our own minds.