EYE ON AI:
THE PODCAST

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Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at the University of Oxford, is renowned for his work on existential risk, the anthropic principle, human enhancement ethics, whole brain emulation, superintelligence risks, and the reversal test.

Thomas Lah, Executive Director of the Technology and Services Industry Association (TSIA), delves into the influence of AI on technology companies and their operating models.

Ylli Bajraktari, President and CEO of the Special Competitive Studies Project, unveils strategic maneuvers and policies shaping the global future of artificial intelligence.

Terry Sejnowski, President of the NeurIPS Foundation and Francis Crick Professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory.

Björn Ommer, a visionary AI researcher and Head of the Computer Vision & Learning Group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, delves into the fascinating inner workings of diffusion models, shedding light on the pivotal role these models play in advancing technology and society.

Sergey Levine is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley.

Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, delves into the intricacies of Perplexity AI, a groundbreaking conversational answer engine designed to redefine the landscape of online search.

Tianmin Shu, Assistant Professor at Johns Hopkins University in both the Computer Science and Cognitive Science departments, unravels the fascinating concept of world models and their intersection with artificial and human intelligence.

Vincent Vanhoucke, a distinguished Scientist and Senior Director for Robotics at Google DeepMind, dives into the cutting-edge world of robotic control with RT2, DeepMind's innovative robotic transformer system.

Cris Valenzuela, co-founder and CEO of Runway, an applied AI research company, shaping the next era of art, entertainment, and human creativity.

Anna Marie Wagner, SVP and Head of AI at Ginkgo Bioworks, is renowned for the company's work in synthetic biology and its integration with artificial intelligence.

Richard Sutton currently serves as a professor of computing science at the University of Alberta and as a research scientist at Keen Technologies. Sutton is considered one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, having made several significant contributions to the field, including temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a company that optimizes frontend deployment, making web projects faster and easier to scale, shares his vision on the future of web development. He emphasizes the significance of JavaScript, the evolution of the web, and the critical role of Vercel in facilitating developers to seamlessly deploy AI-driven applications.

Ian Bremmer, the founder and president of the Eurasia Group, a leading global political risk research and consulting firm. He shares his expert insights into the rapidly evolving landscape of AI development and its implications for global politics, security, and economy.

Matt Powell, Managing Director at ISSVSS, offers a comprehensive suite of AI-powered video intelligence solutions to address security, safety, and business challenges across diverse vertical markets.

Itamar Arel is the CEO of Tenyx, a company that utilizes proprietary neuroscience-inspired AI technology to build the next generation of voice-based conversational agents.

Andy Hock, VP of Product at Cerebras Systems, is part of an AI hardware startup that is out to accelerate deep learning and change computing forever.

Hrant Khachatrian is a notable figure in the field of machine learning and data science in Armenia. He is the founder and director of YerevaNN, a machine learning research lab with two N’s at the end.

Rem Darbinyan, a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, seasoned advisor, author, and keynote speaker with an investment portfolio of over 40 startups. He's the founder and CEO of SmartClick, which builds deep tech innovations based on artificial intelligence and machine learning. He's also the founder and CEO of Viral Mango, a platform that connects influencers with brands.

Vasi Philomin, Vice President of Generative AI at Amazon Web Services. Vasi shares his journey in AI and ML, detailing his contributions to Amazon's extensive array of AI capabilities.

Harut Martirosyan, CTO of Intent.ai. Harut shares insights about Armenia's technological heritage, the influence of major tech companies in the region, and the evolving landscape of AI and machine learning. We also cover the integration of AI in business and its global impact.

Atul Deo, General Manager for Amazon Bedrock. Atul shares his insights on the development and impact of Amazon Bedrock, a platform designed to democratize access to advanced AI models.

Peter Chen, the co-founder and CEO of Covariant, in a deep dive into the world of AI-driven robotics.

Connor Leahy, CEO of Conjecture, an AI company specializing in AI safety. Connor, known for his pioneering work in open-source large language models, shares his views on the monopolization of AI technology and the risks of keeping such powerful technology in the hands of a few.

Karen Hao, who is currently a contributing writer for The Atlantic with an impressive background as a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong and as a senior artificial intelligence editor at MIT Technology Review.

Gordon Crovitz, co-founder of NewsGuard and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, to unravel the complexities of AI-generated misinformation.

Alex Wiltschko, Founder and CEO of Osmo. Alex is giving computers a sense of smell to improve the health and happiness of human life.

Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization that provides free online courses, lessons, and practice exercises across a wide range of subjects to learners worldwide.

Ed Anuff, Chief Product Office at DataStax. Ed sheds light on the innovative ways AI is being incorporated into database technologies, with a special focus on the advancements and applications of vector databases in this realm.

Alex Kendall, founder and CEO of Wavye, a company building autonomous vehicle technology using AI. Alex provides an inside look at Wavye's approach to autonomous driving, which leverages world models and reinforcement learning to create an AI "driver" that can understand complex urban environments.

Asa Cooper Stickland, a postdoctoral researcher at NYU, who is at the forefront of language model safety. Asa recently co-authored a paper proposing tests to measure the precursors of self-awareness in LLMs.

Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner who has been instrumental in advancing convolutional neural networks and whose work spans machine learning, computer vision, and more.

Alex Klein, the Cofounder & CEO of STEM and Kano Computing, who boasts an illustrious academic background from Cambridge and Yale.

Ahmed Imtiaz, a PhD student from Rice University working on deep learning theory and generative modeling. Ahmed is currently spearheading his research at Google, exploring the dynamics of text-to-image generative models.

Yilun Du, a final year PhD student at MIT EECS with a background in research at leading institutions like OpenAI, FAIR, and Google Deepmind.

Viren Jain, a leading Research Scientist at Google in Mountain View, California. Viren, at the helm of the Connectomics team, has pioneered breakthroughs in synapse-resolution brain mapping in collaboration with esteemed institutions such as HHMI, Max Planck, and Harvard.

Riley McCormack, President and CEO of Digimarc, pioneers in digital watermarking and cloud-based product data.

Matt Hicks, President and CEO of Red Hat, a leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions.

Scott Aaronson, Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at The University of Texas and director of its Quantum Information Center.

Arjun Subramonian, a PhD student hailing from UCLA, with a focus on AI fairness and ethics. Arjun's work encompasses the intricate intersections of machine learning, algorithmic fairness, social justice, and ethics, all while ensuring inclusivity and equity in the realm of technology.

Peter Voss, a long time researcher in the field of artificial general intelligence. He was one of the authors of a book titled Artificial General Intelligence, which helped popularize the term, and Peter has a company called Aigo.ai which builds intelligent chatbots for industry.

Isabelle Guyon, is a French researcher in machine learning and pattern recognition. She's known for her work on support vector machines, otherwise known as SVMs, a type of supervised learning algorithm used for classification and regression analysis.

Dmitry Shapiro, Founder of YouAi and CEO of GoMeta. He is no stranger to the tech industry. With an impressive track record, he has made significant contributions to companies like Google, MySpace, and now, he's leading the charge at YouAi.

Dan O'Connell, the Chief AI and Strategy Officer at Dialpad and a seasoned expert in the world of AI-driven business communications.

Raul Martynek, the CEO of Data Bank, one of the industry's leading data center providers, about the intricacies of data storage and the challenges of GPU intensive workloads for AI.

Mike Knoop, Co-Founder of Zapier, a tool that simplifies workflows by connecting various apps and services, making automation accessible to a wide range of users.

Diaa El All, co-founder and CEO of Soundful, an AI music creation platform that helps artists, creators, singers, songwriters, and producers analyze, create, and monetize music.

Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine. The application of artificial intelligence in drug development to advance the field of longevity research.

Michael Jordan, not the basketball legend, but Michael I Jordan, a towering figure in the world of AI. Michael is co-author of the book Machine Learning a probabilistic perspective, which is a standard textbook in the field.

Scott Downes, Chief Technology Officer at Invisible Technologies, whose platform is used for reinforcement learning with human feedback, otherwise known as RLHF, the Dirty Little Secret Behind Generative AI.

Andrew Ng, a well-known researcher and pioneer in machine learning. Andrew has taught courses at Stanford and trained many of the AI luminaries working today. For a time, he was the chief scientist at Baidu, China's AI giant, and he co-founded Coursera, the online education company. Currently, he has an ML Ops company called Landing AI, which has a suite of tools to make it easy for businesses to build, deploy and manage machine learning models

Mathew Lodge, CEO of Diff Blue, a company that uses reinforcement learning to automate the writing of unit tests for Java codes. Matthew talks about how reinforcement learning has been lost in the shuffle around generative AI, but remains one of the most powerful kinds of artificial intelligence in any machine learning developers toolbox, and, in fact, how reinforcement learning is the power behind much of generative AI.

Alexandra Geese, a member of the European Parliament. She's worked on the Digital Services Act in the EU and is now one of the members drafting the AI Act. Parliament has just passed an initial draft of the Act and it's now under negotiation with the European Council and the European Commission.

We know how to build a superhuman AI, and if that recipe is publicly available and, even worse, if the weights of a trained AI are available, then it becomes very easy for a huge number of people to issue instructions that, if they were executed by the AI, could lead terrible catastrophes and, in the worst case, complete extinction. It's very hard, in terms of your feeling of your ego and how you can feel good about what you do, to accept the idea that what you've been working on for decades might be actually very dangerous for humanity.

Clemens Meywald, an expert in AI and enterprise software, talks about solving unstructured data challenges using AI. His company, Instabase, enables users to engage in interactive conversations with various types of content, such as documents and spreadsheets, and he introduces us to the AI Hub, a marketplace where developers and users can contribute models and applications.

Noam Chomsky dismisses the existential threat argument and casts doubt on the intelligence of large-language models. He also weighs in on whether we could talk to extraterrestrials.

Pascal Weinberger, cofounder of Bardeen.ai, talks about using AI to unlock office automation.

Sina Kian, chief operating officer of Aleo, a platform for building private blockchain based applications, talks about zero knowledge proofs to protect sensitive data for training AI systems.

Aidan Gomez, who helped develop the transformer algorithm at the heart of generative AI and large language models, such as GPT-4, talks about transformers and his startup Cohere, a platform that offers users access to pre-built LLMs, as well as allowing users to create their own LLMs.

Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, co-founder of EleutherAI and now co-founder of Conjecture, discusses the darker side of AI. Connor shares his insights on the current negative trajectory of AI, the challenges of keeping superintelligence in a sandbox, and the potential negative implications of large language models such as GPT4. He also discusses the problem of releasing AI to the public and the need for regulatory intervention to ensure alignment with human values.

Danny Tobey, an attorney with the global law firm DLA Piper, is at the forefront of the changing legal dynamics surrounding artificial intelligence. He talked about the current state of legislation and regulation, how regulatory bodies like the Federal Trade Commission are already tackling issues and what the law firm of the future will look like as AI transforms the economy.

Yoshua Bengio, one of the founders of deep learning, tallks about the famous pause letter of which he was perhaps the most prominent signer. And discusses his work on world models and inference machines that would give AI systems the ability to reason on reality.

Edo Liberty, who helped create SageMaker while at Amazon's AI labs, is building out long-term memory for large language models using vector embeddings at Pinecone.io. Edo says it solves the problem of hallucinations in large models like ChatGPT, which as we all know is their primary drawback. Edo's approach is simple: Convert authoritative and trusted information into vectors and load them into a vector database for large language models to refer to, allowing them to give accurate answers. 

We have a new sponsor this week: NetSuite by Oracle, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning software to help businesses of any size manage their financials, operations, and customer relationships in a single platform. They've just rolled out a terrific offer: you can defer payments for a full NetSuite implementation for six months. That's no payment and no interest for six months, and you can take advantage of this special financing offer today at netsuite.com/EYEONAI

Ilya Sutskever, a cofounder and chief scientist of OpenAI and one of the primary minds behind the large language model GPT-4 and it’s public progeny, ChatGPT, talks about AI hallucinations and his vision of AI democracy.

In this episode, Ben Sorscher, a PhD student at Stanford, talks about reducing the size of data sets used to train models, particularly large language models, which are pushing the limits of scaling because of the enormous cost of training and the environmental impact of generating the electricity they consume.

Yann LeCun talks about what's missing in large language models and about his new joint embedding predictive architecture may be a step toward filling that gap.

Terry Sejnowski, an AI pioneer, chairman of the NeurIPS Foundation, and co-creator of Boltzmann Machines - whose sleep-wake cycle has been repurposed in Geoff Hinton's new Forward-Forward algorithm, talks in this episode about the NeurIPS conference, and how advances in deep learning may help us understand our own brains.

Geoffrey Hinton gives a deep dive into his new learning algorithm, which he calls the forward-forward algorithm, a more plausible model for how the cerebral cortex might learn.

To set the stage for some terrific conversations I have coming to you in the new year, in this episode, we go back to some earlier conversations that talk about how we got to where we are in deep learning and how those early threads continue to lead innovation.

This week I talk to Bob Rogers, a Harvard trained astrophysicist who once built digital twins of black holes to better understand them, and now builds digital twins of supply chains to help make them more efficient and resilient.

Jonathon Reilly, co-founder of Akkio, a no-code AI platform, talks about how users with a web browser and an idea have the power to bring AI to life themselves without having to write code.

Moses Guttmann, founded ClearML, talks about the evolution of the MLOps industry over the past few years and ClearML's contribution to it.

Bratin Saha, head of Amazon's machine learning services, talks about Amazon's growing dominance in model building and deploying AI, about the company's SageMaker platform, and whether anyone can compete with the behemoth.

Peter Schrammel, one of the founders of Diffblue, an automated unit-test writing software company, speaks about the increasing automatic generation of code and how he sees such automation increasing the productivity of developers.

Michael Kearns, a computer scientist professor at the University of Pennsylvania and an Amazon scholar talks about differential privacy, how Amazon's research approach differs from its peers, and how AI will eventually permeate all aspects of our lives.

Jacki Morie, a senior XPRIZE advisor, talks about the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, a competition focused on creating a physical avatar system that will seamlessly transport human skills and experience to distant locations. The four-year competition is in its final stretch. 

Aaron Patzer, founder of the personal finance app MINT and more recently founder of the AI-based healthcare company Vital, talks about keeping customer data private and the promise, giving emergency room patients information with AI and finding friendly solutions to anxiety-producing problems. 

Rohit Prasad, Amazon's Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Alexa, speaks about the development of conversational AI and virtual assistants and the merging of IoT sensor data into ambient intelligence - AI that is always present and immediately accessible. 

Ken Washington, who leads Amazon's consumer robotics team, talks about the company's compact wheeled robot called Astro. Ken talked about Astro's evolution, it's popular and possible use cases, and what might be in store in the future. 

Almammon Rasool Abdali, a machine-learning engineer and PhD student in Baghdad, is one of the more prominent members of Iraq's small but growing deep learning community. We talked about his work, which involves vision systems to detect violence, and about the state of artificial intelligence research and teaching in the country generally. 

Ma Yanjun, General Manager of the AI Technology Ecosystem at Baidu, talks about how Baidu's PaddlePaddle stacks up against other AI frameworks, about Baidu's development of large language models and the direction of AI research in China more generally.

Oriol Vinyals, who leads DeepMind’s deep learning team, talks about AlphaCode, his group’s code-writing language model, and DeepMind’s winding road toward artificial general intelligence.

Tom Denton, a software engineer in Google’s bioacoustics group, talks about new algorithms to separate individual bird songs from the cacophony of the forest - and gives some examples. The Eye on AI podcast is sponsored by ClearML, the MLOps solution.

Andrew Ng, founder of Google Brain, Coursera and Landing AI, talks about his vision of data-centric AI, MLOps and the future of supervised vs unsupervised learning. The Eye on AI podcast is sponsored by ClearML.

Tom Siebel, founder and CEO of C3.ai talks about AI projects including military target acquisition and precision healthcare while musing about the dark side of our technological future. The Eye on AI podcast is sponsored by ClearML

Max Bileschi, a software engineer at Google Research, talks about his team’s application of convolutional neural networks to predict the function of amino acid sequences in a protein.

Eye on AI is sponsored by ClearML. 

Vladlen Koltun discusses intelligent locomotion in robots and drones and reveals the Megaverse.

Pushmeet Kohli, the head of DeepMind’s AI for Science and one of the brains behind AlphaFold, the machine learning system that is helping solve the protein folding problem. The episode is sponsored by ClearML, an open-source MLOps solution.

Currently the largest AI system in the world is China’s WuDao 2.0, a sparse, multimodal, large language model with 1.75 trillion parameters. Tang Jie, a professor at China’s Qinghua University, who leads the WuDao team, talks about how the model was built, why it is unique and what his team plans for the future.

Connor Leahy, one of the minds behind Eleuther AI and its open-source large language model, GPT-J, talks about the building such models and their implications for the future.

Robert O. Work, former Deputy Secretary of Defense and recently co-chairman of the National Security Commission on AI, talks about competition between the US and China to integrate AI into their military capabilities.

Stephen DeAngelis, head of Enterra Solutions, reminds us that so-called Old-Fashioned AI continues to be a powerful tool. He talked about leveraging knowledge bases, inference engines and symbolic logic to make decisions about large dynamic systems. 

Daniel Ho, associate director of Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence talks about the proposed National AI Research Resource, an effort to expand the data and compute available to academic researchers, leveling the playing field with researchers in private companies.

Andrew Feldman, one of the founders and CEO of Cerebras Systems, talks about the company's wafer-scale computer chip optimized for machine learning and about the network of chips that company has built that has as much computing power as a human brain.

Adobe’s head of research, Gavin Miller, talks about AI-enhanced creativity, guarding against manipulation of visual media and his own AI-enabled robot snakes.

Seth Dobrin, chief AI officer at IBM, talks about the company's tools to increase the trustworthiness, fairness and explainability of AI models.

This week, I talk to Ron Schmelzer and Kathleen Walch, founders of Cognilytica, a research, advisory, and education firm focused on artificial Intelligence. We talked about the rise of MLOps, data labeling, unsupervised learning and what it will take to get us to human-level artificial general intelligence.

This week I talk to the inimitable Ben Goertzel, about his non-profit foundation, SingularityNET, his work with the robotic head, Sophia, his talking Philip K. Dick avatar, his work in medical AI, his frustration over Big Tech's dominance of AI research and his own quest for AGI.

AI commentator and investor Kaifu Lee talks about his book AI 2041 in which he considers possible futures for humanity if deep learning applications develop as planned.