Shows
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISasha Luccioni: Connecting the Dots Between AI's Environmental and Social ImpactsIn episode 120 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sasha Luccioni.Sasha is the AI and Climate Lead at HuggingFace, where she spearheads research, consulting, and capacity-building to elevate the sustainability of AI systems. A founding member of Climate Change AI (CCAI) and a board member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Sasha is passionate about catalyzing impactful change, organizing events and serving as a mentor to under-represented minorities within the AI community.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach Daniel at editor@thegradient.pub
2024-04-181h 03
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMichael Sipser: Problems in the Theory of ComputationIn episode 119 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Michael Sipser.Professor Sipser is the Donner Professor of Mathematics and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1980 and joined the MIT faculty that same year. He was Chairman of Applied Mathematics from 1998 to 2000 and served as Head of the Mathematics Department 2004-2014. He served as interim Dean of Science 2013-2014 and then as Dean of Science 2014-2020.He was a research staff member at IBM Research in 1980, spent the 1985...
2024-04-111h 28
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIAndrew Lee: How AI will Shape the Future of EmailIn episode 118 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Andrew Lee.Andrew is co-founder and CEO of Shortwave, a company dedicated to building a better product experience for email, particularly by leveraging AI. He previously co-founded and was CTO at Firebase.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach Daniel at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:43) Andrew’s previous work, Firebase* (04:48) Benefits of l...
2024-04-041h 03
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIKate Park: Data Engines for Vision and LanguageIn episode 116 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kate Park. Kate is the Director of Product at Scale AI. Prior to joining Scale, Kate worked on Tesla Autopilot as the AI team’s first and lead product manager building the industry’s first data engine. She has also published research on spoken natural language processing and a travel memoir.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradie...
2024-03-2141 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIBen Wellington: ML for Finance and Storytelling through DataIn episode 115 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ben Wellington.Ben is the Deputy Head of Feature Forecasting at Two Sigma, a financial sciences company. Ben has been at Two Sigma for more than 15 years, and currently leads efforts focused on natural language processing and feature forecasting. He is also the author of data science blog I Quant NY, which has influenced local government policy, including changes in NYC street infrastructure and the design of NYC subway vending machines. Ben is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Urban and Community Planning program at the Pratt...
2024-03-141h 07
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIVenkatesh Rao: Protocols, Intelligence, and Scaling“There is this move from generality in a relative sense of ‘we are not as specialized as insects’ to generality in the sense of omnipotent, omniscient, godlike capabilities. And I think there's something very dangerous that happens there, which is you start thinking of the word ‘general’ in completely unhinged ways.”In episode 114 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Venkatesh Rao. Venkatesh is a writer and consultant. He has been writing the widely read Ribbonfarm blog since 2007, and more recently, the popular Ribbonfarm Studio Substack newsletter. He is the author of Tempo, a book on timi...
2024-03-072h 18
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISasha Rush: Building Better NLP SystemsIn episode 113 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Sasha Rush.Professor Rush is an Associate Professor at Cornell University and a Researcher at HuggingFace. His research aims to develop natural language processing systems that are safe, fast, and controllable. His group is interested primarily in tasks that involve text generation, and they study data-driven probabilistic methods that combine deep-learning based models with probabilistic controls. He is also interested in open-source NLP and deep learning, and develops projects to make deep learning systems safer, clearer, and easier to use.Have suggestions for future...
2024-02-2954 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AICameron Jones & Sean Trott: Understanding, Grounding, and Reference in LLMsIn episode 112 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Cameron Jones and Sean Trott.Cameron is a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. His research compares how humans and large language models process language about world knowledge, situation models, and theory of mind.Sean is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include probing large language models, ambiguity in languages, how ambiguous words are represented, and pragmatic inference. He previously completed his PhD at...
2024-02-221h 59
The Gradient: Perspectives on AINicholas Thompson: AI and JournalismIn episode 111 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nicholas Thompson.Nicholas is the CEO of The Atlantic. Previously, he served as editor-in-chief of Wired and editor of Newyorker.com. Nick also cofounded Atavist, which sold to Automattic in 2018. Publications under Nick’s leadership have won numerous National Magazine Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, and one WIRED story he edited was the basis for the movie Argo. Nick is also the co-founder of Speakeasy AI, a software platform designed to foster constructive online conversations about the world’s most pressing problems.Have suggestions for future podc...
2024-02-1559 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISubbarao Kambhampati: Planning, Reasoning, and Interpretability in the Age of LLMsIn episode 110 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Subbarao Kambhampati.Professor Kambhampati is a professor of computer science at Arizona State University. He studies fundamental problems in planning and decision making, motivated by the challenges of human-aware AI systems. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Association for Computing machinery, and was an NSF Young Investigator. He was the president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, trustee of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and a...
2024-02-081h 59
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIRuss Maschmeyer: Spatial Commerce and AI in RetailIn episode 109 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Russ Maschmeyer.Russ is the Product Lead for AI and Spatial Commerce at Shopify. At Shopify, he leads a team that looks at how AI can better empower entrepreneurs, with a particular interest in how image generation can help make the lives of business owners and merchants more productive. He previously led design for multiple services at Facebook and co-founded Primer, an AR-enabled interior design marketplace.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient...
2024-02-0155 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIBenjamin Breen: The Intersecting Histories of Psychedelics and AI ResearchIn episode 108 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Benjamin Breen.Professor Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change. He is the author of multiple books including The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade and the more recent Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, which you can pre-order now.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or...
2024-01-251h 07
The Gradient: Perspectives on AITed Gibson: The Structure and Purpose of LanguageIn episode 107 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Ted Gibson.Ted is a Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT. He leads the TedLab, which investigates why languages look the way they do; the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and how people learn, represent, and process language.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro...
2024-01-182h 13
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIHarvey Lederman: Propositional Attitudes and Reference in Language ModelsIn episode 106 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Harvey Lederman.Professor Lederman is a professor of philosophy at UT Austin. He has broad interests in contemporary philosophy and in the history of philosophy: his areas of specialty include philosophical logic, the Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming, epistemology, and philosophy of language. He has recently been working on incomplete preferences, on trying in the philosophy of language, and on Wang Yangming’s moral metaphysics.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pu...
2024-01-112h 10
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIEric Jang: AI is Good For YouIn episode 105 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Eric Jang.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:25) Updates since Eric’s last interview* (06:07) The problem space of humanoid robots* (08:42) Motivations for the book “AI is Good for You”* (12:20) Definitions of AGI* (14:35) ~ AGI timelines ~* (16:33) Do we have the ingredie...
2024-01-041h 29
The Gradient: Perspectives on AI2023 in AI, with Nathan BenaichIn episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich.Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a VC firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts. Nathan co-authors the State of AI Report.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient...
2023-12-281h 35
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIKathleen Fisher: DARPA and AI for National SecurityIn episode 103 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Dr. Kathleen Fisher.As the director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), Dr. Kathleen Fisher oversees a portfolio that includes most of the agency’s AI-related research and development efforts, including the recent AI Forward initiative. AI Forward explores new directions for AI research that will result in trustworthy systems for national security missions. This summer, roughly 200 participants from the commercial sector, academia, and the U.S. government attended workshops that generated ideas to inform DARPA’s next phase of AI exploratory projects. Dr. Fisher previo...
2023-12-2146 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIPeter Tse: The Neuroscience of Consciousness and Free WillIn episode 102 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Peter Tse.Professor Tse is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and chair of the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on using brain and behavioral data to constrain models of the neural bases of attention and consciousness, unconscious processing that precedes and constructs consciousness, mental causation, and human capacities for imagination and creativity. He is especially interested in the processing that goes into the construction of conscious experience between retinal activation at time 0 and seeing an event about a third of...
2023-12-142h 24
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIVera Liao: AI Explainability and TransparencyIn episode 101 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Vera Liao.Vera is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) Montréal where she is part of the FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) group. She is trained in human-computer interaction research and works on human-AI interaction, currently focusing on explainable AI and responsible AI. She aims to bridge emerging AI technologies and human-centered design practices, and use both qualitative and quantitative methods to generate recommendations for technology design. Before joining MSR, Vera worked at IBM TJ Watson Research Center, and her work contributed to IBM p...
2023-12-071h 37
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIThomas Dietterich: From the FoundationsIn episode 100 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Thomas Dietterich.Professor Dietterich is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. He is a pioneer in the field of machine learning, and has authored more than 225 refereed publications and two books. His current research topics include robust artificial intelligence, robust human-AI systems, and applications in sustainability. He is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the founding President of the International Machine Learning Society. Other major roles include Executive Editor...
2023-11-302h 01
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMartin Wattenberg: ML Visualization and InterpretabilityIn episode 99 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Martin Wattenberg.Professor Wattenberg is a professor at Harvard and part-time member of Google Research’s People + AI Research (PAIR) initiative, which he co-founded. His work, with long-time collaborator Fernanda Viégas, focuses on making AI technology broadly accessible and reflective of human values. At Google, Professor Wattenberg, his team, and Professor Viégas have created end-user visualizations for products such as Search, YouTube, and Google Analytics. Note: Professor Wattenberg is recruiting PhD students through Harvard SEAS—info here.Have suggestions for future podcast guests...
2023-11-161h 42
The Gradient: Perspectives on AILaurence Liew: AI SingaporeIn episode 98 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Laurence Liew.Laurence is the Director for AI Innovation at AI Singapore. He is driving the adoption of AI by the Singapore ecosystem through the 100 Experiments, AI Apprenticeship Programmes and the Generational AI Talent Development initiative. He is the current Co-Chair of the Innovations and Commercialisation working group and Co-Chair of the "Broad Adoption of AI by SME" committee.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient...
2023-11-0950 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMichael Levin & Adam Goldstein: Intelligence and its Many ScalesIn episode 97 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Michael Levin and Adam Goldstein. Professor Levin is a Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology Department at Tufts University. He also directs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His group, the Levin Lab, focuses on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex pattern regulation, and harnessing endogenous bioelectric dynamics toward rational control of growth and form. Adam Goldstein was a visiting scientist at the Levin Lab, where he worked on cancer research, and is the co-founder and Chairman of A...
2023-11-0257 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJonathan Frankle: From Lottery Tickets to LLMsIn episode 96 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Jonathan Frankle.Jonathan is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and (as of release). Jonathan completed his PhD at MIT, where he investigated the properties of sparse neural networks that allow them to train effectively through his lottery ticket hypothesis. He also spends a portion of his time working on technology policy, and currently works with the OECD to implement the AI principles he helped develop in 2019.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient...
2023-10-261h 08
The Gradient: Perspectives on AINao Tokui: "Surfing" Musical Creativity with AIIn episode 95 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nao Tokui.Nao Tokui is an artist/DJ and researcher based in Tokyo. While pursuing his Ph.D. at The University of Tokyo, he produced his first music album and singles using AI, including a 12-inch record with Nujabes, a legendary Japanese hip-hop producer. After completing his Ph.D. research, he founded Qosmo, AI Creativity and Music Lab, in 2009. Since then, he has been actively working at the intersection of AI technology and art. Nao and his team's works have been exhibited at renowned venues such as...
2023-10-191h 02
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIDivyansh Kaushik: The Realities of AI PolicyIn episode 94 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Divyansh Kaushik.Divyansh is the Associate Director for Emerging Technologies and National Security at the Federation of American Scientists where his focus areas include, amongst other things, AI policy, STEM immigration, and US-China strategic competition. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on designing reliable AI systems that align with human values. In addition to his advocacy work on Capitol Hill, he also played a key role in establishing the Congressional Graduate Research and Development Caucus. He is a frequent contributor to leading...
2023-10-121h 17
The Gradient: Perspectives on AITal Linzen: Psycholinguistics and Language ModelingIn episode 93 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Tal Linzen.Professor Linzen is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Data Science at New York University and a Research Scientist at Google. He directs the Computation and Psycholinguistics Lab, where he and his collaborators use behavioral experiments and computational methods to study how people learn and understand language. They also develop methods for evaluating, understanding, and improving computational systems for language processing.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pub
2023-10-051h 14
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIKevin K. Yang: Engineering Proteins with MLIn episode 92 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kevin K. Yang.Kevin is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) who works on problems at the intersection of machine learning and biology, with an emphasis on protein engineering. He completed his PhD at Caltech with Frances Arnold on applying machine learning to protein engineering. Before joining MSR, he was a machine learning scientist at Generate Biomedicines, where he used machine learning to optimize proteins.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient...
2023-09-2800 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIArjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang: Why Transformative AI is Really, Really Hard to AchieveIn episode 91 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Arjun Ramani and Zhengdong Wang. Arjun is the global business and economics correspondent at The Economist.Zhengdong is a research engineer at Google DeepMind.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (03:53) Arjun intro* (06:04) Zhengdong intro* (09:50) How Arjun and Zhengdong met in th...
2023-09-211h 49
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMiles Grimshaw: Benchmark, LangChain, and Investing in AIIn episode 90 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Miles Grimshaw.Miles is General Partner at Benchmark. He was previously a General Partner at Thrive Capital, where he helped the firm raise its fourth and fifth funds, and sourced deals in Lattice, Mapbox, Benchling, and Airtable, among others.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (02:48) Miles’ back...
2023-09-141h 00
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIShreya Shankar: Machine Learning in the Real WorldIn episode 89 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Shreya Shankar.Shreya is a computer scientist pursuing her PhD in databases at UC Berkeley. Her research interest is in building end-to-end systems for people to develop production-grade machine learning applications. She was previously the first ML engineer at Viaduct, did research at Google Brain, and software engineering at Facebook. She graduated from Stanford with a B.S. and M.S. in computer science with concentrations in systems and artificial intelligence. At Stanford, helped run SHE++, an organization that helps empower underrepresented minorities in technology....
2023-09-071h 16
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIStevan Harnad: AI's Symbol Grounding ProblemIn episode 88 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stevan Harnad.Stevan Harnad is professor of psychology and cognitive science at Université du Québec à Montréal, adjunct professor of cognitive science at McGill University, and professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. His research is on category learning, categorical perception, symbol grounding, the evolution of language, and animal and human sentience (otherwise known as “consciousness”). He is also an advocate for open access and an activist for animal rights.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know...
2023-08-311h 58
The Gradient: Perspectives on AITerry Winograd: AI, HCI, Language, and CognitionIn episode 87 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Terry Winograd. Professor Winograd is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He founded the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, where he directed the teaching programs and HCI research. He is also a founding faculty member of the Stanford d.school and a founding member and past president of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us a...
2023-08-241h 33
Jews on Film: Exploring Jewish Stories & Themes in CinemaWaltz with Bashir w/ Elan GolodDaniel and Harry are joined by Elan Golod, director of "Nathan-ism," to discuss the 2008 film "Waltz with Bashir" directed by Ari Folman.They cover the film’s exploration of memory and its malleability, dive deep into the distinction between historical truth vs story truth (and its relation to Jewish Midrash and the Seder), and make the case for why this film might be more Israeli than strictly Jewish.As always, they close out the episode by ranking the film's "Jewishness" in terms of its cast & crew, content, and themes._____________________Waltz with Ba...
2023-08-241h 08
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIGil Strang: Linear Algebra and Deep LearningIn episode 86 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Gil Strang. Professor Strang is one of the world’s foremost mathematics educators and a mathematician with contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis, and linear algebra. He has spent six decades teaching mathematics at MIT, where he was the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics. He was among the first MIT faculty members to publish a course on MIT’s OpenCourseware and has since championed both linear algebra education and open courseware.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let...
2023-08-171h 00
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIRaphaël Millière: The Vector Grounding Problem and Self-ConsciousnessIn episode 84 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Raphaël Millière.Professor Millière is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Previously, he was the 2020 Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience in Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, and completed his DPhil in philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he focused on self-consciousness.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubsc...
2023-08-042h 04
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIPeli Grietzer: A Mathematized Philosophy of LiteratureIn episode 83 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Peli Grietzer. Peli is a scholar whose work borrows mathematical ideas from machine learning theory to think through “ambient” and ineffable phenomena like moods, vibes, cultural logics, and structures of feeling. He is working on a book titled Big Mood: A Transcendental-Computational Essay in Art and contributes to the experimental literature collective Gauss PDF. Peli has a PhD in mathematically informed literary theory from Harvard Comparative Literature in collaboration with the HUJI Einstein Institute of Mathematics.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let...
2023-07-272h 33
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIRyan Drapeau: Battling Fraud with ML at StripeIn episode 82 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ryan Drapeau.Ryan is a Staff Software Engineer at Stripe and technical lead for Stripe’s Payment Fraud organization, which uses machine learning to help prevent billions of dollars of credit card and payments fraud for business every year.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (02:15) Ryan’s back...
2023-07-201h 06
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIShiv Rao: Enabling Better Patient Care with AIIn episode 81 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Shiv Rao.Shiv Rao, MD is the co-founder and CEO of Abridge, a healthcare conversation company that uses cutting-edge NLP and generative AI to bring context and understanding to every medical conversation. Shiv previously served as an Executive Vice President at UPMC Enterprises, managing the provider-facing portfolio of technology investments and R&D. He is a practicing cardiologist in UPMC's Heart and Vascular Institute.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pub
2023-07-131h 00
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIHugo Larochelle: Deep Learning as ScienceIn episode 80 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Hugo Larochelle. Professor Larochelle leads the Montreal Google DeepMind team and is adjunct professor at Université de Montréal and a Canada CIFAR Chair. His research focuses on the study and development of deep learning algorithms.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:38) Prof. Larochelle’s backg...
2023-07-061h 48
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJeremie Harris: Realistic Alignment and AI PolicyIn episode 79 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Jeremie Harris.Jeremie is co-founder of Gladstone AI, author of the book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It, and co-host of the Last Week in AI Podcast. Jeremy previously hosted the Towards Data Science podcast and worked on a number of other startups after leaving a PhD in physics.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Tw...
2023-06-291h 30
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIAntoine Blondeau: Alpha Intelligence Capital and Investing in AIIn episode 78 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Antoine Blondeau.Antoine is a serial AI entrepreneur and Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Alpha Intelligence Capital. He was chief executive at Dejima when the firm worked on CALO, one of the biggest AI projects in US history and precursor to Apple’s Siri. Later, he co-founded Sentient Technologies, which boasted the title of world’s highest funded AI company in 2016. In 2018, he founded Alpha Intelligence Capital to support future AI unicorns, and has raised more than $300 million, which has been deployed into 31 companies.Have sugg...
2023-06-2259 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJoon Park: Generative Agents and Human-Computer InteractionIn episode 77 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joon Park.Joon is a third-year PhD student at Stanford, advised by Professors Michael Bernstein and Percy Liang. He designs, builds, and evaluates interactive systems that support new forms of human-computer interaction by leveraging state-of-the-art advances in natural language processing such as large language models. His research introduced the concept of, and the techniques for building generative agents—computational software agents that simulate believable human behavior. Joon’s work has been supported by the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, the Stanford School of Engineering Fellowship, and the Siebel Scho...
2023-06-152h 21
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIRiley Goodside: The Art and Craft of Prompt EngineeringIn episode 75 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Riley Goodside. Riley is a Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI. Riley began posting GPT-3 prompt examples and screenshot demonstrations in 2022. He previously worked as a data scientist at OkCupid, Grindr, and CopyAI.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:37) Riley’s journey to becoming the first Staf...
2023-06-0159 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AITalia Ringer: Formal Verification and Deep LearningIn episode 74 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Talia Ringer.Professor Ringer is an Assistant Professor with the Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering group at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Their research leverages proof engineering to allow programmers to more easily build formally verified software systems.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Da...
2023-05-251h 45
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIBrigham Hyde: AI for Clinical Decision-MakingIn episode 72 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Brigham Hyde.Brigham is Co-Founder and CEO of Atropos Health. Prior to Atropos, he served as President of Data and Analytics at Eversana, a life sciences commercialization service provider. He led the investment in Concert AI in the oncology real-world data space at Symphony AI. Brigham has also held research faculty positions at Tufts University and the MIT Media Lab.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The...
2023-05-1841 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIScott Aaronson: Against AI DoomerismIn episode 72 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Scott Aaronson. Scott is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. His research interests focus on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more broadly. He has recently been on leave to work at OpenAI, where he is researching theoretical foundations of AI safety. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubS...
2023-05-111h 09
The Gradient: Perspectives on AITed Underwood: Machine Learning and the Literary ImaginationIn episode 71 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ted Underwood.Ted is a professor in the School of Information Sciences with an appointment in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Trained in English literary history, he turned his research focus to applying machine learning to large digital collections. His work explores literary patterns that become visible across long timelines when we consider many works at once—often, his work involves correcting and enriching digital collections to make them more amenable to interesting literary research.Have suggestions for fu...
2023-05-041h 43
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIIrene Solaiman: AI Policy and Social ImpactIn episode 70 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Irene Solaiman.Irene is an expert in AI safety and policy and the Policy Director at HuggingFace, where she conducts social impact research and develops public policy. In her former role at OpenAI, she initiated and led bias and social impact research at OpenAI in addition to leading public policy. She built AI policy at Zillow group and advised poilcymakers on responsible autonomous decision-making and privacy as a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us...
2023-04-271h 12
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIDrago Anguelov: Waymo and Autonomous VehiclesIn episode 69 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Drago Anguelov.Drago is currently a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo, where he joined in 2018. Earlier, he spent eight years at Google working on 3D vision and pose estimation for StreetView, then leading a research team that developed computer vision systems for annotating Google Photos. He has been involved in developing popular neural network methods such as the Inception architecture and the SSD detector. Before joining Waymo, he also led the 3D perception team at Zoox.Have suggestions for future podcast guests...
2023-04-201h 05
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJoanna Bryson: The Problems of CognitionIn episode 68 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Joanna Bryson.Professor Bryson is Professor of Ethics and Technology at the Hertie School, where her research focuses on the impact of technology on human cooperation and AI/ICT governance. Professor Bryson has advised companies, governments, transnational agencies, and NGOs, particularly in AI policy. She is one of the few people doing this sort of work who actually has a PhD and work experience in AI, but also advanced degrees in the social sciences. She started her academic career though in the liberal arts, and publishes...
2023-04-131h 13
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIDaniel Situnayake: AI on the EdgeIn episode 67 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Daniel Situnayake. Daniel is head of Machine Learning at Edge Impulse. He is co-author of the O’Reilly books "AI at the Edge" and "TinyML". Previously, he’s worked on the Tensorflow Lite team at Google AI and co-founded Tiny Farms, an insect farming company. Daniel has also lectured in AIDC technologies at Birmingham City University.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter
2023-04-061h 58
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISoumith Chintala: PyTorchIn episode 66 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Soumith Chintala.Soumith is a Research Engineer at Meta AI Research in NYC. He is the co-creator and lead of Pytorch, and maintains a number of other open-source ML projects including Torch-7 and EBLearn. Soumith has previously worked on robotics, object and human detection, generative modeling, AI for video games, and ML systems research.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter...
2023-03-301h 08
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISewon Min: The Science of Natural LanguageIn episode 65 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sewon Min.Sewon is a fifth-year PhD student in the NLP group at the University of Washington, advised by Hannaneh Hajishirzi and Luke Zettlemoyer. She is a part-time visiting researcher at Meta AI and a recipient of the JP Morgan PhD Fellowship. She has previously spent time at Google Research and Salesforce research.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOu...
2023-03-231h 42
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIRichard Socher: Re-Imagining SearchIn episode 64 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Richard Socher.Richard is founder and CEO of you.com, a new search engine that lets you personalize your search workflow and eschews tracking and invasive ads. Richard was previously Chief Scientist at Salesforce where he led work on fundamental and applied research, product incubation, CRM search, customer service automation and a cross-product AI platform. He was an adjunct professor at Stanford’s CS department as well as founder and CEO/CTO of MetaMind, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. He received his PhD from Stanford’s CS D...
2023-03-161h 37
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJoe Edelman: Meaning-Aligned AIIn episode 63 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joe Edelman.Joe developed the meaning-based organizational metrics at Couchsurfing.com, then co-founded the Center for Humane Technology with Tristan Harris, and coined the term “Time Well Spent” for a family of metrics adopted by teams at Facebook, Google, and Apple. Since then, he's worked on the philosophical underpinnings for new business metrics, design methods, and political movements. The central idea is to make people's sources of meaning explicit, so that how meaningful or meaningless things are can be rigorously accounted for. His previous career was in HCI...
2023-03-091h 06
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIEd Grefenstette: Language, Semantics, CohereIn episode 62 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ed Grefenstette.Ed is Head of Machine Learning at Cohere and an Honorary Professor at University College London. He previously held research scientist positions at Facebook AI Research and DeepMind, following a stint as co-founder and CTO of Dark Blue Labs. Before his time in industry, Ed worked at Oxford’s Department of Computer Science as a lecturer and Fulford Junior Research Fellow at Somerville College. Ed also received his MSc and DPhil from Oxford’s Computer Science Department.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or o...
2023-03-021h 14
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIKen Liu: What Science Fiction Can Teach UsIn episode 61 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ken Liu.Ken is an author of speculative fiction. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, he is the author of silkpunk epic fantasy series Dandelion Dynasty and short story collections The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. Prior to writing full-time, Ken worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Po...
2023-02-232h 02
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIHattie Zhou: Lottery Tickets and Algorithmic Reasoning in LLMsIn episode 60 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Hattie Zhou.Hattie is a PhD student at the Université de Montréal and Mila. Her research focuses on understanding how and why neural networks work, based on the belief that the performance of modern neural networks exceeds our understanding and that building more capable and trustworthy models requires bridging this gap. Prior to Mila, she spent time as a data scientist at Uber and did research with Uber AI Labs.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!...
2023-02-161h 42
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIKyunghyun Cho: Neural Machine Translation, Language, and Doing Good ScienceIn episode 59 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Kyunghyun Cho.Professor Cho is an associate professor of computer science and data science at New York University and CIFAR Fellow of Learning in Machines & Brains. He is also a senior director of frontier research at the Prescient Design team within Genentech Research & Early Development. He was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research from 2017-2020 and a postdoctoral fellow at University of Montreal under the supervision of Prof. Yoshua Bengio after receiving his MSc and PhD degrees from Aalto University. He received the Samsung Ho-Am...
2023-02-092h 08
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISteve Miller: Will AI Take Your Job? It's Not So Simple.In episode 58 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Steve Miller.Steve is a Professor Emeritus of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Steve served as Founding Dean for the SMU School of Information Systems, and established and developed the technology core of SIS research and project capabilities in Cybersecurity, Data Management & Analytics, Intelligent Systems & Decision Analytics, and Software & Cyber-Physical Systems, as well as the management science oriented capability in Information Systems & Management. Steve works closely with a number of Singapore government ministries and agencies via steering committees, advisory boards, and advisory appointments. ...
2023-02-021h 10
The Gradient: Perspectives on AILinus Lee: At the Boundary of Machine and MindIn episode 56 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Linus Lee. Linus is an independent researcher interested in the future of knowledge representation and creative work aided by machine understanding of language. He builds interfaces and knowledge tools that expand the domain of thoughts we can think and qualia we can feel. Linus has been writing online since 2014–his blog boasts half a million words–and has built well over 100 side projects. He has also spent time as a software engineer at Replit, Hack Club, and Spensa, and was most recently a Researcher in Residence at Beta...
2023-01-192h 28
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISuresh Venkatasubramanian: An AI Bill of RightsIn episode 55 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian. Professor Venkatasubramanian is a Professor of Computer Science and Data Science at Brown University, where his research focuses on algorithmic fairness and the impact of automated decision-making systems in society. He recently served as Assistant Director for Science and Justice in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he co-authored the Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple P...
2023-01-121h 40
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMelanie Mitchell: Abstraction and Analogy in AIHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 53 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Melanie Mitchell. Professor Mitchell is the Davis Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her research focuses on conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and visual recognition in AI systems. She is the author or editor of six books and her work spans the fields of AI, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her latest book is Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS...
2022-12-1554 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMarc Bellemare: Distributional Reinforcement LearningHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 52 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Marc Bellemare. Professor Bellemare leads the reinforcement learning efforts at Google Brain Montréal and is a core industry member at Mila, where he also holds the Canada CIFAR AI Chair. His PhD work, completed at the University of Alberta, proposed the use of Atari 2600 video games to benchmark progress in reinforcement learning (RL). He was a research scientist at DeepMind from 2013-2017, and his Arcade Learning Environment was very influential i...
2022-12-081h 12
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIFrançois Chollet: Keras and Measures of IntelligenceIn episode 51 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to François Chollet.François is a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google and creator of the Keras deep learning library, which has enabled many people (including me) to get their hands dirty with the world of deep learning. Francois is also the author of the book “Deep Learning with Python.” Francois is interested in understanding the nature of abstraction and developing algorithms capable of autonomous abstraction and democratizing the development and deployment of AI technology, among other topics. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts...
2022-12-011h 28
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIYoshua Bengio: The Past, Present, and Future of Deep LearningHappy episode 50! This week’s episode is being released on Monday to avoid Thanksgiving. Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 50 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Yoshua Bengio. Professor Bengio is a Full Professor at the Université de Montréal as well as Founder and Scientific Director of the MILA-Quebec AI Institute and the IVADO institute. Best known for his work in pioneering deep learning, Bengio was one of three awardees of the 2018 A.M. Turing Award along with Geoffrey Hinton and...
2022-11-211h 14
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIKanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht: Generally IntelligentIn episode 49 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kanjun Qiu and Josh Albrecht. Kanjun and Josh are CEO and CTO of Generally Intelligent, an AI startup aiming to develop general-purpose agents with human-like intelligence that can be safely deployed in the real world. Kanjun and Josh have played these roles together in the past as CEO and CTO of AI recruiting startup Sourceress. Kanjun is also involved with building the SF Neighborhood, and together with Josh invests in early-stage founders at Outset Capital.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RS...
2022-11-1747 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AINathan Benaich: The State of AI Report* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!* Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :)In episode 48 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich.Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a venture capital (VC) firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts. Together with investor Ian Hogarth...
2022-11-101h 18
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMatt Sheehan: China's AI Strategy and Governance* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!* Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :)In episode 47 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Matt Sheehan.Matt is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he researches global technology with a focus on China. His writing and research explores China’s AI ecosystem, the future of China’s technology policy, and technology’s role in China’s political economy. Matt has also written for Foreign Affairs andThe Huffington Post, among other ve...
2022-11-031h 06
The Gradient: Perspectives on AILuis Voloch: AI and Biology* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!* Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :)In episode 46 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Luis Voloch.Luis is co-founder of Immunai, a leading AI-led drug discovery company with over 140 employees and over one billion dollar valuation based out of NYC & Tel Aviv. Before Immunai, Luis was Head of Data Science and Machine Learning at ITC and worked at Palantir, where he worked on a variety of ML efforts. He did his studies and...
2022-10-2743 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIZachary Lipton: Where Machine Learning Falls Short* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!* Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :)In episode 45 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Zachary Lipton. Zachary is an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University, where he directs the Approximately Correct Machine Intelligence Lab. He holds a joint appointment between CMU’s ML Department and Tepper School of Business, and holds courtesy appointments at the Heinz School of Public Policy and the Software and Societal Systems Department. Hi...
2022-10-131h 40
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIStuart Russell: The Foundations of Artificial IntelligenceHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 44 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and the Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley, as well as an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. Professor Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, probably the most popular AI textbook in history. He is the founder and head of Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and recently authored the book Human Co...
2022-10-061h 10
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIVarun Ganapathi: AKASA, AI and HealthcareHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 43 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Varun Ganapathi.Varun is co-founder and CTO at AKASA, a company developing AI systems for healthcare operations. Varun’s previous entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding Numovis, a company focused on motion tracking and computer vision for user interaction that was acquired by Google, and Terminal.com, a browser-based IDE acquired by Udacity. Varun received his PhD from Stanford in 2014.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Grad...
2022-09-2951 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJoel Lehman: Open-Endedness and Evolution through Large ModelsHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 42 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joel Lehman.Joel is a machine learning scientist interested in AI safety, reinforcement learning, and creative open-ended search algorithms. Joel has spent time at Uber AI Labs and OpenAI and is the co-author of the book Why Greatness Cannot be Planned: The Myth of the Objective. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:40) From gam...
2022-09-221h 38
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIAndrew Feldman: Cerebras and AI HardwareHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 42 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Andrew Feldman.Andrew is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, an AI accelerator company that has built the largest processor in the industry. Before Cerebras, Andrew co-founded and served as CEO of SeaMicro, which was acquired by AMD in 2012. He has also served in executive positions at Force10 Networks and RiverStone Networks.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOu...
2022-09-1556 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIChristopher Manning: Linguistics and the Development of NLPHave suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here!In episode 41 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Christopher Manning.Chris is the Director of the Stanford AI Lab and an Associate Director of the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is an ACM Fellow, an AAAI Fellow, and past President of ACL. His work currently focuses on applying deep learning to natural language processing; it has included tree recursive neural networks, GloVe, neural machine translation, and computational linguistic approaches to parsing, among other topics. Subscribe to The G...
2022-09-081h 11
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIBeen Kim: Interpretable Machine LearningIn episode 38 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Been Kim.Been is a staff research scientist at Google Brain focused on interpretability–helping humans communicate with complex machine learning models by not only building tools but also studying how humans interact with these systems. She has served with a number of conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, and AISTATS. She gave the keynotes at ICLR 2022, ECML 2020, and the G20 meeting in Argentina in 2018. Her work TCAV received the UNESCO Netexplo award, was featured at Google I/O 2019 and in Brian Christian’s book The Alignment Problem.
2022-08-181h 11
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISebastian Raschka: AI Education and ResearchIn episode 36 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sebastian Raschka.Sebastian is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lead AI Educator at Lightning AI. He has written two bestselling books: Python Machine Learning and Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(01:10) Sebastian’s intro to AI(05:15) Sebastian’s process for learning new things(12:15) Learning style varies with purpose(16:10) Ordinal Regression...
2022-07-291h 03
The Gradient: Perspectives on AISara Hooker: Cohere For AI, the Hardware Lottery, and DL TradeoffsIn episode 34 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sara Hooker.Sara (@sarahookr) leads Cohere for AI and is a former Research Scientist at Google. Sara founded a Bay Area non-profit called Delta Analytics, which works with non-profits and communities to build technical capacity. She is also one of the co-founders of the Trustworthy ML Initiative, an active participant of the ML Collective research group, and a host of the underrated ML podcast.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(02:20) Po...
2022-07-1452 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIPreetum Nakkiran: An Empirical Theory of Deep LearningIn episode 31 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Preetum Nakkiran.Preetum is a Research Scientist at Apple, a Visiting Researcher at UCSD, and part of the NSF/Simons Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning. He completed his PhD at Harvard, where he co-founded the ML Foundations Group. Preetum’s research focuses on building conceptual tools for understanding learning systems.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(01:25) Getting into AI through Theoretical Computer Science (TCS)(0...
2022-06-241h 37
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIMax Woolf: Data Science at BuzzFeed and AI Content GenerationIn episode 30 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Max Woolf.Max Woolf (@minimaxir) is currently a Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco. Some work he’s done for BuzzFeed includes using StyleGAN to create AI-generated fake boyfriends and AI-generated art quizzes. In his free time, Max creates open source Python and R software on his GitHub. More recently, Max has been developing tooling for AI content generation, such as aitextgen for easy AI text generation.Max’s projects are funded by his Patreon. If you have found anything on his website helpful, plea...
2022-06-1648 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIBen Green: "Tech for Social Good" Needs to Do MoreIn episode 28 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ben Green, postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Ben’s work focuses on the social and political impacts of government algorithms.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(02:00) Getting Started(06:15) Soul Searching(11:55) Decentering Algorithms(19:50) The Future of the City(27:25) Ethical Lip Service(32:30) Ethics Research and Industry Incentives
2022-06-0253 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIYejin Choi: Teaching Machines Common Sense and MoralityIn episode 26 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Yejin Choi, professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, and senior research manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(01:42) Getting Started in the Winter(09:17) Has NLP lost its way?(12:57) The Mosaic Project, Commonsense Intelligence(18:20) A Priori Intuitions and Common Sense in Machines(21:35) Abductive Reasoning(24:49) Benchmarking Common Sense(33:00) DeLorean and CO...
2022-05-191h 16
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIDavid Chalmers on AI and ConsciousnessIn episode 25 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to David Chalmers, professor of philosophy and Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, and co-director of NYU’s center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(00:42) “Today’s neural networks may be slightly conscious”(03:55) Openness to Machine Consciousness(09:37) Integrated Information Theory(18:41) Epistemic Gaps, Verbal Reports(25:52) Vision Models and Consciousness(33:37) Reasoning about Consciousness(38:20) Illusionism(41:30) Best Approaches to the Hard Problem(44:21) Panpsychism(46:35) OutroEpisode Links:* Chalmers’...
2022-05-1252 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIGreg Yang on Communicating Research, Tensor Programs, and µTransferIn episode 24 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir talks to Greg Yang, senior researcher at Microsoft Research. Greg Yang’s Tensor Programs framework recently received attention for its role in the µTransfer paradigm for tuning the hyperparameters of large neural networks. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterSections:(00:00) Intro(01:50) Start in AI / Research(05:55) Fear of Math in ML(08:00) Presentation of Research(17:35) Path to MSR(21:20) Origin of Tensor Programs(26:05) Refining TP’s Presentation(39:55) The Sea of Garbage (Initializations) and the Oasis(47:44) Scaling Up Further(55:53) On Theory...
2022-04-281h 05
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJeremy Howard on Kaggle, Enlitic, and fast.aiIn episode 10 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview data scientist, researcher, developer, educator, and entrepreneur Jeremy Howard.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSJeremy Howard is a data scientist, researcher, developer, educator, and entrepreneur. Jeremy is a founding researcher at fast.ai, a research institute dedicated to making deep learning more accessible. He is also a Distinguished Research Scientist at the University of San Francisco, the chair of WAMRI, and is Chief Scientist at platform.ai. Previously, Jeremy was the founding CEO Enlitic, which was the first company to apply...
2021-09-0958 min
That Tech ShowEpisode 30 - The State of Artificial Intelligence & Unplanned Ice Cream with Daniel BashirDaniel Bashir is on the show today, we go deep into Artificial Intelligence and talk about his new book which takes in contemporary ethical and political considerations surrounding AI and its use in recommendations, bias in criminal justice and the dangers of large language models. Buy Daniels's book: https://amzn.to/3zNjnoxThis is a deep conversation and a really great talk. I think I've had to listen to this several times myself just to take in all the learnings. Luckily Daniel makes this really accessible for us all to get our teeth...
2021-09-071h 37That Tech ShowEpisode 30 - The State of Artificial Intelligence & Unplanned Ice Cream with Daniel BashirDaniel Bashir is on the show today, we go deep into Artificial Intelligence and talk about his new book which takes in contemporary ethical and political considerations surrounding AI and its use in recommendations, bias in criminal justice and the dangers of large language models. Buy Daniels's book: https://amzn.to/3zNjnoxThis is a deep conversation and a really great talk. I think I've had to listen to this several times myself just to take in all the learnings. Luckily Daniel makes this really accessible for us all to get our teeth...
2021-09-071h 37
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIEvan Hubinger on Effective Altruism and AI SafetyIn episode 9 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview Yannic Kilcher, an AI researcher and educator.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSEvan is an AI safety veteran who’s done research at leading AI labs like OpenAI, and whose experience also includes stints at Google, Ripple andYelp. He currently works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) as a Research Fellow, and joined me to talk about his views on AI safety, the alignment problem, and whether humanity is likely to survive the advent of superintelligent AI....
2021-09-031h 15
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIYannic Kilcher on Being an AI Researcher and EducatorIn episode 8 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview Yannic Kilcher, an AI researcher and educator.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSYannic graduated with his PhD from ETH Zurich’s data analytics lab and is now the Chief Technology Officer of DeepJudge, a company building the next-generation AI-powered context-sensitive legal document processing platform. He famously produces videos on his very popular Youtube channel, which cover machine learning research papers, programming, and issues of the AI community, and the broader impact of AI in society.Check out his Youtube ch...
2021-08-2740 min
Brotherly PodBrotherly Pod #117 "Tarik El-Bashir Interview"Anthony and Dan return with guest Tarik El-Bashir to talk the Capitals quite summer, Ovechkin re-signs and chasing Gretzky, Kuznetsov trade rumors, the goaltending, where do the Caps stack up in the Metro division, more!
2021-08-191h 01
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIAlexander Veysov on Self-Teaching AI and Creating Open Speech-To-TextIn episode 7 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview founder and owner of Silero Alexander Veysov. You can find a transcript of our conversation here, and the repositories for Open Speech To Text and Silero Models here.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSAlexander Veysov is the founder / owner of Silero, a small company building Speech / NLP enabled products, and author of Open STT. Silero has recently shipped its own Russian STT engine. Previously he worked in a then Moscow-based VC firm and Ponominalu.ru, a ticketing startup acquired by MTS...
2021-08-1946 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIYann LeCun on his Start in Research and Self-Supervised LearningIn episode 6 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview Deep Learning pioneer Yann LeCun.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterYann LeCun is the VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU and he was also the founding Director of Facebook AI Research and of the NYU Center for Data Science. He famously pioneered the use of Convolutional Neural Nets for image processing in the 80s and 90s, and is generally regarded as one of the people whose work was pivotal to the Deep Learning revolution...
2021-08-0555 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIAnna Rogers on the Flaws of Peer Review in AIIn episode 5 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview NLP researcher Anna Rogers.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSAnna Rogers is a post-doctoral associate at the University of Copenhagen, working with the research groups in the Center for Social Data Science and Machine Learning section. Her main research area is Natural Language Processing, with focus on interpretability and evaluation of deep learning models. She is also known for her work on improving peer review in NLP and as organizer of the workshop on Insights from Negative Results in NLP.Check...
2021-07-301h 03
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIJoel Simon on AI art and ArtbreederIn episode 4 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview artist, engineer, and entrepreneur Joel Simon.Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSJoel Simon is a multidisciplinary artist, toolmaker, and researcher. He studied computer science and art at Carnegie Mellon University, worked on bioinformatics at Rockefeller University, and most recently is the founder and director of Morphogen, a generative design company developing Artbreeder, a massively collaborative creative tool and network. His interests lie in the intersection of computer science, biology and design as well as furniture-design, collaborative-creativity, sculpture and game-design....
2021-07-2058 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIAbubakar Abid on AI for Genomics, Gradio, and the Fatima FellowshipSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: iTunes | RSS | SpotifyIn episode 3 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview researcher and entrepreneur Abubakar Abid. Follow him on Twitter and check out the websites of his company Gradio and his side project the Fatima Fellowship.Abubakar is an entrepreneur and researcher focused on AI and its applications to medicine. He is currently running the company Gradio, which is developing a product to generate an easy-to-use UI for any ML model, function, or API. He is also running the Fatima Al-Fihri Predoctoral Fellowship, which is a 9-month program for computer s...
2021-07-0644 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIHelena Sarin on being an AI ArtistIn episode 2 of The Gradient Podcast, we interview AI artist Helana Sarin. Check out her work and follow her over at her Twitter @NeuralBricolage.Helena Sarin is a visual artist and software engineer and is among the most prominent artists utilizing AI for their work. After she discovered GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) several years ago and then made generative models her primary medium. She is a frequent speaker at ML/AI conferences, for the past year delivering invited talks at MIT, Library of Congress and Capitol One, and her artwork was exhibited at AI Art exhibitions in...
2021-06-1940 min
The Gradient: Perspectives on AIHello World from The Gradient Podcast!Hello world! After more than 3 years of publishing overviews and perspectives from the AI community on thegradient.pub, The Gradient now has a podcast. In this first episode our lead editors take a look back on how it all started, as well as a look ahead at where things are heading. Keep an eye out for our next episode, coming soon!Theme: “MusicVAE: Trio 16-bar Sample #2” from "MusicVAE: A Hierarchical Latent Vector Model for Learning Long-Term Structure in Music". Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe
2021-06-0122 minBrotherly PodBrotherly Pod #85 "Tarik El-Bashir Interview"Anthony and Dan return with guest Tarik El-Bashir of The Athletic to talk the Caps goaltending situation, Chara's role on the team, Laviolette's early impacts, Alex Ovechkin's next contract, reverse retro jerseys, Tom Wilson, Organization in "win now" mode, past coaching changes, more!
2021-02-241h 06