63. Geordie Rose - Will AGI need to be embodied?
Towards Data Science
12/23/20
•72m
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The leap from today’s narrow AI to a more general kind of intelligence seems likely to happen at some point in the next century. But no one knows exactly how: at the moment, AGI remains a significant technical and theoretical challenge, and expert opinion about what it will take to achieve it varies widely. Some think that scaling up existing paradigms — like deep learning and reinforcement learning — will be enough, but others think these approaches are going to fall short.
Geordie Rose is one of them, and his voice is one that’s worth listening to: he has deep experience with hard tech, from founding D-Wave (the world’s first quantum computing company), to building Kindred Systems, a company pioneering applications of reinforcement learning in industry that was recently acquired for $350 million dollars.
Geordie is now focused entirely on AGI. Through his current company, Sanctuary AI, he’s working on an exciting and unusual thesis. At the core of this thesis is the idea is that one of the easiest paths to AGI will be to build embodied systems: AIs with physical structures that can move around in the real world and interact directly with objects. Geordie joined me for this episode of the podcast to discuss his AGI thesis, as well as broader questions about AI safety and AI alignment.
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62. Nicolai Baldin - AI meets the law: Bias, fairness, privacy and regulation
December 16, 2020
•49m
The fields of AI bias and AI fairness are still very young. And just like most young technical fields, they’re dominated by theoretical discussions: researchers argue over what words like “privacy” and “fairness” mean, but don’t do much in the way of applying these definitions to real-world problems.
Slowly but surely, this is all changing though, and government oversight has had a big role to play in that process. Laws like GDPR — passed by the European Union in 2016 —are starting to impose concrete requirements on companies that want to use consumer data, or build AI systems with it. There are pros and cons to legislating machine learning, but one thing’s for sure: there’s no looking back. At this point, it’s clear that government-endorsed definitions of “bias” and “fairness” in AI systems are going to be applied to companies (and therefore to consumers), whether they’re well-developed and thoughtful or not.
Keeping up with the philosophy of AI is a full-time job for most, but actually applying that philosophy to real-world corporate data is its own additional challenge. My guest for this episode of the podcast is doing just that: Nicolai Baldin is a former Cambridge machine learning researcher, and now the founder and CEO of Synthesized, a startup that specializes in helping companies apply privacy, AI fairness and bias best practices to their data. Nicolai is one of relatively few people working on concrete problems in these areas, and has a unique perspective on the space as a result.
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64. David Krueger - Managing the incentives of AI
December 30, 2020
•50m
What does a neural network system want to do?
That might seem like a straightforward question. You might imagine that the answer is “whatever the loss function says it should do.” But when you dig into it, you quickly find that the answer is much more complicated than that might imply.
In order to accomplish their primary goal of optimizing a loss function, algorithms often develop secondary objectives (known as instrumental goals) that are tactically useful for that main goal. For example, a computer vision algorithm designed to tell faces apart might find it beneficial to develop the ability to detect noses with high fidelity. Or in a more extreme case, a very advanced AI might find it useful to monopolize the Earth’s resources in order to accomplish its primary goal — and it’s been suggested that this might actually be the default behavior of powerful AI systems in the future.
So, what does an AI want to do? Optimize its loss function — perhaps. But a sufficiently complex system is likely to also manifest instrumental goals. And if we don’t develop a deep understanding of AI incentives, and reliable strategies to manage those incentives, we may be in for an unpleasant surprise when unexpected and highly strategic behavior emerges from systems with simple and desirable primary goals. Which is why it’s a good thing that my guest today, David Krueger, has been working on exactly that problem. David studies deep learning and AI alignment at MILA, and joined me to discuss his thoughts on AI safety, and his work on managing the incentives of AI systems.
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