91. Peter Gao - Self-driving cars: Past, present and future
Towards Data Science
07/07/21
•61m
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Cruise is a self-driving car startup founded in 2013 — at a time when most people thought of self-driving cars as the stuff of science fiction. And yet, just three years later, the company was acquired by GM for over a billion dollars, having shown itself to be a genuine player in the race to make autonomous driving a reality. Along the way, the company has had to navigate and adapt to a rapidly changing technological landscape, mixing and matching old ideas from robotics and software engineering with cutting edge techniques like deep learning.
My guest for this episode of the podcast was one of Cruise’s earliest employees. Peter Gao is a machine learning specialist with deep experience in the self-driving car industry, and is also the co-founder of Aquarium Learning, a Y Combinator-backed startup that specializes in improving the performance of machine learning models by fixing problems with the data they’re trained on. We discussed Peter’s experiences in the self-driving car industry, including the innovations that have spun out of self-driving car tech, as well as some of the technical and ethical challenges that need to be overcome to make self-driving cars hit mainstream use around the world.
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90. Jeffrey Ding - China’s AI ambitions and why they matter
June 30, 2021
•49m
There are a lot of reasons to pay attention to China’s AI initiatives. Some are purely technological: Chinese companies are producing increasingly high-quality AI research, and they’re poised to become even more important players in AI over the next few years. For example, Huawei recently put together their own version of OpenAI’s massive GPT-3 language model — a feat that leveraged massive scale compute that pushed the limits of current systems, calling for deep engineering and technical know-how.
But China’s AI ambitions are also important geopolitically. In order to build powerful AI systems, you need a lot of compute power. And in order to get that, you need a lot of computer chips, which are notoriously hard to manufacture. But most of the world’s computer chips are currently made in democratic Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory. You can see how quickly this kind of thing can lead to international tension.
Still, the story of US-China AI isn’t just one of competition and decoupling, but also of cooperation — or at least, that’s the case made by my guest today, China AI expert and Stanford researcher Jeffrey Ding. In addition to studying Chinese AI ecosystem as part of his day job, Jeff published the very popular China AI newsletter, which offers a series of translations and analyses of Chinese language articles about AI. Jeff acknowledges the competitive dynamics of AI research, but argues that focusing only on controversial applications of AI — like facial recognition and military applications — causes us to ignore or downplay areas where real collaboration can happen, like language translation for example.
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92. Daniel Filan - Peering into neural nets for AI safety
July 14, 2021
•66m
Many AI researchers think it’s going to be hard to design AI systems that continue to remain safe as AI capabilities increase. We’ve seen already on the podcast that the field of AI alignment has emerged to tackle this problem, but a related effort is also being directed at a separate dimension of the safety problem: AI interpretability.
Our ability to interpret how AI systems process information and make decisions will likely become an important factor in assuring the reliability of AIs in the future. And my guest for this episode of the podcast has focused his research on exactly that topic. Daniel Filan is an AI safety researcher at Berkeley, where he’s supervised by AI pioneer Stuart Russell. Daniel also runs AXRP, a podcast dedicated to technical AI alignment research.
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