Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Alan Chan is a PhD student at Mila, the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms, supervised by Nicolas Le Roux. Before joining Mila, Alan was a Masters student at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and the University of Alberta, where he worked with Martha White. Alan's expertise and research interests encompass value alignment and AI governance. He is currently exploring the measurement of harms from language models and the incentives that age...
Dec 26, 2022•14 min•Season 1Ep. 94
Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Professor Murray Shanahan is a renowned researcher on sophisticated cognition and its implications for artificial intelligence. His 2016 article ‘Conscious Exotica’ explores the Space of Possible Minds, a concept first proposed by philosopher Aaron Sloman in 1984, which includes all the different forms of minds from those of other animals to those of artificial intelligence. Shanahan rejects the idea of an impenetrable realm of subjective experience and a...
Dec 24, 2022•1 hr 20 min•Season 1Ep. 93
Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Sara Hooker is an exceptionally talented and accomplished leader and research scientist in the field of machine learning. She is the founder of Cohere For AI, a non-profit research lab that seeks to solve complex machine learning problems. She is passionate about creating more points of entry into machine learning research and has dedicated her efforts to understanding how progress in this field can be translated into reliable and accessible machine learn...
Dec 23, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 92
Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Hattie Zhou, a PhD student at Université de Montréal and Mila, has set out to understand and explain the performance of modern neural networks, believing it a key factor in building better, more trusted models. Having previously worked as a data scientist at Uber, a private equity analyst at Radar Capital, and an economic consultant at Cornerstone Research, she has recently released a paper in collaboration with the Google Brain team, titled ‘Teaching Alg...
Dec 20, 2022•21 min•Season 1Ep. 91
Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst (On the main version we released; the music was a tiny bit too loud in places, and some pieces had percussion which was a bit distracting -- here is a version with all music removed so you have the option! ) David Chalmers is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, and an honorary professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. He is the co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, as well as th...
Dec 19, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 90
Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst David Chalmers is a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University, and an honorary professor of philosophy at the Australian National University. He is the co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, as well as the PhilPapers Foundation. His research focuses on the philosophy of mind, especially consciousness, and its connection to fields such as cognitive science, physics, and technology. He also investigates areas s...
Dec 19, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 90
Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Dr. Walid Saba recently reviewed the book Machines Will Never Rule The World, which argues that strong AI is impossible. He acknowledges the complexity of modeling mental processes and language, as well as interactive dialogues, and questions the authors' use of "never." Despite his skepticism, he is impressed with recent developments in large language models, though he questions the extent of their success. We then discussed the successes of cognitive sc...
Dec 16, 2022•1 hr 22 min•Season 1Ep. 88
Yann LeCun is a French computer scientist known for his pioneering work on convolutional neural networks, optical character recognition and computer vision. He is a Silver Professor at New York University and Vice President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta. Along with Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, he was awarded the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning, earning them the nickname of the "Godfathers of Deep Learning". Dr. Randall Balestriero has been researching learnable signal proce...
Dec 11, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 86
Dr. Petar Veličković is a Staff Research Scientist at DeepMind, he has firmly established himself as one of the most significant up and coming researchers in the deep learning space. He invented Graph Attention Networks in 2017 and has been a leading light in the field ever since pioneering research in Graph Neural Networks, Geometric Deep Learning and also Neural Algorithmic reasoning. If you haven’t already, you should check out our video on the Geometric Deep learning blueprint, featuri...
Dec 08, 2022•37 min•Season 1Ep. 85
In this NeurIPSs interview, we speak with Laura Ruis about her research on the ability of language models to interpret language in context. She has designed a simple task to evaluate the performance of widely used state-of-the-art language models and has found that they struggle to make pragmatic inferences (implicatures). Tune in to learn more about her findings and what they mean for the future of conversational AI. Laura Ruis https://www.lauraruis.com/ https://twitter.com/LauraRuis BLOOM http...
Dec 06, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 84
First in our unplugged series live from #NeurIPS2022 We discuss natural language understanding, symbol meaning and grounding and Chomsky with Dr. Andrew Lampinen from DeepMind. We recorded a LOT of material from NeurIPS, keep an eye out for the uploads. YT version: https://youtu.be/46A-BcBbMnA References [Paul Cisek] Beyond the computer metaphor: Behaviour as interaction https://philpapers.org/rec/CISBTC Linguistic Competence (Chomsky reference) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguist...
Dec 04, 2022•21 min•Season 1Ep. 83
AI Helps Ukraine - Charity Conference A charity conference on AI to raise funds for medical and humanitarian aid for Ukraine https://aihelpsukraine.cc/ YT version: https://youtu.be/LgwjcqhkOA4 Support us! https://www.patreon.com/mlst Dr. Joscha Bach (born 1973 in Weimar, Germany) is a German artificial intelligence researcher and cognitive scientist focusing on cognitive architectures, mental representation, emotion, social modelling, and multi-agent systems. http://bach.ai/ https://...
Nov 27, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 82
Support us (and please rate on podcast app) https://www.patreon.com/mlst In this show tonight with Prof. Julian Togelius (NYU) and Prof. Ken Stanley we discuss open-endedness, AGI, game AI and reinforcement learning. [Prof Julian Togelius] https://engineering.nyu.edu/faculty/julian-togelius https://twitter.com/togelius [Prof Ken Stanley] https://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/ https://twitter.com/kenneth0stanley TOC: [00:00:00] Introduction [00:01:07] AI and computer games [00:12:23] Inte...
Nov 20, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 81
We had a conversation with Aidan Gomez, the CEO of language-based AI platform Cohere. Cohere is a startup which uses artificial intelligence to help users build the next generation of language-based applications. It's headquartered in Toronto. The company has raised $175 million in funding so far. Language may well become a key new substrate for software building, both in its representation and how we build the software. It may democratise software building so that more people can build software...
Nov 15, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 80
This video is demonetised on music copyright so we would appreciate support on our Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/mlst We would also appreciate it if you rated us on your podcast platform. YT: https://youtu.be/_KVAzAzO5HU Panel: Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar Guests: Prof. J. Mark Bishop, Francois Chollet, Prof. David Chalmers, Dr. Joscha Bach, Prof. Karl Friston, Alexander Mattick, Sam Roffey The Chinese Room Argument was first proposed by philosopher John Searle in 1980. It is ...
Nov 08, 2022•2 hr 10 min•Season 1Ep. 79
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB In this special edition episode, we have a conversation with Prof. Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics and the most important intellectual of the 20th century. With a career spanning the better part of a century, we took the chance to ask Prof. Chomsky his thoughts not only on the progress of linguistics and cognitive science but also the deepest enduring mysteries of science and philosophy as a whole -...
Jul 08, 2022•4 hr 37 min•Season 1Ep. 78
Vitaliy Chiley is a Machine Learning Research Engineer at the next-generation computing hardware company Cerebras Systems. We spoke about how DL workloads including sparse workloads can run faster on Cerebras hardware. [00:00:00] Housekeeping [00:01:08] Preamble [00:01:50] Vitaliy Chiley Introduction [00:03:11] Cerebrus architecture [00:08:12] Memory management and FLOP utilisation [00:18:01] Centralised vs decentralised compute architecture [00:21:12] Sparsity [00:23:47] Does Sparse NN im...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 77
Check out Weights and Biases here! https://wandb.me/MLST Lukas Biewald is an entrepreneur living in San Francisco. He was the founder and CEO of Figure Eight an Internet company that collects training data for machine learning. In 2018, he founded Weights and Biases, a company that creates developer tools for machine learning. Recently WandB got a cash injection of 15 million dollars in its second funding round. Lukas has a bachelors and masters in mathematics and computer scie...
Jun 09, 2022•58 min•Season 1Ep. 76
An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviours as a collective. If emergence happens over disparate size scales, then the reason is usually a causal relation across different scales. Weak emergence describes new properties arising in systems as a result of the low-level interactions, these might be interactions between components of the system or the components and their environment. In o...
Apr 29, 2022•2 hr 55 min•Season 1Ep. 75
Please note that in this interview Dr. Lampinen was expressing his personal opinions and they do not necessarily represent those of DeepMind. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB YT version: https://youtu.be/yPMtSXXn4OY Dr. Andrew Lampinen is a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind, and he thinks that symbols are subjective in the relativistic sense. Dr. Lampinen completed his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at Stanford University. His background i...
Apr 14, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB YT version: https://youtu.be/RzGaI7vXrkk This week we speak with Yasaman Razeghi and Prof. Sameer Singh from UC Urvine. Yasaman recently published a paper called Impact of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot Reasoning where she demonstrated comprehensively that large language models only perform well on reasoning tasks because they memorise the dataset. For the first time she showed the accuracy was linearly correl...
Apr 07, 2022•56 min•Season 1Ep. 73
YT version: https://youtu.be/DxBZORM9F-8 Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB Prof. Ken Stanley argued in his book that our world has become saturated with objectives. The process of setting an objective, attempting to achieve it, and measuring progress along the way has become the primary route to achievement in our culture. He’s not saying that objectives are bad per se, especially if they’re modest, but he thinks that when goals are ambitious then...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 25 min•Season 1Ep. 72
Special discount link for Zak's GNN course - https://bit.ly/3uqmYVq Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB YT version: https://youtu.be/jAGIuobLp60 (there are lots of helper graphics there, recommended if poss) Want to sponsor MLST!? Let us know on Linkedin / Twitter. [00:00:00] Preamble [00:03:12] Geometric deep learning [00:10:04] Message passing [00:20:42] Top down vs bottom up [00:24:59] All NN architectures are different forms of information diffu...
Mar 25, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Today we are having a discussion with Letitia Parcalabescu from the AI Coffee Break youtube channel! We discuss linguistics, symbolic AI and our respective Youtube channels. Make sure you subscribe to her channel! In the first 15 minutes Tim dissects the recent article from Gary Marcus "Deep learning has hit a wall". Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/ESrGqhf5CB YT: https://youtu.be/p2D2duT-R2E [00:00:00] Comments on Gary Marcus Article / Symbolic AI [00:14:5...
Mar 19, 2022•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Today we are speaking with Dr. Thomas Lux, a research scientist at Meta in Silicon Valley. In some sense, all of supervised machine learning can be framed through the lens of geometry. All training data exists as points in euclidean space, and we want to predict the value of a function at all those points. Neural networks appear to be the modus operandi these days for many domains of prediction. In that light; we might ask ourselves — what makes neural networks better than classical techni...
Mar 12, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 69
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/HNnAwSduud YT version: https://youtu.be/pMtk-iUaEuQ Dr. Walid Saba is an old-school polymath. He has a background in cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, computer science and logic and he’s is now a Senior Scientist at Sorcero. Walid is perhaps the most outspoken critic of BERTOLOGY, which is to say trying to solve the problem of natural language understanding with application of large statistical language models. ...
Mar 07, 2022•2 hr 42 min•Season 1Ep. 68
We engage in a bit of epistemic foraging with Prof. Karl Friston! In this show; we discuss the free energy principle in detail, also emergence, cognition, consciousness and Karl's burden of knowledge! YT: https://youtu.be/xKQ-F2-o8uM Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/HNnAwSduud [00:00:00] Introduction to FEP/Friston [00:06:53] Cheers to Epistemic Foraging! [00:09:17] The Burden of Knowledge Across Disciplines [00:12:55] On-show introduction to Friston [00:14:23] S...
Mar 02, 2022•2 hr 42 min•Season 1Ep. 67
We have a chat with Alexander Mattick aka ZickZack from Yannic's Discord community. Alex is one of the leading voices in that community and has an impressive technical depth. Don't forget MLST has now started it's own Discord server too, come and join us! We are going to run regular events, our first big event on Wednesday 9th 1700-1900 UK time. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/HNnAwSduud YT version: https://youtu.be/rGOOLC8cIO4 [00:00:00] Introduction to A...
Feb 28, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 66
Note: there are no politics discussed in this show and please do not interpret this show as any kind of a political statement from us. We have decided not to discuss politics on MLST anymore due to its divisive nature. Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/HNnAwSduud [00:00:00] Intro [00:01:36] What we all need to understand about machine learning [00:06:05] The Master Algorithm Target Audience [00:09:50] Deeply Connected Algorithms seen from Divergent Fra...
Feb 26, 2022•1 hr 28 min•Season 1Ep. 65
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Discord: https://discord.gg/HNnAwSduud YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDY2nhkPZxw We have a chat with Prof. Gary Marcus about everything which is currently top of mind for him, consciousness [00:00:00] Gary intro [00:01:25] Slightly conscious [00:24:59] Abstract, compositional models [00:32:46] Spline theory of NNs [00:36:17] Self driving cars / algebraic reasoning [00:39:43] Extrapolation [00:44:15] Scaling laws [00:49:50] Maximum likelihoo...
Feb 24, 2022•52 min•Season 1Ep. 64
