In 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 engin...
Jan 19, 2023•2 hr 29 min
In 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 Right...
Jan 12, 2023•1 hr 41 min
In episode 54 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks with Pete Florence . Note: this was recorded 2 months ago. Andrey should be getting back to putting out some episodes next year. Pete Florence is a Research Scientist at Google Research on the Robotics at Google team inside Brain Team in Google Research . His research focuses on topics in robotics, computer vision, and natural language -- including 3D learning, self-supervised learning, and policy learning in robotics. Before Google, ...
Jan 05, 2023•1 hr 15 min
Have 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 Intell...
Dec 15, 2022•55 min
Have 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 w...
Dec 08, 2022•1 hr 12 min
In 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...
Dec 01, 2022•1 hr 29 min
Happy 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 t...
Nov 21, 2022•1 hr 14 min
In 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...
Nov 17, 2022•47 min
* 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...
Nov 10, 2022•1 hr 19 min
* 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. Ma...
Nov 03, 2022•1 hr 7 min
* 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 o...
Oct 27, 2022•44 min
* 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...
Oct 13, 2022•1 hr 41 min
Have 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 t...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min
Have 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. ...
Sep 29, 2022•51 min
Have 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 C...
Sep 22, 2022•1 hr 39 min
Have 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...
Sep 15, 2022•57 min
Have 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...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 12 min
In episode 41 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Professor Jeff Clune . Jeff is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Faculty Member of the Vector Institute. Previously, he was a Research Team Leader at OpenAI and before that a Senior Research Manager and founding member of Uber AI Labs, and prior to that he was an Associate Professor in Computer Science at the University of Wyoming. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcast...
Sep 01, 2022•1 hr 9 min
In episode 40 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Catherine Olsson and Nelson Elhage. Catherine and Nelson are both members of technical staff at Anthropic, which is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Catherine and Nelson’s focus is on interpretability, and we will discuss several of their recent works in this interview. Follow The Gradient on Twitter Outline: (00:00) Intro (01:10) Catherine’s Path into AI (...
Aug 26, 2022•47 min
In 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...
Aug 18, 2022•1 hr 12 min
In episode 37 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Laura Weidinger Laura is a senior research scientist at DeepMind, with her focus being AI ethics. Laura is also a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, studying philosophy of science and specifically approaches to measuring the ethics of AI systems. Previously Laura worked in technology policy at UK and EU levels, as a Policy executive at techUK. She then pivoted to cognitive science research and studied human learning at t...
Aug 05, 2022•56 min
In 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 | RSS Follow The Gradient on Twitter Sections : (00:00) Intro (01:10) Sebastian’s intro to AI (05:15...
Jul 29, 2022•1 hr 4 min
In episode 35 of The Gradient Podcast, guest host Sharon Zhou speaks to Jack Shanahan. John (Jack) Shanahan was a Lieutenant General in the United States Air Force, retired after a 36-year military career. He was the inaugural Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). He was also the Director of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (Project Maven). Currently, he is a Special Government Employee supporting the National Security C...
Jul 22, 2022•31 min
In 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: App...
Jul 14, 2022•53 min
In episode 33 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Lukas Biewald . Lukas Biewald is a co-founder of Weights and Biases , a company that creates developer tools for machine learning. Prior to that he was a co-founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower) — an Internet company that collects training data for machine learning, which was sold for 300 million dollars. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS Follow The Gradient on Tw...
Jul 07, 2022•47 min
In episode 32 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Chip Huyen . Chip Huyen is a co-founder of Claypot AI, a platform for real-time machine learning. Previously, she was with Snorkel AI and NVIDIA. She teaches CS 329S: Machine Learning Systems Design at Stanford. She has also written four bestselling Vietnamese books, and more recently her new O’Reilly book Designing Machine Learning Systems has just come out! Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Cast...
Jun 30, 2022•48 min
In 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 | RSS Fol...
Jun 24, 2022•1 hr 37 min
In 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 ...
Jun 16, 2022•48 min
In episode 29 of The Gradient Podcast, we chat with Rosanne Liu . Rosanne is a research scientist in Google Brain, and co-founder and executive director of ML Collective , a nonprofit organization for open collaboration and accessible mentorship. Before that she was a founding member of Uber AI. Outside of research, she supports underrepresented communities, and organizes symposiums, workshops, and a weekly reading group “ Deep Learning: Classics and Trends ” since 2018. She is currently thinkin...
Jun 10, 2022•1 hr 15 min
In 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 | RSS Follow The Gradient on Twitter Sections : (00:00) Intro (02:00) Getting Started (06:15) Soul Searching (11:55) Decentering Algorithms (19...
Jun 02, 2022•53 min
