Episode 142 Happy holidays! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the third time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of all the AI news and advancements you need to know. This includes selections from this year’s State of AI Report, some early takes on o3, a few minutes LARPing as China Guys……… If you’ve stuck around and co…

Episode 141 I spoke with Professor Philip Goff about: * What a “post-Galilean” science of consciousness looks like * How panpsychism helps explain consciousness and the hybrid cosmopsychist view Enjoy! Philip Goff is a British author, idealist philosopher, and professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and conscious…

Hi everyone! If you’re a new subscriber or listener, welcome. If you’re not new, you’ve probably noticed that things have slowed down from us a bit recently. Hugh Zhang, Andrey Kurenkov and I sat down to recap some of The Gradient’s history, where we are now, and how things will look going forward. To summarize and give some context: The Gradient h…

Episode 140 I spoke with Professor Jacob Andreas about: * Language and the world * World models * How he’s developed as a scientist Enjoy! Jacob is an associate professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research aims to understand the…

Episode 139 I spoke with Evan Ratliff about: * Shell Game, Evan’s new podcast, where he creates an AI voice clone of himself and sets it loose. * The end of the Longform Podcast and his thoughts on the state of journalism. Enjoy! Evan is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. He’s the author o…

Episode 138 I spoke with Meredith Morris about: * The intersection of AI and HCI and why we need more cross-pollination between AI and adjacent fields * Disability studies and AI * Generative ghosts and technological determinism * Developing a useful definition of AGI I didn’t get to record an intro for this episode since I’ve been sick. Enjoy! Mer…

Episode 137 I spoke with Davidad Dalrymple about: * His perspectives on AI risk * ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) and its Safeguarded AI Programme Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Davidad is a Programme Director at ARIA. He was most recently a Research Fellow in technical AI safety at Oxford. He co-invented the top-40 cr…

Episode 136 I spoke with Clive Thompson about: * How he writes * Writing about the climate and biking across the US * Technology culture and persistent debates in AI * Poetry Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Clive is a journalist who writes about science and technology. He is a contributing writer forWired magazine, and is currently writing hi…

Episode 136 I spoke with Judy Fan about: * Our use of physical artifacts for sensemaking * Why cognitive tools can be a double-edged sword * Her approach to scientific inquiry and how that approach has developed Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Judy is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford and director of the Cognitive Tools Lab. Her l…

Episode 135 I spoke with L. M. Sacasas about: * His writing and intellectual influences * The value of asking hard questions about technology and our relationship to it * What happens when we decide to outsource skills and competency * Evolving notions of what it means to be human and questions about how to live a good life Enjoy—and let me know wh…

Episode 134 I spoke with Pete Wolfendale about: * The flaws in longtermist thinking * Selections from his new book, The Revenge of Reason * Metaphysics * What philosophy has to say about reason and AI Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Pete is an independent philosopher based in Newcastle. Dr. Wolfendale got both his undergraduate degree and his…

Episode 133 I spoke with Peter Lee about: * His early work on compiler generation, metacircularity, and type theory * Paradoxical problems * GPT-4s impact, Microsoft’s “Sparks of AGI” paper, and responses and criticism Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Peter is President of Microsoft Research. He leads Microsoft Research and incubates new resea…

Episode 132 I spoke with Manuel and Lenore Blum about: * Their early influences and mentors * The Conscious Turing Machine and what theoretical computer science can tell us about consciousness Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Manuel is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and the winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition…

Episode 131 I spoke with Professor Kevin Dorst about: * Subjective Bayesianism and epistemology foundations * What happens when you’re uncertain about your evidence * Why it’s rational for people to polarize on political matters Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Kevin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at …

Episode 130 I spoke with David Pfau about: * Spectral learning and ML * Learning to disentangle manifolds and (projective) representation theory * Deep learning for computational quantum mechanics * Picking and pursuing research problems and directions David’s work is really (times k for some very large value of k) interesting—I’ve been inspired to…

Episode 129 I spoke with Dan Hart and Michelle Michael about: * Developing NSWEduChat, an AI-powered chatbot designed and delivered by the NSW Department of Education for students and teachers. * The challenges in effectively teaching students as technology develops * Understanding and defining the importance of the classroom Enjoy—and let me know …

Episode 129 I spoke with Kristin Lauter about: * Elliptic curve cryptography and homomorphic encryption * Standardizing cryptographic protocols * Machine Learning on encrypted data * Attacking post-quantum cryptography with AI Enjoy—and let me know what you think! Kristin is Senior Director of FAIR Labs North America (2022—present), based in Seattl…

Episode 128 I spoke with Sergiy Nesterenko about: * Developing an automated system for designing PCBs * Difficulties in human and automated PCB design * Building a startup at the intersection of different areas of expertise By the way — I hit 40 ratings on Apple Podcasts (and am at 66 on Spotify). It’d mean a lot (really, a lot) if you’d consider l…

Episode 127 I spoke with Christopher Thi Nguyen about: * How we lose control of our values * The tradeoffs of legibility, aggregation, and simplification * Gamification and its risks Enjoy—and let me know what you think! C. Thi Nguyen as of July 2020 is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research focuses on how social …

Episode 126 I spoke with Vivek Natarajan about: * Improving access to medical knowledge with AI * How an LLM for medicine should behave * Aspects of training Med-PaLM and AMIE * How to facilitate appropriate amounts of trust in users of medical AI systems Vivek Natarajan is a Research Scientist at Google Health AI advancing biomedical AI to help sc…

Episode 125 False universalism freaks me out. It doesn’t freak me out as a first principle because of epistemic violence; it freaks me out because it works. I spoke with Professor Thomas Mullaney about: * Telling stories about your work and balancing what feels meaningful with practical realities * Destabilizing our understandings of the technologi…

Episode 124 You may think you’re doing a priori reasoning, but actually you’re just over-generalizing from your current experience of technology. I spoke with Professor Seth Lazar about: * Why managing near-term and long-term risks isn’t always zero-sum * How to think through axioms and systems in political philosphy * Coordination problems, econom…

Episode 123 I spoke with Suhail Doshi about: * Why benchmarks aren’t prepared for tomorrow’s AI models * How he thinks about artists in a world with advanced AI tools * Building a unified computer vision model that can generate, edit, and understand pixels. Suhail is a software engineer and entrepreneur known for founding Mixpanel, Mighty Computing…

Episode 122 I spoke with Azeem Azhar about: * The speed of progress in AI * Historical context for some of the terminology we use and how we think about technology * What we might want our future to look like Azeem is an entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. He is the creator of Exponential View, a global platform for in-depth technology analysis, a…

Episode 122 I spoke with Professor David Thorstad about: * The practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary work * Why theories of human rationality should account for boundedness, heuristics, and other cognitive limitations * why EA epistemics suck (ok, it’s a little more nuanced than that) Professor Thorstad is an Assistant Professor of Phil…

Episode 121 I spoke with Professor Ryan Tibshirani about: * Differences between the ML and statistics communities in scholarship, terminology, and other areas. * Trend filtering * Why you can’t just use garbage prediction functions when doing conformal prediction Ryan is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. He is also a Princ…

In 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 …

In 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 Mathema…

In 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 her…

Episode 117 “You get more of what you engage with. Everyone who complains about coverage should understand that every click, every quote tweet, every argument is registered by these publications as engagement. If what you want is really meaty, dispassionate, balanced, and fair explainers, you need to click on that, you need to read the whole thing,…

In 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 m…

In 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 …

“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 …

In 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 gen…

In 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 A…

In 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 Puli…

In 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 Advanc…

In 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 producti…

In 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…

In 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 …

In 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…

In 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.pub Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on Twitter Outline: * (00:00) Intro * (01:25) Updates si…

In 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 improv…

In 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 f…

In 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, uncons…

In 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 explai…

In 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 …

In 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 an…

In 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 Innov…

In 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 mechani…