Eye On A.I.

Thinking robots: that's how much of the world envisions artificial intelligence and if there is one person on the planet who understands the limitations and promise of intelligence in robots, it's Pieter Abbeel, one of the world's foremost experts on robotic learning systems. In this episode, Pieter talks about robot memories and the prospect of robots with personalities eventually assisting in th...

This week I talk to the Bengio brothers, Samy and Yoshua, in their first interview together. Yoshua recently won the Turing Award with Geoff Hinton and Yann Lecun, while Samy leads a team of researchers at Google Brain. The brothers are well known to people who work in machine learning, but few know how intertwined their professional lives have been. They talked about their unconventional parents...

In this week's episode, I talk to Pedro Domingos, author of the bestselling book, The Master Algorithm, which is about the ongoing effort to unify machine-learning paradigms in a single model. But the conversation was much broader than that. Pedro believes strongly that the great powers are engaged in an AI arms race with America's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, pitted agains...

Resurrecting the Tower of Babel with machine learning: In this week's episode, we talk to Liang Huang, principal scientist at Baidu Research in Silicon Valley about his breakthrough in simultaneous translation technology, which promises to erase language barriers. Baidu's system can already translate speech to text with as little as a three-second delay. Soon, Liang says, the technology will trans...

In this episode of Eye on AI, I continue my review of AI research in different regions of the world with a focus on Europe. Europe, with its strong academic tradition, faces unique challenges in scientific research because of the continent's fragmentation and the weakening of the European Union. Given the growing dominance of North America and China, Europe risks being left behind. To understand w...

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Ben Rosman, who runs Africa's largest machine learning lab at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he is focused on reinforcement learning. Ben has been instrumental in unifying and upgrading the continent's machine-learning capabilities in hopes of making Africa a player in the artificial intelligence revolution. If you wante...

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Julian Togelius,  perhaps the most prolific researcher at the intersection of video games and artificial intelligence. Julian works on AI for games and games for AI. Some of his most significant work is in training deep neural networks to play video games and generalize what they have learned, a critical step toward artificial general intelligence. For those...

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Miles Brundage, who studies the societal impacts of artificial intelligence and works on the policy team of OpenAI, the nonprofit A.I. research company founded by Elon Musk. When I spoke to Miles, he was a research fellow at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, where he remains an associate. We talked about the policy side of AI security...

In this episode of Eye on AI, I talk to Kaifu Lee, a thought leader on AI in China. Kaifu just published the book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order . We talked about the premise of the book, which is that China has already caught up with the US in the field of AI and is poised to surpass it. While China may lag on basic research, it has the formula to excel in impleme...

In Episode 3 of Eye on AI, I talk to Misha Bilenko, head of AI at Yandex, the Google of Russia, about Vladimir Putin's claim that whomever dominates AI will rule the world; about Yandex's chatty virtual assistant, Alice; and how AI has made the dead poet Pushkin relevant today.

In Episode 2 of Eye on AI, I talk to Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, a nonprofit A.I. research company, in a wide-ranging conversation off of things highlighted in Jack's popular Import AI newsletter. Topics include whether A.I. will be used to trade cryptocurrencies; about A.I. used to speed up the creation of A.I. systems and how long will it be before A.I. does it al...

In Episode 1 of Eye on AI, I talk to Jack Clark, Strategy and Communications Director at OpenAI, a nonprofit A.I. research company, in a wide-ranging conversation off of things highlighted in Jack's popular Import AI newsletter. Topics include Google CEO Sundar Pichai's comment that the advent of artificial intelligence to man's discovery of fire; the chances that the world's nation states can cre...