Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Welcome! We engage in fascinating discussions with pre-eminent figures in the AI field. Our flagship show covers current affairs in AI, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind with in-depth analysis. Our approach is unrivalled in terms of scope and rigour – we believe in intellectual diversity in AI, and we touch on all of the main ideas in the field with the hype surgically removed. MLST is run by Tim Scarfe, Ph. D (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecsquizor/) and features regular appearances from MIT Doctor of Philosophy Keith Duggar (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-keith-duggar/).
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Author
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Category
Podcast website
Latest episode
Jul 1, 2026
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Episodes
#030 Multi-Armed Bandits and Pure-Exploration (Wouter M. Koolen) 20.11.2020 1:48:08
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar and Yannic Kilcher discuss multi-arm bandits and pure exploration with Dr. Wouter M. Koolen, Senior Researcher, Machine Learning group, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica. Wouter specialises in machine learning theory, game theory, information theory, statistics and optimisation. Wouter is currently interested in pure exploration in multi-armed bandit mod...
#029 GPT-3, Prompt Engineering, Trading, AI Alignment, Intelligence 08.11.2020 1:50:32
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar, Yannic Kilcher and Connor Leahy cover a broad range of topics, ranging from academia, GPT-3 and whether prompt engineering could be the next in-demand skill, markets and economics including trading and whether you can predict the stock market, AI alignment, utilitarian philosophy, randomness and intelligence and even whether the universe is infinite!&nbs...
NLP is not NLU and GPT-3 - Walid Saba 04.11.2020 2:20:32
#machinelearning This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar and Yannic Kilcher speak with veteran NLU expert Dr. Walid Saba. Walid is an old-school AI expert. He is a polymath, a neuroscientist, psychologist, linguist, philosopher, statistician, and logician. He thinks the missing information problem and lack of a typed ontology is the key issue with NLU, not sample efficiency or gener...
AI Alignment & AGI Fire Alarm - Connor Leahy 01.11.2020 2:04:35
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Alex Stenlake and Yannic Kilcher speak with AGI and AI alignment specialist Connor Leahy a machine learning engineer from Aleph Alpha and founder of EleutherAI. Connor believes that AI alignment is philosophy with a deadline and that we are on the precipice, the stakes are astronomical. AI is important, and it will go wrong by default. Connor thinks that the singularity o...
Kaggle, ML Community / Engineering (Sanyam Bhutani) 28.10.2020 1:26:59
Join Dr Tim Scarfe, Sayak Paul, Yannic Kilcher, and Alex Stenlake have a conversation with Mr. Chai Time Data Science; Sanyam Bhutani! 00:00:00 Introduction 00:03:42 Show kick off 00:06:34 How did Sanyam get started into ML 00:07:46 Being a content creator 00:09:01 Can you be self taught without a formal education in ML? 00:22:54 Kaggle 00:33:41 H20 product / jo...
Sara Hooker - The Hardware Lottery, Sparsity and Fairness 20.10.2020 1:30:35
Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher and Sayak Paul chat with Sara Hooker from the Google Brain team! We discuss her recent hardware lottery paper, pruning / sparsity, bias mitigation and intepretability. The hardware lottery -- what causes inertia or friction in the marketplace of ideas? Is there a meritocracy of ideas or do the previous decisions we have made enslave us? Sara Hooker calls this a...
The Social Dilemma Part 3 - Dr. Rebecca Roache 11.10.2020 1:16:18
This week join Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher, and Keith Duggar have a conversation with Dr. Rebecca Roache in the last of our 3-part series on the social dilemma Netflix film. Rebecca is a senior lecturer in philosophy at Royal Holloway, university of London and has written extensively about the future of friendship. People claim that friendships are not what they used to be. People are alw...
The Social Dilemma - Part 1 03.10.2020 1:07:19
In this first part of our three part series on the Social Dilemma Netflix film, Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic "Lightspeed" Kilcher and Zak Jost gang up with Cybersecurity expert Andy Smith. We give you our take on the film. We are super excited to get your feedback on this one! Hope you enjoy. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:11 Moral hypocrisy 00:12:38 Road to hell is paved with good inte...
Capsule Networks and Education Targets 29.09.2020 1:24:08
In today's episode, Dr. Keith Duggar, Alex Stenlake and Dr. Tim Scarfe chat about the education chapter in Kenneth Stanley's "Greatness cannot be planned" book, and we relate it to our Algoshambes conversation a few weeks ago. We debate whether objectives in education are a good thing and whether they cause perverse incentives and stifle creativity and innovation. Next up we dissect capsule networ...
Programming Languages, Software Engineering and Machine Learning 25.09.2020 1:23:33
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar, Yannic "Lightspeed" Kilcher have a conversation with Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Sachin Kundu. We speak about programming languages including which our favourites are and functional programming vs OOP. Next we speak about software engineering and the intersection of software engineering and machine learning. We also talk about applications of ML a...
Computation, Bayesian Model Selection, Interactive Articles 22.09.2020 1:13:40
This week Dr. Keith Duggar, Alex Stenlake and Dr. Tim Scarfe discuss the theory of computation, intelligence, Bayesian model selection, the intelligence explosion and the the phenomenon of "interactive articles". 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:27 Kernels and context-free grammars 00:06:04 Theory of computation 00:18:41 Intelligence 00:22:03 Bayesian model selection 00:44:05 AI-IQ Measure / Intelligenc...
Kernels! 18.09.2020 1:37:29
Today Yannic Lightspeed Kilcher and I spoke with Alex Stenlake about Kernel Methods. What is a kernel? Do you remember those weird kernel things which everyone obsessed about before deep learning? What about Representer theorem and reproducible kernel hilbert spaces? SVMs and kernel ridge regression? Remember them?! Hope you enjoy the conversation! 00:00:00 Tim Intro 00:01:35 Yannic clever insight...
Explainability, Reasoning, Priors and GPT-3 16.09.2020 1:25:52
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe and Dr. Keith Duggar discuss Explainability, Reasoning, Priors and GPT-3. We check out Christoph Molnar's book on intepretability, talk about priors vs experience in NNs, whether NNs are reasoning and also cover articles by Gary Marcus and Walid Saba critiquing deep learning. We finish with a brief discussion of Chollet's ARC challenge and intelligence paper. 00:00:0...
SWaV: Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments (Mathilde Caron) 14.09.2020 1:27:36
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Lightspeed Kicher, Sayak Paul and Ayush Takur interview Mathilde Caron from Facebook Research (FAIR). We discuss Mathilde's paper which she wrote with her collaborators "SWaV: Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments" @ https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.09882.pdf This paper is the latest unsupervised contrastive visual representati...
UK Algoshambles, Neuralink, GPT-3 and Intelligence 07.09.2020 1:34:33
This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar and Yannic "Lightspeed" Kilcher respond to the "Algoshambles" exam fiasco in the UK where the government were forced to step in to standardise the grades which were grossly inflated by the schools. The schools and teachers are all paid on metrics related to the grades received by students, what could possibly go wrong?! The result is that we end up...
Sayak Paul 17.07.2020 1:36:16
This week we spoke with Sayak Paul , who is extremely active in the machine learning community. We discussed the AI landscape in India, unsupervised representation learning, data augmentation and contrastive learning, explainability, abstract scene representations and finally pruning and the recent super positions paper. I really enjoyed this conversation and I hope you folks do too! 00:00:00 Intr...
Robert Lange on NN Pruning and Collective Intelligence 08.07.2020 1:45:41
We speak with Robert Lange! Robert is a PhD student at the Technical University Berlin. His research combines Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning and Cognitive Science to study the learning dynamics of large collectives. He has a brilliant blog where he distils and explains cutting edge ML research. We spoke about his story, economics, multi-agent RL, intelligence and AGI, and his recent artic...
WelcomeAIOverlords (Zak Jost) 30.06.2020 1:58:02
We welcome Zak Jost from the WelcomeAIOverlords channel. Zak is an ML research scientist at Amazon. He has a great blog at http://blog.zakjost.com and also a Discord channel at https://discord.gg/xh2chKX WelcomeAIOverlords: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxw9_WYmLqlj5PyXu2AWU_g 00:00:00 INTRO START 00:01:07 MAIN SHOW START 00:01:59 ZAK'S STORY 00:05:06 YOUTUBE DISCUSSION 00:24:12 UNDERSTAN...
Facebook Research - Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages 24.06.2020 1:02:33
In this episode of Machine Learning Street Talk Dr. Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher and Connor Shorten spoke with Marie-Anne Lachaux, Baptiste Roziere and Dr. Guillaume Lample from Facebook Research (FAIR) in Paris. They recently released the paper "Unsupervised Translation of Programming Languages" which was an exciting new approach to learned translation of programming languages (learned transcoder)...
Francois Chollet - On the Measure of Intelligence 19.06.2020 2:33:31
We cover Francois Chollet's recent paper. Abstract; To make deliberate progress towards more intelligent and more human-like artificial systems, we need to be following an appropriate feedback signal: we need to be able to define and evaluate intelligence in a way that enables comparisons between two systems, as well as comparisons with humans. Over the past hundred years, there has been an abunda...
OpenAI GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners 06.06.2020 1:51:37
In this episode of Machine Learning Street Talk, Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher and Connor Shorten discuss their takeaways from OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. With the help of Microsoft’s ZeRO-2 / DeepSpeed optimiser, OpenAI trained an 175 BILLION parameter autoregressive language model. The paper demonstrates how self-supervised language modelling at this scale can perform many downstream tasks witho...
Jordan Edwards: ML Engineering and DevOps on AzureML 03.06.2020 1:12:45
This week we had a super insightful conversation with Jordan Edwards, Principal Program Manager for the AzureML team! Jordan is on the coalface of turning machine learning software engineering into a reality for some of Microsoft's largest customers. ML DevOps is all about increasing the velocity of- and orchastrating the non-interactive phase of- software deployments for ML. We...
One Shot and Metric Learning - Quadruplet Loss (Machine Learning Dojo) 02.06.2020 2:28:30
*Note this is an episode from Tim's Machine Learning Dojo YouTube channel. Join Eric Craeymeersch on a wonderful discussion all about ML engineering, computer vision, siamese networks, contrastive loss, one shot learning and metric learning. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:11:47 ML Engineering Discussion 00:35:59 Intro to the main topic 00:42:13 Siamese Networks 00:48:36 Mining strategi...
Harri Valpola: System 2 AI and Planning in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning 25.05.2020 1:38:16
In this episode of Machine Learning Street Talk, Tim Scarfe, Yannic Kilcher and Connor Shorten interviewed Harri Valpola, CEO and Founder of Curious AI. We continued our discussion of System 1 and System 2 thinking in Deep Learning, as well as miscellaneous topics around Model-based Reinforcement Learning. Dr. Valpola describes some of the challenges of modelling industrial control processes such...
ICLR 2020: Yoshua Bengio and the Nature of Consciousness 22.05.2020 2:34:17
In this episode of Machine Learning Street Talk, Tim Scarfe, Connor Shorten and Yannic Kilcher react to Yoshua Bengio’s ICLR 2020 Keynote “Deep Learning Priors Associated with Conscious Processing”. Bengio takes on many future directions for research in Deep Learning such as the role of attention in consciousness, sparse factor graphs and causality, and the study of systematic generalization. Beng...
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