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/).
Be sure to visit the podcast's website and support the creator: podcasters.spotify.com
Author
Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Category
Podcast website
Latest episode
Jul 1, 2026
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Episodes
#80 AIDAN GOMEZ [CEO Cohere] - Language as Software 15.11.2022 51:50
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 ho...
#79 Consciousness and the Chinese Room [Special Edition] (CHOLLET, BISHOP, CHALMERS, BACH) 08.11.2022 2:09:34
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...
MLST #78 - Prof. NOAM CHOMSKY (Special Edition) 08.07.2022 3:37:01
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...
#77 - Vitaliy Chiley (Cerebras) 16.06.2022 1:07:33
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...
#76 - LUKAS BIEWALD (Weights and Biases CEO) 09.06.2022 57:36
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 i...
#75 - Emergence [Special Edition] with Dr. DANIELE GRATTAROLA 29.04.2022 1:55:28
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...
#74 Dr. ANDREW LAMPINEN - Symbolic behaviour in AI [UNPLUGGED] 14.04.2022 1:05:38
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 se...
#73 - YASAMAN RAZEGHI & Prof. SAMEER SINGH - NLP benchmarks 07.04.2022 55:53
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 tas...
#72 Prof. KEN STANLEY 2.0 - On Art and Subjectivity [UNPLUGGED] 29.03.2022 1:24:48
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 objec...
#71 - ZAK JOST (Graph Neural Networks + Geometric DL) [UNPLUGGED] 25.03.2022 1:02:35
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 [00:2...
#70 - LETITIA PARCALABESCU - Symbolics, Linguistics [UNPLUGGED] 19.03.2022 1:18:30
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/ESrGqhf5C...
#69 DR. THOMAS LUX - Interpolation of Sparse High-Dimensional Data 12.03.2022 50:38
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 predict...
#68 DR. WALID SABA 2.0 - Natural Language Understanding [UNPLUGGED] 07.03.2022 1:42:14
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 t...
#67 Prof. KARL FRISTON 2.0 02.03.2022 1:42:10
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...
#66 ALEXANDER MATTICK - [Unplugged / Community Edition] 28.02.2022 50:31
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:...
#65 Prof. PEDRO DOMINGOS [Unplugged] 26.02.2022 1:28:27
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]...
#64 Prof. Gary Marcus 3.0 24.02.2022 51:47
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 / alg...
#063 - Prof. YOSHUA BENGIO - GFlowNets, Consciousness & Causality 22.02.2022 1:33:07
We are now sponsored by Weights and Biases! Please visit our sponsor link: http://wandb.me/MLST Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst For Yoshua Bengio, GFlowNets are the most exciting thing on the horizon of Machine Learning today. He believes they can solve previously intractable problems and hold the key to unlocking machine abstract reasoning itself. This discussion explores the promise of GFl...
#062 - Dr. Guy Emerson - Linguistics, Distributional Semantics 03.02.2022 1:29:50
Dr. Guy Emerson is a computational linguist and obtained his Ph. D from Cambridge university where he is now a research fellow and lecturer. On panel we also have myself, Dr. Tim Scarfe, as well as Dr. Keith Duggar and the veritable Dr. Walid Saba. We dive into distributional semantics, probability theory, fuzzy logic, grounding, vagueness and the grammar/cognition connection. The aim of distribut...
061: Interpolation, Extrapolation and Linearisation (Prof. Yann LeCun, Dr. Randall Balestriero) 04.01.2022 3:19:43
We are now sponsored by Weights and Biases! Please visit our sponsor link: http://wandb.me/MLST Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst Yann LeCun thinks that it's specious to say neural network models are interpolating because in high dimensions, everything is extrapolation. Recently Dr. Randall Balestriero , Dr. Jerome Pesente and prof. Yann LeCun released their paper learning in high dimensions a...
#60 Geometric Deep Learning Blueprint (Special Edition) 19.09.2021 3:33:22
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst The last decade has witnessed an experimental revolution in data science and machine learning, epitomised by deep learning methods. Many high-dimensional learning tasks previously thought to be beyond reach -- such as computer vision, playing Go, or protein folding -- are in fact tractable given enough computational horsepower. Remarkably, the essence of deep...
#59 - Jeff Hawkins (Thousand Brains Theory) 03.09.2021 2:34:51
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/mlst The ultimate goal of neuroscience is to learn how the human brain gives rise to human intelligence and what it means to be intelligent. Understanding how the brain works is considered one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Jeff Hawkins thinks that the reality we perceive is a kind of simulation, a hallucination, a confabulation. He thinks that our brains...
#58 Dr. Ben Goertzel - Artificial General Intelligence 11.08.2021 2:28:14
The field of Artificial Intelligence was founded in the mid 1950s with the aim of constructing “thinking machines” - that is to say, computer systems with human-like general intelligence. Think of humanoid robots that not only look but act and think with intelligence equal to and ultimately greater than that of human beings. But in the intervening years, the field has drifted far from its ambitiou...
#57 - Prof. Melanie Mitchell - Why AI is harder than we think 25.07.2021 2:31:21
Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has vacillated between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding. Even with today’s seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational compa...
#56 - Dr. Walid Saba, Gadi Singer, Prof. J. Mark Bishop (Panel discussion) 08.07.2021 1:11:17
It has been over three decades since the statistical revolution overtook AI by a storm and over two decades since deep learning (DL) helped usher the latest resurgence of artificial intelligence (AI). However, the disappointing progress in conversational agents, NLU, and self-driving cars, has made it clear that progress has not lived up to the promise of these empirical and data-driven meth...
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