The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

Episode 144 Happy New Year! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the fourth time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of AI news and advancements, including selections from this year’s State of AI Report. If you’ve stuck around and continue to listen, I’m really thankful you’re here. I love hearing from you. You can find Nathan and Air Street Press here on Substack and on...

Episode 143 I spoke with Iason Gabriel about: * Value alignment * Technology and worldmaking * How AI systems affect individuals and the social world Iason is a philosopher and Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment , distributive justice , language ethics and human rights . You can...

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 continue to listen, I’m really thankful you’re here....

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 consciousness. Specifically, it focuses on how consciousnes...

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 has been around for around 6 years now – we began...

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 computational foundations of language learning, a...

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 of the The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Emp...

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! Meredith is Director for Human-AI Interaction Researc...

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 cryptocurrency Filecoin, led an international neuros...

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 for Wired magazine, and is currently writing his next book about micromobility and cycling acros...

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 lab employs converging approaches from cognitive s...

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 what you think! Michael is Executive Director of the...

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 Ph. D in Philosophy at the University of Warwick....

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 research-powered products and lines of business in area...

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 of his contributions to the foundations of comput...

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 MIT. He works at the border between philosophy and...

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 descend a number of rabbit holes because of it....

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 what you think! Dan Hart is Head of AI, and Miche...

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 Seattle. Her current research areas are AI4Crypto and Pr...

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 leaving a rating or a review. I read everything,...

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 structures and technology can shape our rationalit...

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 scale world class healthcare to everyone. Vivek is p...

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 technologies we feel familiar with, and the work of research...

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, economic incentives, and other difficulties in developin...

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, and Playground AI (they’re hiring !). Reach me a...