The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! * Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :) In episode 48 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich . Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a venture capital (VC) firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a nu...

* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! * Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :) In episode 47 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Matt Sheehan . Matt is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he researches global technology with a focus on China. His writing and research explores China’s AI ecosys...

* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! * Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :) In episode 46 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Luis Voloch. Luis is co-founder of Immunai , a leading AI-led drug discovery company with over 140 employees and over one billion dollar valuation based out of NYC & Tel Aviv. Before Immunai, Lui...

* Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! * Want to write with us? Send a pitch using this form :) In episode 45 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Zachary Lipton . Zachary is an Assistant Professor of Machine Learning and Operations Research at Carnegie Mellon University , where he directs the Approximately Correct Machine Intelligence Lab...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 44 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stuart Russell. Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and the Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley , as well as an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford . Professor Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of Ar...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 43 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Varun Ganapathi. Varun is co-founder and CTO at AKASA, a company developing AI systems for healthcare operations. Varun’s previous entrepreneurial experience includes co-founding Numovis, a company focused on motion tracking and computer vision for user...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 42 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joel Lehman . Joel is a machine learning scientist interested in AI safety, reinforcement learning, and creative open-ended search algorithms. Joel has spent time at Uber AI Labs and OpenAI and is the co-author of the book Why Greatness Cannot be Planned...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 42 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Andrew Feldman. Andrew is the co-founder and CEO of Cerebras Systems, an AI accelerator company that has built the largest processor in the industry. Before Cerebras, Andrew co-founded and served as CEO of SeaMicro, which was acquired by AMD in 2012. He...

Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here ! In episode 41 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Christopher Manning . Chris is the Director of the Stanford AI Lab and an Associate Director of the Stanford Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute. He is an ACM Fellow, an AAAI Fellow, and past President of ACL. His work currently focuses on a...

In episode 41 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Professor Jeff Clune . Jeff is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Faculty Member of the Vector Institute. Previously, he was a Research Team Leader at OpenAI and before that a Senior Research Manager and founding member of Uber AI Labs, and prior to that he was an Associate Professo...

In episode 40 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Catherine Olsson and Nelson Elhage. Catherine and Nelson are both members of technical staff at Anthropic, which is an AI safety and research company that’s working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Catherine and Nelson’s focus is on interpretability, and we will discuss several of their recent works in this...

In episode 38 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Been Kim. Been is a staff research scientist at Google Brain focused on interpretability–helping humans communicate with complex machine learning models by not only building tools but also studying how humans interact with these systems. She has served with a number of conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML, and AISTATS. She gave th...

In episode 37 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Laura Weidinger Laura is a senior research scientist at DeepMind, with her focus being AI ethics. Laura is also a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, studying philosophy of science and specifically approaches to measuring the ethics of AI systems. Previously Laura worked in technology policy at UK and EU levels, as a Policy...

In episode 36 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sebastian Raschka . Sebastian is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lead AI Educator at Lightning AI. He has written two bestselling books: Python Machine Learning and Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn . Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:   Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Cas...

In episode 35 of The Gradient Podcast, guest host Sharon Zhou speaks to Jack Shanahan. John (Jack) Shanahan was a Lieutenant General in the United States Air Force, retired after a 36-year military career. He was the inaugural Director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). He was also the Director of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Tea...

In episode 34 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sara Hooker. Sara (@sarahookr) leads Cohere for AI and is a former Research Scientist at Google. Sara founded a Bay Area non-profit called Delta Analytics, which works with non-profits and communities to build technical capacity. She is also one of the co-founders of the Trustworthy ML Initiative, an active participant of the ML Collec...

In episode 33 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Lukas Biewald . Lukas Biewald is a co-founder of Weights and Biases , a company that creates developer tools for machine learning. Prior to that he was a co-founder and CEO of Figure Eight Inc. (formerly CrowdFlower) — an Internet company that collects training data for machine learning, which was sold for 300 million dollars. Subscr...

In episode 32 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Chip Huyen . Chip Huyen is a co-founder of Claypot AI, a platform for real-time machine learning. Previously, she was with Snorkel AI and NVIDIA. She teaches CS 329S: Machine Learning Systems Design at Stanford. She has also written four bestselling Vietnamese books, and more recently her new O’Reilly book Designing Machine Learning...

In episode 31 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Preetum Nakkiran . Preetum is a Research Scientist at Apple, a Visiting Researcher at UCSD, and part of the NSF/Simons Collaboration on the Theoretical Foundations of Deep Learning. He completed his PhD at Harvard, where he co-founded the ML Foundations Group. Preetum’s research focuses on building conceptual tools for understanding le...

In episode 30 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Max Woolf. Max Woolf (@minimaxir) is currently a Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco. Some work he’s done for BuzzFeed includes using StyleGAN to create AI-generated fake boyfriends and AI-generated art quizzes . In his free time, Max creates open source Python and R software on his GitHub . More recently, Max has been developi...

In episode 29 of The Gradient Podcast, we chat with Rosanne Liu . Rosanne is a research scientist in Google Brain, and co-founder and executive director of ML Collective , a nonprofit organization for open collaboration and accessible mentorship. Before that she was a founding member of Uber AI. Outside of research, she supports underrepresented communities, and organizes symposiums, workshops, an...

In episode 28 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ben Green, postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows and Assistant Professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Ben’s work focuses on the social and political impacts of government algorithms. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:   Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS Follow The Gradient on Twitter Sec...

In episode 27 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Max Braun, who leads the AI and robotics software engineering team at Everyday Robots, a moonshot to create robots that can learn to help people in their everyday lives. Previously, he worked on building frontier technology products as an entrepreneur and later at Google and X. Max enjoys exploring the intersection of art, technology...

In episode 26 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Yejin Choi, professor of Computer Science at the University of Washington, and senior research manager at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:   Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS Follow The Gradient on Twitter Sections : (00:00) Intro (01:42) Getting Started in the Winter (09:...

In episode 25 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to David Chalmers, professor of philosophy and Philosophy and Neural Science at New York University, and co-director of NYU’s center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast:   Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSS Follow The Gradient on Twitter Sections : (00:00) Intro(00:42) “Today’s neural networks...