There?s a website called thispersondoesnotexist.com. When you visit it, you?re confronted by a high-resolution, photorealistic AI-generated picture of a human face. As the website?s name suggests, there?s no human being on the face of the earth who looks quite like the person staring back at you on the page.

Each of those generated pictures are a piece of data that captures so much of the essence of what it means to look like a human being. And yet they do so without telling you anything whatsoever about any particular person. In that sense, it?s fully anonymous human face data.

That?s impressive enough, and it speaks to how far generative image models have come over the last decade. But what if we could do the same for any kind of data?

What if I could generate an anonymized set of medical records or financial transaction data that captures all of the latent relationships buried  in a private dataset, without the risk of leaking sensitive information about real people? That?s the mission of Alex Watson, the Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Gretel AI, where he works on unlocking value hidden in sensitive datasets in ways that preserve privacy.

What I realized talking to Alex was that synthetic data is about much more than ensuring privacy. As you?ll see over the course of the conversation, we may well be heading for a world where most data can benefit from augmentation via data synthesis???where synthetic data brings privacy value almost as a side-effect of enriching ground truth data with context imported from the wider world.

Alex joined me to talk about data privacy, data synthesis, and what could be the very strange future of the data lifecycle on this episode of the TDS podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters:

2:40 What is synthetic data? 6:45 Large language models 11:30 Preventing data leakage 18:00 Generative versus downstream models 24:10 De-biasing and fairness 30:45 Using synthetic data 35:00 People consuming the data 41:00 Spotting correlations in the data 47:45 Generalization of different ML algorithms 51:15 Wrap-up

Two ML researchers with world-class pedigrees who decided to build a company that puts AI on the blockchain. Now to most people ? myself included ? ?AI on the blockchain? sounds like a winning entry in some kind of startup buzzword bingo. But what I discovered talking to Jacob and Ala was that they actually have good reasons to combine those two ingredients together.

At a high level, doing AI on a blockchain allows you to decentralize AI research and reward labs for building better models, and not for publishing papers in flashy journals with often biased reviewers.

And that?s not all ? as we?ll see, Ala and Jacob are taking on some of the thorniest current problems in AI with their decentralized approach to machine learning. Everything from the problem of designing robust benchmarks to rewarding good AI research and even the centralization of power in the hands of a few large companies building powerful AI systems ? these problems are all in their sights as they build out Bittensor, their AI-on-the-blockchain-startup.

Ala and Jacob joined me to talk about all those things and more on this episode of the TDS podcast.

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Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

---

Chapters:

2:40 Ala and Jacob?s backgrounds 4:00 The basics of AI on the blockchain 11:30 Generating human value 17:00 Who sees the benefit? 22:00 Use of GPUs 28:00 Models learning from each other 37:30 The size of the network 45:30 The alignment of these systems 51:00 Buying into a system 54:00 Wrap-up

As you might know if you follow the podcast, we usually talk about the world of cutting-edge AI capabilities, and some of the emerging safety risks and other challenges that the future of AI might bring. But I thought that for today?s episode, it would be fun to change things up a bit and talk about the applied side of data science, and how the field has evolved over the last year or two.

And I found the perfect guest to do that with: her name is Sadie St. Lawrence, and among other things, she?s the founder of Women in Data ? a community that helps women enter the field of data and advance throughout their careers ? and she?s also the host of the Data Bytes podcast, a seasoned data scientist and a community builder extraordinaire. Sadie joined me to talk about her founder?s journey, what data science looks like today, and even the possibilities that blockchains introduce for data science on this episode of the towards data science podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters:

2:00 Founding Women in Data 6:30 Having gendered conversations 11:00 The cultural aspect 16:45 Opportunities in blockchain 22:00 The blockchain database 32:30 Data science education 37:00 GPT-3 and unstructured data 39:30 Data science as a career 42:50 Wrap-up

If the name data2vec sounds familiar, that?s probably because it made quite a splash on social and even traditional media when it came out, about two months ago. It?s an important entry in what is now a growing list of strategies that are focused on creating individual machine learning architectures that handle many different data types, like text, image and speech.

Most self-supervised learning techniques involve getting a model to take some input data (say, an image or a piece of text) and mask out certain components of those inputs (say by blacking out pixels or words) in order to get the models to predict those masked out components.

That ?filling in the blanks? task is hard enough to force AIs to learn facts about their data that generalize well, but it also means training models to perform tasks that are very different depending on the input data type. Filling in blacked out pixels is quite different from filling in blanks in a sentence, for example.

So what if there was a way to come up with one task that we could use to train machine learning models on any kind of data? That?s where data2vec comes in.

For this episode of the podcast, I?m joined by Alexei Baevski, a researcher at Meta AI one of the creators of data2vec. In addition to data2vec, Alexei has been involved in quite a bit of pioneering work on text and speech models, including wav2vec, Facebook?s widely publicized unsupervised speech model. Alexei joined me to talk about how data2vec works and what?s next for that research direction, as well as the future of multi-modal learning.

*** 

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

-  Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters: 2:00 Alexei?s background 10:00 Software engineering knowledge 14:10 Role of data2vec in progression 30:00 Delta between student and teacher 38:30 Losing interpreting ability 41:45 Influence of greater abilities 49:15 Wrap-up

AI scaling has really taken off. Ever since GPT-3 came out, it?s become clear that one of the things we?ll need to do to move beyond narrow AI and towards more generally intelligent systems is going to be to massively scale up the size of our models, the amount of processing power they consume and the amount of data they?re trained on, all at the same time.

That?s led to a huge wave of highly scaled models that are incredibly expensive to train, largely because of their enormous compute budgets. But what if there was a more flexible way to scale AI???one that allowed us to decouple model size from compute budgets, so that we can track a more compute-efficient course to scale?

That?s the promise of so-called mixture of experts models, or MoEs. Unlike more traditional transformers, MoEs don?t update all of their parameters on every training pass. Instead, they route inputs intelligently to sub-models called experts, which can each specialize in different tasks. On a given training pass, only those experts have their parameters updated. The result is a sparse model, a more compute-efficient training process, and a new potential path to scale.

Google has been pushing the frontier of research on MoEs, and my two guests today in particular have been involved in pioneering work on that strategy (among many others!). Liam Fedus and Barrett Zoph are research scientists at Google Brain, and they joined me to talk about AI scaling, sparsity and the present and future of MoE models on this episode of the TDS podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters: 2:15 Guests? backgrounds 8:00 Understanding specialization 13:45 Speculations for the future 21:45 Switch transformer versus dense net 27:30 More interpretable models 33:30 Assumptions and biology 39:15 Wrap-up

There?s an idea in machine learning that most of the progress we see in AI doesn?t come from new algorithms of model architectures. instead, some argue, progress almost entirely comes from scaling up compute power, datasets and model sizes ? and besides those three ingredients, nothing else really matters.

Through that lens the history of AI becomes the history f processing power and compute budgets. And if that turns out to be true, then we might be able to do a decent job of predicting AI progress by studying trends in compute power and their impact on AI development.

And that?s why I wanted to talk to Jaime Sevilla, an independent researcher and AI forecaster, and affiliate researcher at Cambridge University?s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, where he works on technological forecasting and understanding trends in AI in particular. His work?s been cited in a lot of cool places, including Our World In Data, who used his team?s data to put together an exposé on trends in compute. Jaime joined me to talk about compute trends and AI forecasting on this episode of the TDS podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

*** 

Chapters:

2:00 Trends in compute 4:30 Transformative AI 13:00 Industrial applications 19:00 GPT-3 and scaling 25:00 The two papers 33:00 Biological anchors 39:00 Timing of projects 43:00 The trade-off 47:45 Wrap-up

Generating well-referenced and accurate Wikipedia articles has always been an important problem: Wikipedia has essentially become the Internet's encyclopedia of record, and hundreds of millions of people use it do understand the world.

But over the last decade Wikipedia has also become a critical source of training data for data-hungry text generation models. As a result, any shortcomings in Wikipedia?s content are at risk of being amplified by the text generation tools of the future. If one type of topic or person is chronically under-represented in Wikipedia?s corpus, we can expect generative text models to mirror???or even amplify???that under-representation in their outputs.

Through that lens, the project of Wikipedia article generation is about much more than it seems???it?s quite literally about setting the scene for the language generation systems of the future, and empowering humans to guide those systems in more robust ways.

That?s why I wanted to talk to Meta AI researcher Angela Fan, whose latest project is focused on generating reliable, accurate, and structured Wikipedia articles. She joined me to talk about her work, the implications of high-quality long-form text generation, and the future of human/AI collaboration on this episode of the TDS podcast.

--- 

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

---

Chapters: 1:45 Journey into Meta AI 5:45 Transition to Wikipedia 11:30 How articles are generated 18:00 Quality of text 21:30 Accuracy metrics 25:30 Risk of hallucinated facts 30:45 Keeping up with changes 36:15 UI/UX problems 45:00 Technical cause of gender imbalance 51:00 Wrap-up

Trustworthy AI is one of today?s most popular buzzwords. But although everyone seems to agree that we want AI to be trustworthy, definitions of trustworthiness are often fuzzy or inadequate. Maybe that shouldn?t be surprising: it?s hard to come up with a single set of standards that add up to ?trustworthiness?, and that apply just as well to a Netflix movie recommendation as a self-driving car.

So maybe trustworthy AI needs to be thought of in a more nuanced way???one that reflects the intricacies of individual AI use cases. If that?s true, then new questions come up: who gets to define trustworthiness, and who bears responsibility when a lack of trustworthiness leads to harms like AI accidents, or undesired biases?

Through that lens, trustworthiness becomes a problem not just for algorithms, but for organizations. And that?s exactly the case that Beena Ammanath makes in her upcoming book, Trustworthy AI, which explores AI trustworthiness from a practical perspective, looking at what concrete steps companies can take to make their in-house AI work safer, better and more reliable. Beena joined me to talk about defining trustworthiness, explainability and robustness in AI, as well as the future of AI regulation and self-regulation on this episode of the TDS podcast.

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

Chapters: 1:55 Background and trustworthy AI 7:30 Incentives to work on capabilities 13:40 Regulation at the level of application domain 16:45 Bridging the gap 23:30 Level of cognition offloaded to the AI 25:45 What is trustworthy AI? 34:00 Examples of robustness failures 36:45 Team diversity 40:15 Smaller companies 43:00 Application of best practices 46:30 Wrap-up

Until recently, very few people were paying attention to the potential malicious applications of AI. And that made some sense: in an era where AIs were narrow and had to be purpose-built for every application, you?d need an entire research team to develop AI tools for malicious applications. Since it?s more profitable (and safer) for that kind of talent to work in the legal economy, AI didn?t offer much low-hanging fruit for malicious actors.

But today, that?s all changing. As AI becomes more flexible and general, the link between the purpose for which an AI was built and its potential downstream applications has all but disappeared. Large language models can be trained to perform valuable tasks, like supporting writers, translating between languages, or write better code. But a system that can write an essay can also write a fake news article, or power an army of humanlike text-generating bots.

More than any other moment in the history of AI, the move to scaled, general-purpose foundation models has shown how AI can be a double-edged sword. And now that these models exist, we have to come to terms with them, and figure out how to build societies that remain stable in the face of compelling AI-generated content, and increasingly accessible AI-powered tools with malicious use potential.

That?s why I wanted to speak with Katya Sedova, a former Congressional Fellow and Microsoft alumna who now works at Georgetown University?s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where she recently co-authored some fascinating work exploring current and likely future malicious uses of AI. If you like this conversation I?d really recommend checking out her team?s latest report???it?s called ?AI and the future of disinformation campaigns?.

Katya joined me to talk about malicious AI-powered chatbots, fake news generation and the future of AI-augmented influence campaigns on this episode of the TDS podcast.

***

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

*** 

Chapters: 2:40 Malicious uses of AI 4:30 Last 10 years in the field 7:50 Low handing fruit of automation 14:30 Other analytics functions 25:30 Authentic bots 30:00 Influences of service businesses 36:00 Race to the bottom 42:30 Automation of systems 50:00 Manufacturing norms 52:30 Interdisciplinary conversations 54:00 Wrap-up

Imagine, for example, an AI that?s trained to identify cows in images. Ideally, we?d want it to learn to detect cows based on their shape and colour. But what if the cow pictures we put in the training dataset always show cows standing on grass?

In that case, we have a spurious correlation between grass and cows, and if we?re not careful, our AI might learn to become a grass detector rather than a cow detector. Even worse, we could only realize that?s happened once we?ve deployed it in the real world and it runs into a cow that isn?t standing on grass for the first time.

So how do you build AI systems that can learn robust, general concepts that remain valid outside the context of their training data?

That?s the problem of out-of-distribution generalization, and it?s a central part of the research agenda of Irina Rish, a core member of the Mila? Quebec AI Research institute, and the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous AI. Irina?s research explores many different strategies that aim to overcome the out-of-distribution problem, from empirical AI scaling efforts to more theoretical work, and she joined me to talk about just that on this episode of the podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters: 2:00 Research, safety, and generalization 8:20 Invariant risk minimization 15:00 Importance of scaling 21:35 Role of language 27:40 AGI and scaling 32:30 GPT versus ResNet 50 37:00 Potential revolutions in architecture 42:30 Inductive bias aspect 46:00 New risks 49:30 Wrap-up

Google the phrase ?AI over-hyped?, and you?ll find literally dozens of articles from the likes of Forbes, Wired, and Scientific American, all arguing that ?AI isn?t really as impressive at it seems from the outside,? and ?we still have a long way to go before we come up with *true* AI, don?t you know.?

Amusingly, despite the universality of the ?AI is over-hyped? narrative, the statement that ?We haven?t made as much progress in AI as you might think??? is often framed as somehow being an edgy, contrarian thing to believe.

All that pressure not to over-hype AI research really gets to people???researchers included. And they adjust their behaviour accordingly: they over-hedge their claims, cite outdated and since-resolved failure modes of AI systems, and generally avoid drawing straight lines between points that clearly show AI progress exploding across the board. All, presumably, to avoid being perceived as AI over-hypers.

Why does this matter? Well for one, under-hyping AI allows us to stay asleep???to delay answering many of the fundamental societal questions that come up when widespread automation of labour is on the table. But perhaps more importantly, it reduces the perceived urgency of addressing critical problems in AI safety and AI alignment.

Yes, we need to be careful that we?re not over-hyping AI. ?AI startups? that don?t use AI are a problem. Predictions that artificial general intelligence is almost certainly a year away are a problem. Confidently prophesying major breakthroughs over short timescales absolutely does harm the credibility of the field.

But at the same time, we can?t let ourselves be so cautious that we?re not accurately communicating the true extent of AI?s progress and potential. So what?s the right balance?

That?s where Sam Bowman comes in. Sam is a professor at NYU, where he does research on AI and language modeling. But most important for today?s purposes, he?s the author of a paper titled, ?When combating AI hype, proceed with caution,? in which he explores a trend he calls under-claiming???a common practice among researchers that consists of under-stating the extent of current AI capabilities, and over-emphasizing failure modes in ways that can be (unintentionally) deceptive.

Sam joined me to talk about under-claiming and what it means for AI progress on this episode of the Towards Data Science podcast.

***

Intro music: 

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc 

***

Chapters:  2:15 Overview of the paper 8:50 Disappointing systems 13:05 Potential double standard 19:00 Moving away from multi-modality 23:50 Overall implications 28:15 Pressure to publish or perish 32:00 Announcement discrepancies 36:15 Policy angle 41:00 Recommendations 47:20 Wrap-up

It?s no secret that AI systems are being used in more and more high-stakes applications. As AI eats the world, it?s becoming critical to ensure that AI systems behave robustly???that they don?t get thrown off by unusual inputs, and start spitting out harmful predictions or recommending dangerous courses of action. If we?re going to have AI drive us to work, or decide who gets bank loans and who doesn?t, we?d better be confident that our AI systems aren?t going to fail because of a freak blizzard, or because some intern missed a minus sign.

We?re now past the point where companies can afford to treat AI development like a glorified Kaggle competition, in which the only thing that matters is how well models perform on a testing set. AI-powered screw-ups aren?t always life-or-death issues, but they can harm real users, and cause brand damage to companies that don?t anticipate them.

Fortunately, AI risk is starting to get more attention these days, and new companies???like Robust Intelligence???are stepping up to develop strategies that anticipate AI failures, and mitigate their effects. Joining me for this episode of the podcast was Yaron Singer, a former Googler, professor of computer science and applied math at Harvard, and now CEO and co-founder of Robust Intelligence. Yaron has the rare combination of theoretical and engineering expertise required to understand what AI risk is, and the product intuition to know how to integrate that understanding into solutions that can help developers and companies deal with AI risk.

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Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

--- 

Chapters: 0:00 Intro 2:30 Journey into AI risk 5:20 Guarantees of AI systems 11:00 Testing as a solution 15:20 Generality and software versus custom work 18:55 Consistency across model types 24:40 Different model failures 30:25 Levels of responsibility 35:00 Wrap-up

Until very recently, the study of human disease involved looking at big things ? like organs or macroscopic systems ? and figuring out when and how they can stop working properly. But that?s all started to change: in recent decades, new techniques have allowed us to look at disease in a much more detailed way, by examining the behaviour and characteristics of single cells.

One class of those techniques now known as single-cell genomics ? the study of gene expression and function at the level of single cells. Single-cell genomics is creating new, high-dimensional datasets consisting of tens of millions of cells whose gene expression profiles and other characteristics have been painstakingly measured. And these datasets are opening up exciting new opportunities for AI-powered drug discovery ? opportunities that startups are now starting to tackle head-on.

Joining me for today?s episode is Tali Raveh, Senior Director of Computational Biology at Immunai, a startup that?s using single-cell level data to perform high resolution profiling of the immune system at industrial scale. Tali joined me to talk about what makes the immune system such an exciting frontier for modern medicine, and how single-cell data and AI might be poised to generate unprecedented breakthroughs in disease treatment on this episode of the TDS podcast.

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Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

--- 

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

2:00 Tali?s background

4:00 Immune systems and modern medicine

14:40 Data collection technology

19:00 Exposing cells to different drugs

24:00 Labeled and unlabelled data

27:30 Dataset status

31:30 Recent algorithmic advances

36:00 Cancer and immunology

40:00 The next few years

41:30 Wrap-up

If you were scrolling through your newsfeed in late September 2021, you may have caught this splashy headline from The Times of London that read, ?Can this man save the world from artificial intelligence??. The man in question was Mo Gawdat, an entrepreneur and senior tech executive who spent several years as the Chief Business Officer at GoogleX (now called X Development), Google?s semi-secret research facility, that experiments with moonshot projects like self-driving cars, flying vehicles, and geothermal energy. At X, Mo was exposed to the absolute cutting edge of many fields ? one of which was AI. His experience seeing AI systems learn and interact with the world raised red flags for him ? hints of the potentially disastrous failure modes of the AI systems we might just end up with if we don?t get our act together now.

Mo writes about his experience as an insider at one of the world?s most secretive research labs and how it led him to worry about AI risk, but also about AI?s promise and potential in his new book, Scary Smart: The Future of Artificial Intelligence and How You Can Save Our World. He joined me to talk about just that on this episode of the TDS podcast.

Today?s episode is somewhat special, because we?re going to be talking about what might be the first solid quantitative study of the power-seeking tendencies that we can expect advanced AI systems to have in the future.

For a long time, there?s kind of been this debate in the AI safety world, between:

People who worry that powerful AIs could eventually displace, or even eliminate humanity altogether as they find more clever, creative and dangerous ways to optimize their reward metrics on the one hand, and People who say that?s Terminator-bating Hollywood nonsense that anthropomorphizes machines in a way that?s unhelpful and misleading.

Unfortunately, recent work in AI alignment???and in particular, a spotlighted 2021 NeurIPS paper???suggests that the AI takeover argument might be stronger than many had realized. In fact, it?s starting to look like we ought to expect to see power-seeking behaviours from highly capable AI systems by default. These behaviours include things like AI systems preventing us from shutting them down, repurposing resources in pathological ways to serve their objectives, and even in the limit, generating catastrophes that would put humanity at risk.

As concerning as these possibilities might be, it?s exciting that we?re starting to develop a more robust and quantitative language to describe AI failures and power-seeking. That?s why I was so excited to sit down with AI researcher Alex Turner, the author of the spotlighted NeurIPS paper on power-seeking, and discuss his path into AI safety, his research agenda and his perspective on the future of AI on this episode of the TDS podcast.

***

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters: 

- 2:05 Interest in alignment research

- 8:00 Two camps of alignment research

- 13:10 The NeurIPS paper

- 17:10 Optimal policies

- 25:00 Two-piece argument

- 28:30 Relaxing certain assumptions

- 32:45 Objections to the paper

- 39:00 Broader sense of optimization

- 46:35 Wrap-up

Until recently, AI systems have been narrow???they?ve only been able to perform the specific tasks that they were explicitly trained for. And while narrow systems are clearly useful, the holy grain of AI is to build more flexible, general systems.

But that can?t be done without good performance metrics that we can optimize for???or that we can at least use to measure generalization ability. Somehow, we need to figure out what number needs to go up in order to bring us closer to generally-capable agents. That?s the question we?ll be exploring on this episode of the podcast, with Danijar Hafner. Danijar is a PhD student in artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto with Jimmy Ba and Geoffrey Hinton and researcher at Google Brain and the Vector Institute.

Danijar has been studying the problem of performance measurement and benchmarking for RL agents with generalization abilities. As part of that work, he recently released Crafter, a tool that can procedurally generate complex environments that are a lot like Minecraft, featuring resources that need to be collected, tools that can be developed, and enemies who need to be avoided or defeated. In order to succeed in a Crafter environment, agents need to robustly plan, explore and test different strategies, which allow them to unlock certain in-game achievements.

Crafter is part of a growing set of strategies that researchers are exploring to figure out how we can benchmark and measure the performance of general-purpose AIs, and it also tells us something interesting about the state of AI: increasingly, our ability to define tasks that require the right kind of generalization abilities is becoming just as important as innovating on AI model architectures. Danijar joined me to talk about Crafter, reinforcement learning, and the big challenges facing AI researchers as they work towards general intelligence on this episode of the TDS podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters: 0:00 Intro 2:25 Measuring generalization 5:40 What is Crafter? 11:10 Differences between Crafter and Minecraft 20:10 Agent behavior 25:30 Merging scaled models and reinforcement learning 29:30 Data efficiency 38:00 Hierarchical learning 43:20 Human-level systems 48:40 Cultural overlap 49:50 Wrap-up

2021 has been a wild ride in many ways, but its wildest features might actually be AI-related. We?ve seen major advances in everything from language modeling to multi-modal learning, open-ended learning and even AI alignment.

So, we thought, what better way to take stock of the big AI-related milestones we?ve reached in 2021 than a cross-over episode with our friends over at the Last Week In AI podcast.

***

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

***

Chapters:

0:00 Intro 2:15 Rise of multi-modal models 7:40 Growth of hardware and compute 13:20 Reinforcement learning 20:45 Open-ended learning 26:15 Power seeking paper 32:30 Safety and assumptions 35:20 Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation 42:00 Mapping natural language 46:20 Timnit Gebru?s research institute 49:20 Wrap-up

Imagine for a minute that you?re running a profitable business, and that part of your sales strategy is to send the occasional mass email to people who?ve signed up to be on your mailing list. For a while, this approach leads to a reliable flow of new sales, but then one day, that abruptly stops. What happened?

You pour over logs, looking for an explanation, but it turns out that the problem wasn?t with your software; it was with your data. Maybe the new intern accidentally added a character to every email address in your dataset, or shuffled the names on your mailing list so that Christina got a message addressed to ?John?, or vice-versa. Versions of this story happen surprisingly often, and when they happen, the cost can be significant: lost revenue, disappointed customers, or worse???an irreversible loss of trust.

Today, entire products are being built on top of datasets that aren?t monitored properly for critical failures???and an increasing number of those products are operating in high-stakes situations. That?s why data observability is so important: the ability to  track the origin, transformations and characteristics of mission-critical data to detect problems before they lead to downstream harm.

And it?s also why we?ll be talking to Kevin Hu, the co-founder and CEO of Metaplane, one of the world?s first data observability startups. Kevin has a deep understanding of data pipelines, and the problems that cap pop up if you they aren?t properly monitored. He joined me to talk about data observability, why it matters, and how it might be connected to responsible AI on this episode of the TDS podcast.

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc 0:00

Chapters: 

0:00 Intro 2:00 What is data observability? 8:20 Difference between a dataset?s internal and external characteristics 12:20 Why is data so difficult to log? 17:15 Tracing back models 22:00 Algorithmic analyzation of a date 26:30 Data ops in five years 33:20 Relation to cutting-edge AI work 39:25 Software engineering and startup funding 42:05 Problems on a smaller scale 46:40 Future data ops problems to solve 48:45 Wrap-up

Historically, AI systems have been slow learners. For example, a computer vision model often needs to see tens of thousands of hand-written digits before it can tell a 1 apart from a 3. Even game-playing AIs like DeepMind?s AlphaGo, or its more recent descendant MuZero, need far more experience than humans do to master a given game.

So when someone develops an algorithm that can reach human-level performance at anything as fast as a human can, it?s a big deal. And that?s exactly why I asked Yang Gao to join me on this episode of the podcast. Yang is an AI researcher with affiliations at Berkeley and Tsinghua University, who recently co-authored a paper introducing EfficientZero: a reinforcement learning system that learned to play Atari games at the human-level after just two hours of in-game experience. It?s a tremendous breakthrough in sample-efficiency, and a major milestone in the development of more general and flexible AI systems.

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Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

---

Chapters: 

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:50 Yang?s background

- 6:00 MuZero?s activity

- 13:25 MuZero to EfficiantZero

- 19:00 Sample efficiency comparison

- 23:40 Leveraging algorithmic tweaks

- 27:10 Importance of evolution to human brains and AI systems

- 35:10 Human-level sample efficiency

- 38:28 Existential risk from AI in China

- 47:30 Evolution and language

- 49:40 Wrap-up

There once was a time when AI researchers could expect to read every new paper published in the field on the arXiv, but today, that?s no longer the case. The recent explosion of research activity in AI has turned keeping up to date with new developments into a full-time job.

Fortunately, people like YouTuber, ML PhD and sunglasses enthusiast Yannic Kilcher make it their business to distill ML news and papers into a digestible form for mortals like you and me to consume. I highly recommend his channel to any TDS podcast listeners who are interested in ML research ? it?s a fantastic resource, and literally the way I finally managed to understand the Attention is All You Need paper back in the day.

Yannic is joined me to talk about what he?s learned from years of following, reporting and doing AI research, including the trends, the challenges and the opportunities that he expects are going to shape the course of AI history in coming years.

--- 

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

--- 

Chapters:

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:20 Yannic?s path into ML

- 7:25 Selecting ML news

- 11:45 AI ethics ? political discourse

- 17:30 AI alignment

- 24:15 Malicious uses

- 32:10 Impacts on persona

- 39:50 Bringing in human thought

- 46:45 Math with big numbers

- 51:05 Metrics for generalization

- 58:05 The future of AI

- 1:02:58 Wrap-up

Today, most machine learning algorithms use the same paradigm: set an objective, and train an agent, a neural net, or a classical model to perform well against that objective. That approach has given good results: these types of AI can hear, speak, write, read, draw, drive and more.

But they?re also inherently limited: because they optimize for objectives that seem interesting to humans, they often avoid regions of parameter space that are valuable, but that don?t immediately seem interesting to human beings, or the objective functions we set. That poses a challenge for researchers like Ken Stanley, whose goal is to build broadly superintelligent AIs ? intelligent systems that outperform humans at a wide range of tasks. Among other things, Ken is a former startup founder and AI researcher, whose career has included work in academia, at UberAI labs, and most recently at OpenAI, where he leads the open-ended learning team.

Ken joined me to talk about his 2015 book Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective, what open-endedness could mean for humanity, the future of intelligence, and even AI safety on this episode of the TDS podcast.

It?s no secret that governments around the world are struggling to come up with effective policies to address the risks and opportunities that AI presents. And there are many reasons why that?s happening: many people ? including technical people ? think they understand what frontier AI looks like, but very few actually do, and even fewer are interested in applying their understanding in a government context, where salaries are low and stock compensation doesn?t even exist.

So there?s a critical policy-technical gap that needs bridging, and failing to address that gap isn?t really an option: it would mean flying blind through the most important test of technological governance the world has ever faced. Unfortunately, policymakers have had to move ahead with regulating and legislating with that dangerous knowledge gap in place, and the result has been less-than-stellar: widely criticized definitions of privacy and explainability, and definitions of AI that create exploitable loopholes are among some of the more concerning results.

Enter Gillian Hadfield, a Professor of Law and Professor of Strategic Management and Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Gillian?s background is in law and economics, which has led her to AI policy, and definitional problems with recent and emerging regulations on AI and privacy. But ? as I discovered during the podcast ? she also happens to be related to Dyllan Hadfield-Menell, an AI alignment researcher whom we?ve had on the show before. Partly through Dyllan, Gillian has also been exploring how principles of AI alignment research can be applied to AI policy, and to contract law. Gillian joined me to talk about all that and more on this episode of the podcast.

---

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc 

---

Chapters: 1:35 Gillian?s background 8:44 Layers and governments? legislation 13:45 Explanations and justifications 17:30 Explainable humans 24:40 Goodhart?s Law 29:10 Bringing in AI alignment 38:00 GDPR 42:00 Involving technical folks 49:20 Wrap-up

AI ethics is often treated as a dry, abstract academic subject. It doesn?t have the kinds of consistent, unifying principles that you might expect from a quantitative discipline like computer science or physics.

But somehow, the ethics rubber has to meet the AI road, and where that happens???where real developers have to deal with real users and apply concrete ethical principles???is where you find some of the most interesting, practical thinking on the topic.

That?s why I wanted to speak with Wendy Foster, the Director of Engineering and Data Science at Shopify. Wendy?s approach to AI ethics is refreshingly concrete and actionable. And unlike more abstract approaches, it?s based on clear principles like user empowerment: the idea that you should avoid forcing users to make particular decisions, and instead design user interfaces that frame AI-recommended actions as suggestions that can be ignored or acted on.

Wendy joined me to discuss her practical perspective on AI ethics, the importance of user experience design for AI products, and how responsible AI gets baked into product at Shopify on this episode of the TDS podcast.

---

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

---

Chapters: 

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:40 Wendy?s background

- 4:40 What does practice mean?

- 14:00 Different levels of explanation

- 19:05 Trusting the system

- 24:00 Training new folks

- 30:02 Company culture

- 34:10 The core of AI ethics

- 40:10 Communicating with the user

- 44:15 Wrap-up

Over the last two years, the capabilities of AI systems have exploded. AlphaFold2, MuZero, CLIP, DALLE, GPT-3 and many other models have extended the reach of AI to new problem classes. There?s a lot to be excited about.

But as we?ve seen in other episodes of the podcast, there?s a lot more to getting value from an AI system than jacking up its capabilities. And increasingly, one of these additional missing factors is becoming trust. You can make all the powerful AIs you want, but if no one trusts their output???or if people trust it when they shouldn?t???you can end up doing more harm than good.

That?s why we invited Ayanna Howard on the podcast. Ayanna is a roboticist, entrepreneur and Dean of the College of Engineering at Ohio State University, where she focuses her research on human-machine interactions and the factors that go into building human trust in AI systems. She joined me to talk about her research, its applications in medicine and education, and the future of human-machine trust.

---

Intro music:

- Artist: Ron Gelinas

- Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

- Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

---

Chapters:

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:30 Ayanna?s background

- 6:10 The interpretability of neural networks

- 12:40 Domain of machine-human interaction

- 17:00 The issue of preference

- 20:50 Gelman/newspaper amnesia

- 26:35 Assessing a person?s persuadability

- 31:40 Doctors and new technology

- 36:00 Responsibility and accountability

- 43:15 The social pressure aspect

- 47:15 Is Ayanna optimistic?

- 53:00 Wrap-up

On the face of it, there?s no obvious limit to the reinforcement learning paradigm: you put an agent in an environment and reward it for taking good actions until it masters a task.

And by last year, RL had achieved some amazing things, including mastering Go, various Atari games, Starcraft II and so on. But the holy grail of AI isn?t to master specific games, but rather to generalize ? to make agents that can perform well on new games that they haven?t been trained on before.

Fast forward to July of this year though and a team of DeepMind published a paper called ?Open-Ended Learning Leads to Generally Capable Agents?, which takes a big step in the direction of general RL agents. Joining me for this episode of the podcast is one of the co-authors of that paper, Max Jaderberg. Max came into the Google ecosystem in 2014 when they acquired his computer vision company, and more recently, he started DeepMind?s open-ended learning team, which is focused on pushing machine learning further into the territory of cross-task generalization ability. I spoke to Max about open-ended learning, the path ahead for generalization and the future of AI.

---

Intro music by:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc 

---

Chapters: 

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:30 Max?s background

- 6:40 Differences in procedural generations

- 12:20 The qualitative side

- 17:40 Agents? mistakes

- 20:00 Measuring generalization

- 27:10 Environments and loss functions

- 32:50 The potential of symbolic logic

- 36:45 Two distinct learning processes

- 42:35 Forecasting research

- 45:00 Wrap-up

Bias gets a bad rap in machine learning. And yet, the whole point of a machine learning model is that it biases certain inputs to certain outputs ? a picture of a cat to a label that says ?cat?, for example. Machine learning is bias-generation.

So removing bias from AI isn?t an option. Rather, we need to think about which biases are acceptable to us, and how extreme they can be. These are questions that call for a mix of technical and philosophical insight that?s hard to find. Luckily, I?ve managed to do just that by inviting onto the podcast none other than Margaret Mitchell, a former Senior Research Scientist in Google?s Research and Machine Intelligence Group, whose work has been focused on practical AI ethics. And by practical, I really do mean the nuts and bolts of how AI ethics can be baked into real systems, and navigating the complex moral issues that come up when the AI rubber meets the road.

*** 

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

*** 

Chapters:

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:20 Margaret?s background

- 8:30 Meta learning and ethics

- 10:15 Margaret?s day-to-day

- 13:00 Sources of ethical problems within AI

- 18:00 Aggregated and disaggregated scores

- 24:02 How much bias will be acceptable?

- 29:30 What biases does the AI ethics community hold?

- 35:00 The overlap of these fields

- 40:30 The political aspect

- 45:25 Wrap-up

As impressive as they are, language models like GPT-3 and BERT all have the same problem: they?re trained on reams of internet data to imitate human writing. And human writing is often wrong, biased, or both, which means language models are trying to emulate an imperfect target.

Language models often babble, or make up answers to questions they don?t understand. And it can make them unreliable sources of truth. Which is why there?s been increased interest in alternative ways to retrieve information from large datasets ? approaches that include knowledge graphs.

Knowledge graphs encode entities like people, places and objects into nodes, which are then connected to other entities via edges, which specify the nature of the relationship between the two. For example, a knowledge graph might contain a node for Mark Zuckerberg, linked to another node for Facebook, via an edge that indicates that Zuck is Facebook?s CEO. Both of these nodes might in turn be connected to dozens, or even thousands of others, depending on the scale of the graph.

Knowledge graphs are an exciting path ahead for AI capabilities, and the world?s largest knowledge graphs are trained by a company called Diffbot, whose CEO Mike Tung joined me for this episode of the podcast to discuss where knowledge graphs can improve on more standard techniques, and why they might be a big part of the future of AI.

---

Intro music by:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

--- 

0:00 Intro

1:30 The Diffbot dynamic

3:40 Knowledge graphs

7:50 Crawling the internet

17:15 What makes this time special?

24:40 Relation to neural networks

29:30 Failure modes

33:40 Sense of competition

39:00 Knowledge graphs for discovery

45:00 Consensus to find truth

48:15 Wrap-up

Corporate governance of AI doesn?t sound like a sexy topic, but it?s rapidly becoming one of the most important challenges for big companies that rely on machine learning models to deliver value for their customers. More and more, they?re expected to develop and implement governance strategies to reduce the incidence of bias, and increase the transparency of their AI systems and development processes. Those expectations have historically come from consumers, but governments are starting impose hard requirements, too.

So for today?s episode, I spoke to Anthony Habayeb, founder and CEO of Monitaur, a startup focused on helping businesses anticipate and comply with new and upcoming AI regulations and governance requirements. Anthony?s been watching the world of AI regulation very closely over the last several years, and was kind enough to share his insights on the current state of play and future direction of the field.

--- 

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

--- 

Chapters:

- 0:00 Intro

- 1:45 Anthony?s background

- 6:20 Philosophies surrounding regulation

- 14:50 The role of governments

- 17:30 Understanding fairness

- 25:35 AI?s PR problem

- 35:20 Governments? regulation

- 42:25 Useful techniques for data science teams

- 46:10 Future of AI governance

- 49:20 Wrap-up

The more powerful our AIs become, the more we?ll have to ensure that they?re doing exactly what we want. If we don?t, we risk building AIs that use dangerously creative solutions that have side-effects that could be undesirable, or downright dangerous. Even a slight misalignment between the motives of a sufficiently advanced AI and human values could be hazardous.

That?s why leading AI labs like OpenAI are already investing significant resources into AI alignment research. Understanding that research is important if you want to understand where advanced AI systems might be headed, and what challenges we might encounter as AI capabilities continue to grow ? and that?s what this episode of the podcast is all about. My guest today is Jan Leike, head of AI alignment at OpenAI, and an alumnus of DeepMind and the Future of Humanity Institute. As someone who works directly with some of the world?s largest AI systems (including OpenAI?s GPT-3) Jan has a unique and interesting perspective to offer both on the current challenges facing alignment researchers, and the most promising future directions the field might take.

--- 

Intro music:

? Artist: Ron Gelinas

? Track Title: Daybreak Chill Blend (original mix)

? Link to Track: https://youtu.be/d8Y2sKIgFWc

--- 

Chapters:  

0:00 Intro

1:35 Jan?s background

7:10 Timing of scalable solutions

16:30 Recursive reward modeling

24:30 Amplification of misalignment

31:00 Community focus

32:55 Wireheading

41:30 Arguments against the democratization of AIs

49:30 Differences between capabilities and alignment

51:15 Research to focus on

1:01:45 Formalizing an understanding of personal experience

1:04:04 OpenAI hiring

1:05:02 Wrap-up

The recent success of large transformer models in AI raises new questions about the limits of current strategies: can we expect deep learning, reinforcement learning and other prosaic AI techniques to get us all the way to humanlike systems with general reasoning abilities?

Some think so, and others disagree. One dissenting voice belongs to Francesca Rossi, a former professor of computer science, and now AI Ethics Global Leader at IBM. Much of Francesca?s research is focused on deriving insights from human cognition that might help AI systems generalize better. Francesca joined me for this episode of the podcast to discuss her research, her thinking, and her thinking about thinking.

AI research is often framed as a kind of human-versus-machine rivalry that will inevitably lead to the defeat???and even wholesale replacement of???human beings by artificial superintelligences that have their own sense of agency, and their own goals.

Divya Siddarth disagrees with this framing. Instead, she argues, this perspective leads us to focus on applications of AI that are neither as profitable as they could be, nor safe enough to prevent us from potentially catastrophic consequences of dangerous AI systems in the long run. And she ought to know: Divya is an associate political economist and social technologist in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft.

She?s also spent a lot of time thinking about what governments can???and are???doing to shift the framing of AI away from centralized systems that compete directly with humans, and toward a more cooperative model, which would see AI as a kind of facilitation tool that gets leveraged by human networks. Divya points to Taiwan as an experiment in digital democracy that?s doing just that.

2020 was an incredible year for AI. We saw powerful hints of the potential of large language models for the first time thanks to OpenAI?s GPT-3, DeepMind used AI to solve one of the greatest open problems in molecular biology, and Boston Dynamics demonstrated their ability to blend AI and robotics in dramatic fashion.

Progress in AI is accelerating exponentially, and though we?re just over halfway through 2021, this year is already turning into another one for the books. So we decided to partner with our friends over at Let?s Talk AI, a podcast co-hosted by Stanford PhD and former Googler Sharon Zhou, and Stanford PhD student Andrey Kurenkov, that covers current events in AI.

This was a fun chat, and a format we?ll definitely be playing with more in the future :)

Many AI researchers think it?s going to be hard to design AI systems that continue to remain safe as AI capabilities increase. We?ve seen already on the podcast that the field of AI alignment has emerged to tackle this problem, but a related effort is also being directed at a separate dimension of the safety problem: AI interpretability.

Our ability to interpret how AI systems process information and make decisions will likely become an important factor in assuring the reliability of AIs in the future. And my guest for this episode of the podcast has focused his research on exactly that topic. Daniel Filan is an AI safety researcher at Berkeley, where he?s supervised by AI pioneer Stuart Russell. Daniel also runs AXRP, a podcast dedicated to technical AI alignment research.

Cruise is a self-driving car startup founded in 2013 ? at a time when most people thought of self-driving cars as the stuff of science fiction. And yet, just three years later, the company was acquired by GM for over a billion dollars, having shown itself to be a genuine player in the race to make autonomous driving a reality. Along the way, the company has had to navigate and adapt to a rapidly changing technological landscape, mixing and matching old ideas from robotics and software engineering with cutting edge techniques like deep learning.

My guest for this episode of the podcast was one of Cruise?s earliest employees. Peter Gao is a machine learning specialist with deep experience in the self-driving car industry, and is also the co-founder of Aquarium Learning, a Y Combinator-backed startup that specializes in improving the performance of machine learning models by fixing problems with the data they?re trained on. We discussed Peter?s experiences in the self-driving car industry, including the innovations that have spun out of self-driving car tech, as well as some of the technical and ethical challenges that need to be overcome to make self-driving cars hit mainstream use around the world.

There are a lot of reasons to pay attention to China?s AI initiatives. Some are purely technological: Chinese companies are producing increasingly high-quality AI research, and they?re poised to become even more important players in AI over the next few years. For example, Huawei recently put together their own version of OpenAI?s massive GPT-3 language model ? a feat that leveraged massive scale compute that pushed the limits of current systems, calling for deep engineering and technical know-how.

But China?s AI ambitions are also important geopolitically. In order to build powerful AI systems, you need a lot of compute power. And in order to get that, you need a lot of computer chips, which are notoriously hard to manufacture. But most of the world?s computer chips are currently made in democratic Taiwan, which China claims as its own territory. You can see how quickly this kind of thing can lead to international tension.

Still, the story of US-China AI isn?t just one of competition and decoupling, but also of cooperation ? or at least, that?s the case made by my guest today, China AI expert and Stanford researcher Jeffrey Ding. In addition to studying Chinese AI ecosystem as part of his day job, Jeff published the very popular China AI newsletter, which offers a series of translations and analyses of Chinese language articles about AI. Jeff acknowledges the competitive dynamics of AI research, but argues that focusing only on controversial applications of AI ? like facial recognition and military applications ? causes us to ignore or downplay areas where real collaboration can happen, like language translation for example.

This special episode of the Towards Data Science podcast is a cross-over with our friends over at the Banana Data podcast. We?ll be zooming out and talking about some of the most important current challenges AI creates for humanity, and some of the likely future directions the technology might take.

Few would disagree that AI is set to become one of the most important economic and social forces in human history.

But along with its transformative potential has come concern about a strange new risk that AI might pose to human beings. As AI systems become exponentially more capable of achieving their goals, some worry that even a slight misalignment between those goals and our own could be disastrous. These concerns are shared by many of the most knowledgeable and experienced AI specialists, at leading labs like OpenAI, DeepMind, CHAI Berkeley, Oxford and elsewhere.

But they?re not universal: I recently had Melanie Mitchell ? computer science professor and author who famously debated Stuart Russell on the topic of AI risk ? on the podcast to discuss her objections to the AI catastrophe argument. And on this episode, we?ll continue our exploration of the case for AI catastrophic risk skepticism with an interview with Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, a world-leading AI research lab that?s developed many well-known projects, including the popular AllenNLP library, and Semantic Scholar.

Oren has a unique perspective on AI risk, and the conversation was lots of fun!

How can you know that a super-intelligent AI is trying to do what you asked it to do?

The answer, it turns out, is: not easily. And unfortunately, an increasing number of AI safety researchers are warning that this is a problem we?re going to have to solve sooner rather than later, if we want to avoid bad outcomes ? which may include a species-level catastrophe.

The type of failure mode whereby AIs optimize for things other than those we ask them to is known as an inner alignment failure in the context of AI safety. It?s distinct from outer alignment failure, which is what happens when you ask your AI to do something that turns out to be dangerous, and it was only recognized by AI safety researchers as its own category of risk in 2019. And the researcher who led that effort is my guest for this episode of the podcast, Evan Hubinger.

Evan is an AI safety veteran who?s done research at leading AI labs like OpenAI, and whose experience also includes stints at Google, Ripple and Yelp. He currently works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI) as a Research Fellow, and joined me to talk about his views on AI safety, the alignment problem, and whether humanity is likely to survive the advent of superintelligent AI.

When OpenAI announced the release of their  GPT-3 API last year, the tech world was shocked. Here was a language model, trained only to perform a simple autocomplete task, which turned out to be capable of language translation, coding, essay writing, question answering and many other tasks that previously would each have required purpose-built systems.

What accounted for GPT-3?s ability to solve these problems? How did it beat state-of-the-art AIs that were purpose-built to solve tasks it was never explicitly trained for? Was it a brilliant new algorithm? Something deeper than deep learning?

Well? no. As algorithms go, GPT-3 was relatively simple, and was built using a by-then fairly standard transformer architecture. Instead of a fancy algorithm, the real difference between GPT-3 and everything that came before was size: GPT-3 is a simple-but-massive, 175B-parameter model, about 10X bigger than the next largest AI system.

GPT-3 is only the latest in a long line of results that now show that scaling up simple AI techniques can give rise to new behavior, and far greater capabilities. Together, these results have motivated a push toward AI scaling: the pursuit of ever larger AIs, trained with more compute on bigger datasets. But scaling is expensive: by some estimates, GPT-3 cost as much as $5M to train. As a result, only well-resources companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have been able to experiment with scaled models.

That?s a problem for independent AI safety researchers, who want to better understand how advanced AI systems work, and what their most dangerous behaviors might be, but who can?t afford a $5M compute budget. That?s why a recent paper by Andy Jones, an independent researcher specialized in AI scaling, is so promising: Andy?s paper shows that, at least in some contexts, the capabilities of large AI systems can be predicted from those of smaller ones. If the result generalizes, it could give independent researchers the ability to run cheap experiments on small systems, which nonetheless generalize to expensive, scaled AIs like GPT-3. Andy was kind enough to join me for this episode of the podcast.

In 2016, OpenAI published a blog describing the results of one of their AI safety experiments. In it, they describe how an AI that was trained to maximize its score in a boat racing game ended up discovering a strange hack: rather than completing the race circuit as fast as it could, the AI learned that it could rack up an essentially unlimited number of bonus points by looping around a series of targets, in a process that required it to ram into obstacles, and even travel in the wrong direction through parts of the circuit.

This is a great example of the alignment problem: if we?re not extremely careful, we risk training AIs that find dangerously creative ways to optimize whatever thing we tell them to optimize for. So building safe AIs ? AIs that are aligned with our values ? involves finding ways to very clearly and correctly quantify what we want our AIs to do. That may sound like a simple task, but it isn?t: humans have struggled for centuries to define ?good? metrics for things like economic health or human flourishing, with very little success.

Today?s episode of the podcast features Brian Christian ? the bestselling author of several books related to the connection between humanity and computer science & AI. His most recent book, The Alignment Problem, explores the history of alignment research, and the technical and philosophical questions that we?ll have to answer if we?re ever going to safely outsource our reasoning to machines. Brian?s perspective on the alignment problem links together many of the themes we?ve explored on the podcast so far, from AI bias and ethics to existential risk from AI.

We all value privacy, but most of us would struggle to define it. And there?s a good reason for that: the way we think about privacy is shaped by the technology we use. As new technologies emerge, which allow us to trade data for services, or pay for privacy in different forms, our expectations shift and privacy standards evolve. That shifting landscape makes privacy a moving target.

The challenge of understanding and enforcing privacy standards isn?t novel, but it?s taken on a new importance given the rapid progress of AI in recent years. Data that would have been useless just a decade ago ? unstructured text data and many types of images come to mind ? are now a treasure trove of value, for example. Should companies have the right to use data they originally collected at a time when its value was limited, when it no longer is? Do companies have an obligation to provide maximum privacy without charging their customers directly for it? Privacy in AI is as much a philosophical question as a technical one, and to discuss it, I was joined by Eliano Marques, Executive VP of Data and AI at Protegrity, a company that specializes in privacy and data protection for large companies. Eliano has worked in data privacy for the last decade.

When OpenAI developed its GPT-2 language model in early 2019, they initially chose not to publish the algorithm, owing to concerns over its potential for malicious use, as well as the need for the AI industry to experiment with new, more responsible publication practices that reflect the increasing power of modern AI systems.

This decision was controversial, and remains that way to some extent even today: AI researchers have historically enjoyed a culture of open publication and have defaulted to sharing their results and algorithms. But whatever your position may be on algorithms like GPT-2, it?s clear that at some point, if AI becomes arbitrarily flexible and powerful, there will be contexts in which limits on publication will be important for public safety.

The issue of publication norms in AI is complex, which is why it?s a topic worth exploring with people who have experience both as researchers, and as policy specialists ? people like today?s Towards Data Science podcast guest, Rosie Campbell. Rosie is the Head of Safety Critical AI at Partnership on AI (PAI), a nonprofit that brings together startups, governments, and big tech companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, to shape best practices, research, and public dialogue about AI?s benefits for people and society. Along with colleagues at PAI, Rosie recently finished putting together a white paper exploring the current hot debate over publication norms in AI research, and making recommendations for researchers, journals and institutions involved in AI research.

Automated weapons mean fewer casualties, faster reaction times, and more precise strikes. They?re a clear win for any country that deploys them. You can see the appeal.

But they?re also a classic prisoner?s dilemma. Once many nations have deployed them, humans no longer have to be persuaded to march into combat, and the barrier to starting a conflict drops significantly.

The real risks that come from automated weapons systems like drones aren?t always the obvious ones. Many of them take the form of second-order effects???the knock-on consequences that come from setting up a world where multiple countries have large automated forces. But what can we do about them? That?s the question we?ll be taking on during this episode of the podcast with Jakob Foerster, an early pioneer in multi-agent reinforcement learning, and incoming faculty member at the University of Toronto. Jakob has been involved in the debate over weaponized drone automation for some time, and recently wrote an open letter to German politicians urging them to consider the risks associated with the deployment of this technology.

In December 1938, a frustrated nuclear physicist named Leo Szilard wrote a letter to the British Admiralty telling them that he had given up on his greatest invention ? the nuclear chain reaction.

"The idea of a nuclear chain reaction won?t work. There?s no need to keep this patent secret, and indeed there?s no need to keep this patent too. It won?t work." ? Leo Szilard

What Szilard didn?t know when he licked the envelope was that, on that very same day, a research team in Berlin had just split the uranium atom for the very first time. Within a year, the Manhatta Project would begin, and by 1945, the first atomic bomb was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It was only four years later ? barely a decade after Szilard had written off the idea as impossible ? that Russia successfully tested its first atomic weapon, kicking off a global nuclear arms race that continues in various forms to this day.

It?s a surprisingly short jump from cutting edge technology to global-scale risk. But although the nuclear story is a high-profile example of this kind of leap, it?s far from the only one. Today, many see artificial intelligence as a class of technology whose development will lead to global risks ? and as a result, as a technology that needs to be managed globally. In much the same way that international treaties have allowed us to reduce the risk of nuclear war, we may need global coordination around AI to mitigate its potential negative impacts.

One of the world?s leading experts on AI?s global coordination problem is Nicolas Miailhe. Nicolas is the co-founder of The Future Society, a global nonprofit whose primary focus is encouraging responsible adoption of AI, and ensuring that countries around the world come to a common understanding of the risks associated with it. Nicolas is a veteran of the prestigious Harvard Kennedy School of Government, an appointed expert to the Global Partnership on AI, and advises cities, governments, international organizations about AI policy.

We?ve recorded quite a few podcasts recently about the problems AI does and may create, now and in the future. We?ve talked about AI safety, alignment, bias and fairness.

These are important topics, and we?ll continue to discuss them, but I also think it?s important not to lose sight of the value that AI and tools like it bring to the world in the here and now. So for this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Dr Yan Li, a professor who studies data management and analytics, and the co-founder of Techies Without Borders, a nonprofit dedicated to using tech for humanitarian good. Yan has firsthand experience developing and deploying technical solutions for use in poor countries around the world, from Tibet to Haiti.

AI safety researchers are increasingly focused on understanding what AI systems want. That may sound like an odd thing to care about: after all, aren?t we just programming AIs to want certain things by providing them with a loss function, or a number to optimize?

Well, not necessarily. It turns out that AI systems can have incentives that aren?t necessarily obvious based on their initial programming. Twitter, for example, runs a recommender system whose job is nominally to figure out what tweets you?re most likely to engage with. And while that might make you think that it should be optimizing for matching tweets to people, another way Twitter can achieve its goal is by matching people to tweets???that is, making people easier to predict, by nudging them towards simplistic and partisan views of the world. Some have argued that?s a key reason that social media has had such a divisive impact on online political discourse.

So the incentives of many current AIs already deviate from those of their programmers in important and significant ways???ways that are literally shaping society. But there?s a bigger reason they matter: as AI systems continue to develop more capabilities, inconsistencies between their incentives and our own will become more and more important. That?s why my guest for this episode, Ryan Carey, has focused much of his research on identifying and controlling the incentives of AIs. Ryan is a former medical doctor, now pursuing a PhD in machine learning and doing research on AI safety at Oxford University?s Future of Humanity Institute.

As AI systems have become more powerful, an increasing number of people have been raising the alarm about its potential long-term risks. As we?ve covered on the podcast before, many now argue that those risks could even extend to the annihilation of our species by superhuman AI systems that are slightly misaligned with human values.

There?s no shortage of authors, researchers and technologists who take this risk seriously ? and they include prominent figures like Eliezer Yudkowsky, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stuart Russell and Nick Bostrom. And while I think the arguments for existential risk from AI are sound, and aren?t widely enough understood, I also think that it?s important to explore more skeptical perspectives.

Melanie Mitchell is a prominent and important voice on the skeptical side of this argument, and she was kind enough to join me for this episode of the podcast. Melanie is the Davis Professor of complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, a Professor of computer science at Portland State University, and the author of Artificial Intelligence: a Guide for Thinking Humans ? a book in which she explores arguments for AI existential risk through a critical lens. She?s an active player in the existential risk conversation, and recently participated in a high-profile debate with Stuart Russell, arguing against his AI risk position.

Powered by Moore?s law, and a cluster of related trends, technology has been improving at an exponential pace across many sectors. AI capabilities in particular have been growing at a dizzying pace, and it seems like every year brings us new breakthroughs that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. GPT-3, AlphaFold and DALL-E were developed in the last 12 months???and all of this in a context where the leading machine learning model has been increasing in size tenfold every year for the last decade.

To many, there?s a sharp contrast between the breakneck pace of these advances and the rate at which the laws that govern technologies like AI evolves. Our legal systems are chock full of outdated laws, and politicians and regulators often seem almost comically behind the technological curve. But while there?s no question that regulators face an uphill battle in trying to keep up with a rapidly changing tech landscape, my guest today thinks they have a good shot of doing so???as long as they start to think about the law a bit differently.

His name is Josh Fairfield, and he?s a law and technology scholar and former director of R&D at pioneering edtech company Rosetta Stone. Josh has consulted with U.S. government agencies, including the White House Office of Technology and the Homeland Security Privacy Office, and literally wrote a book about the strategies policymakers can use to keep up with tech like AI.

Paradoxically, it may be easier to predict the far future of humanity than to predict our near future.

The next fad, the next Netflix special, the next President???all are nearly impossible to anticipate. That?s because they depend on so many trivial factors: the next fad could be triggered by a viral video someone filmed on a whim, and well, the same could be true of the next Netflix special or President for that matter.

But when it comes to predicting the far future of humanity, we might oddly be on more solid ground. That?s not to say predictions can be made with confidence, but at least they can be made based on economic analysis and first principles reasoning. And most of that analysis and reasoning points to one of two scenarios: we either attain heights we?ve never imagined as a species, or everything we care about gets wiped out in a cosmic scale catastrophe.

Few people have spent more time thinking about the possible endgame of human civilization as my guest for this episode of the podcast, Stuart Armstrong. Stuart is a Research Fellow at Oxford University?s Future of Humanity Institute, where he studies the various existential risks that face our species, focusing most of his work specifically on risks from AI. Stuart is a fascinating and well-rounded thinker with a fresh perspective to share on just about everything you could imagine, and I highly recommend giving the episode a listen.

For the past decade, progress in AI has mostly been driven by deep learning ? a field of research that draws inspiration directly from the structure and function of the human brain. By drawing an analogy between brains and computers, we?ve been able to build computer vision, natural language and other predictive systems that would have been inconceivable just ten years ago.

But analogies work two ways. Now that we have self-driving cars and AI systems that regularly outperform humans at increasingly complex tasks, some are wondering whether reversing the usual approach ? and drawing inspiration from AI to inform out approach to neuroscience ? might be a promising strategy. This more mathematical approach to neuroscience is exactly what today?s guest, Georg Nortoff, is working on. Georg is a professor of neuroscience, psychiatry, and philosophy at the University of Ottawa, and as part of his work developing a more mathematical foundation for neuroscience, he?s explored a unique and intriguing theory of consciousness that he thinks might serve as a useful framework for developing more advanced AI systems that will benefit human beings.