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PODCAST

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Welcome! We engage in fascinating discussions with pre-eminent figures in the AI field. Our flagship show covers current affairs in AI, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind with in-depth analysis. Our approach is unrivalled in terms of scope and rigour – we believe in intellectual diversity in AI, and we touch on all of the main ideas in the field with the hype surgically removed. MLST is run by Tim Scarfe, Ph.D (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecsquizor/) and features regular

technology

All Episodes

00:34:30

Prof. Randall Balestriero - LLMs without pretraining...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/04/23

Randall Balestriero joins the show to discuss some counterintuitive findings in AI. He shares research showing that huge language models, even when started from scratch (randomly initialized) without massive pre-training, can learn specific tasks like sentiment analysis surprisingly well, train stably, and avoid severe overfitting, sometimes matching the performance of costly pre-trained models. This raises questions about when giant pre-training efforts are truly worth it.He also talks about how

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01:16:55

How Machines Learn to Ignore the Noise (Kevin Ellis +...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/04/08

Prof. Kevin Ellis and Dr. Zenna Tavares talk about making AI smarter, like humans. They want AI to learn from just a little bit of information by actively trying things out, not just by looking at tons of data.They discuss two main ways AI can "think": one way is like following specific rules or steps (like a computer program), and the other is more intuitive, like guessing based on patterns (like modern AI often does). They found combining both methods works well for solving complex

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01:36:28

Eiso Kant (CTO poolside) - Superhuman Coding Is Coming!

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/04/02

Eiso Kant, CTO of poolside AI, discusses the company's approach to building frontier AI foundation models, particularly focused on software development. Their unique strategy is reinforcement learning from code execution feedback which is an important axis for scaling AI capabilities beyond just increasing model size or data volume. Kant predicts human-level AI in knowledge work could be achieved within 18-36 months, outlining poolside's vision to dramatically increase software development

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01:37:10

The Compendium - Connor Leahy and Gabriel Alfour

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/30

Connor Leahy and Gabriel Alfour, AI researchers from Conjecture and authors of "The Compendium," joinus for a critical discussion centered on Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) safety and governance. Drawing from their comprehensive analysis in "The Compendium," they articulate a stark warning about the existential risks inherent in uncontrolled AI development, framing it through the lens of "intelligence domination"—where a sufficiently advanced AI could subordinate

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00:54:15

ARC Prize v2 Launch! (Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/24

We are joined by Francois Chollet and Mike Knoop, to launch the new version of the ARC prize! In version 2, the challenges have been calibrated with humans such that at least 2 humans could solve each task in a reasonable task, but also adversarially selected so that frontier reasoning models can't solve them. The best LLMs today get negligible performance on this challenge. https://arcprize.org/SPONSOR MESSAGES:***Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier

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01:03:36

Test-Time Adaptation: the key to reasoning with DL...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/22

Mohamed Osman joins to discuss MindsAI's highest scoring entry to the ARC challenge 2024 and the paradigm of test-time fine-tuning. They explore how the team, now part of Tufa Labs in Zurich, achieved state-of-the-art results using a combination of pre-training techniques, a unique meta-learning strategy, and an ensemble voting mechanism. Mohamed emphasizes the importance of raw data input and flexibility of the network.SPONSOR MESSAGES:***Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich

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01:11:23

GSMSymbolic paper - Iman Mirzadeh (Apple)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/19

Iman Mirzadeh from Apple, who recently published the GSM-Symbolic paper discusses the crucial distinction between intelligence and achievement in AI systems. He critiques current AI research methodologies, highlighting the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in reasoning and knowledge representation. SPONSOR MESSAGES:***Tufa AI Labs is a brand new research lab in Zurich started by Benjamin Crouzier focussed on o-series style reasoning and AGI. They are hiring a Chief Engineer and ML

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01:23:11

Reasoning, Robustness, and Human Feedback in AI - Max...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/18

Dr. Max Bartolo from Cohere discusses machine learning model development, evaluation, and robustness. Key topics include model reasoning, the DynaBench platform for dynamic benchmarking, data-centric AI development, model training challenges, and the limitations of human feedback mechanisms. The conversation also covers technical aspects like influence functions, model quantization, and the PRISM project.Max Bartolo

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01:41:19

Tau Language: The Software Synthesis Future (sponsored)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/12

This sponsored episode features mathematician Ohad Asor discussing logical approaches to AI, focusing on the limitations of machine learning and introducing the Tau language for software development and blockchain tech. Asor argues that machine learning cannot guarantee correctness. Tau allows logical specification of software requirements, automatically creating provably correct implementations with potential to revolutionize distributed systems. The discussion highlights program synthesis,

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00:54:50

John Palazza - Vice President of Global Sales @...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/10

John Palazza from CentML joins us in this sponsored interview to discuss the critical importance of infrastructure optimization in the age of Large Language Models and Generative AI. We explore how enterprises can transition from the innovation phase to production and scale, highlighting the significance of efficient GPU utilization and cost management. The conversation covers the open-source versus proprietary model debate, the rise of AI agents, and the need for platform independence to avoid

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01:00:54

Transformers Need Glasses! - Federico Barbero

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/08

Federico Barbero (DeepMind/Oxford) is the lead author of "Transformers Need Glasses!". Have you ever wondered why LLMs struggle with seemingly simple tasks like counting or copying long strings of text? We break down the theoretical reasons behind these failures, revealing architectural bottlenecks and the challenges of maintaining information fidelity across extended contexts.Federico explains how these issues are rooted in the transformer's design, drawing parallels to over-squashing

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01:37:54

Sakana AI - Chris Lu, Robert Tjarko Lange, Cong Lu

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/03/01

We speak with Sakana AI, who are building nature-inspired methods that could fundamentally transform how we develop AI systems.The guests include Chris Lu, a researcher who recently completed his DPhil at Oxford University under Prof. Jakob Foerster's supervision, where he focused on meta-learning and multi-agent systems. Chris is the first author of the DiscoPOP paper, which demonstrates how language models can discover and design better training algorithms. Also joining is Robert Tjarko Lange,

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00:51:26

Clement Bonnet - Can Latent Program Networks Solve...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/02/19

Clement Bonnet discusses his novel approach to the ARC (Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus) challenge. Unlike approaches that rely on fine-tuning LLMs or generating samples at inference time, Clement's method encodes input-output pairs into a latent space, optimizes this representation with a search algorithm, and decodes outputs for new inputs. This end-to-end architecture uses a VAE loss, including reconstruction and prior losses. SPONSOR MESSAGES:***CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI

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00:53:31

Prof. Jakob Foerster - ImageNet Moment for...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/02/18

Prof. Jakob Foerster, a leading AI researcher at Oxford University and Meta, and Chris Lu, a researcher at OpenAI -- they explain how AI is moving beyond just mimicking human behaviour to creating truly intelligent agents that can learn and solve problems on their own. Foerster champions open-source AI for responsible, decentralised development. He addresses AI scaling, goal misalignment (Goodhart's Law), and the need for holistic alignment, offering a quick look at the future of AI and how to

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01:09:04

Daniel Franzen & Jan Disselhoff - ARC Prize 2024 winners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/02/12

Daniel Franzen and Jan Disselhoff, the "ARChitects" are the official winners of the ARC Prize 2024. Filmed at Tufa Labs in Zurich - they revealed how they achieved a remarkable 53.5% accuracy by creatively utilising large language models (LLMs) in new ways. Discover their innovative techniques, including depth-first search for token selection, test-time training, and a novel augmentation-based validation system. Their results were extremely surprising.SPONSOR MESSAGES:***CentML offers

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01:07:01

Sepp Hochreiter - LSTM: The Comeback Story?

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/02/12

Sepp Hochreiter, the inventor of LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks – a foundational technology in AI. Sepp discusses his journey, the origins of LSTM, and why he believes his latest work, XLSTM, could be the next big thing in AI, particularly for applications like robotics and industrial simulation. He also shares his controversial perspective on Large Language Models (LLMs) and why reasoning is a critical missing piece in current AI systems.SPONSOR MESSAGES:***CentML offers competitive pricing

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01:18:10

Want to Understand Neural Networks? Think Elastic...

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/02/08

Professor Randall Balestriero joins us to discuss neural network geometry, spline theory, and emerging phenomena in deep learning, based on research presented at ICML. Topics include the delayed emergence of adversarial robustness in neural networks ("grokking"), geometric interpretations of neural networks via spline theory, and challenges in reconstruction learning. We also cover geometric analysis of Large Language Models (LLMs) for toxicity detection and the relationship between

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01:21:15

Nicholas Carlini (Google DeepMind)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/01/25

Nicholas Carlini from Google DeepMind offers his view of AI security, emergent LLM capabilities, and his groundbreaking model-stealing research. He reveals how LLMs can unexpectedly excel at tasks like chess and discusses the security pitfalls of LLM-generated code. SPONSOR MESSAGES: *** CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI model deployment, with flexible options to suit a wide range of models, from small to large-scale deployments. https://centml.ai/pricing/ Tufa AI Labs is a brand new

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01:32:13

Subbarao Kambhampati - Do o1 models search?

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/01/23

Join Prof. Subbarao Kambhampati and host Tim Scarfe for a deep dive into OpenAI's O1 model and the future of AI reasoning systems. * How O1 likely uses reinforcement learning similar to AlphaGo, with hidden reasoning tokens that users pay for but never see * The evolution from traditional Large Language Models to more sophisticated reasoning systems * The concept of "fractal intelligence" in AI - where models work brilliantly sometimes but fail unpredictably * Why O1's improved

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01:18:01

How Do AI Models Actually Think? - Laura Ruis

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) ·

2025/01/20

Laura Ruis, a PhD student at University College London and researcher at Cohere, explains her groundbreaking research into how large language models (LLMs) perform reasoning tasks, the fundamental mechanisms underlying LLM reasoning capabilities, and whether these models primarily rely on retrieval or develop procedural knowledge.SPONSOR MESSAGES: *** CentML offers competitive pricing for GenAI model deployment, with flexible options to suit a wide range of models, from small to large-scale

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235 results

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