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PODCAST

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI

Deeply researched, technical interviews with experts thinking about AI and technology. thegradientpub.substack.com

technology

All Episodes

103:45

Thomas Mullaney: A Global History of the Information Age

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/05/30

Episode 125False universalism freaks me out. It doesn’t freak me out as a first principle because of epistemic violence; it freaks me out because it works. I spoke with Professor Thomas Mullaney about:* Telling stories about your work and balancing what feels meaningful with practical realities* Destabilizing our understandings of the technologies we feel familiar with, and the work of researching the history of the Chinese typewriter* The personal nature of researchThe Chinese Typewriter and The

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110:17

Seth Lazar: Normative Philosophy of Computing

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/05/23

Episode 124You may think you’re doing a priori reasoning, but actually you’re just over-generalizing from your current experience of technology.I spoke with Professor Seth Lazar about:* Why managing near-term and long-term risks isn’t always zero-sum* How to think through axioms and systems in political philosphy* Coordination problems, economic incentives, and other difficulties in developing publicly beneficial AISeth is Professor of Philosophy at the Australian National University, an Australian

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68:07

Suhail Doshi: The Future of Computer Vision

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/05/16

Episode 123I spoke with Suhail Doshi about:* Why benchmarks aren’t prepared for tomorrow’s AI models* How he thinks about artists in a world with advanced AI tools* Building a unified computer vision model that can generate, edit, and understand pixels. Suhail is a software engineer and entrepreneur known for founding Mixpanel, Mighty Computing, and Playground AI (they’re hiring!).Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple

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106:25

Azeem Azhar: The Exponential View

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/05/09

Episode 122I spoke with Azeem Azhar about:* The speed of progress in AI* Historical context for some of the terminology we use and how we think about technology* What we might want our future to look likeAzeem is an entrepreneur, investor, and adviser. He is the creator of Exponential View, a global platform for in-depth technology analysis, and the host of the Bloomberg Original series Exponentially.Reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions. Subscribe to The Gradient

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139:02

David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/05/02

Episode 122I spoke with Professor David Thorstad about:* The practical difficulties of doing interdisciplinary work* Why theories of human rationality should account for boundedness, heuristics, and other cognitive limitations* why EA epistemics suck (ok, it’s a little more nuanced than that)Professor Thorstad is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, a Senior Research Affiliate at the Global Priorities Institute at Oxford, and a Research Affiliate at the MINT Lab at

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106:29

Ryan Tibshirani: Statistics, Nonparametric...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/04/25

Episode 121I spoke with Professor Ryan Tibshirani about:* Differences between the ML and statistics communities in scholarship, terminology, and other areas. * Trend filtering* Why you can’t just use garbage prediction functions when doing conformal predictionRyan is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at UC Berkeley. He is also a Principal Investigator in the Delphi group. From 2011-2022, he was a faculty member in Statistics and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University. From

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63:07

Sasha Luccioni: Connecting the Dots Between AI's...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/04/18

In episode 120 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Sasha Luccioni.Sasha is the AI and Climate Lead at HuggingFace, where she spearheads research, consulting, and capacity-building to elevate the sustainability of AI systems. A founding member of Climate Change AI (CCAI) and a board member of Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Sasha is passionate about catalyzing impactful change, organizing events and serving as a mentor to under-represented minorities within the AI community.Have

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88:21

Michael Sipser: Problems in the Theory of Computation

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/04/11

In episode 119 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Michael Sipser.Professor Sipser is the Donner Professor of Mathematics and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT.He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1980 and joined the MIT faculty that same year. He was Chairman of Applied Mathematics from 1998 to 2000 and served as Head of the Mathematics Department 2004-2014. He served as interim Dean of Science 2013-2014 and then as Dean of

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63:40

Andrew Lee: How AI will Shape the Future of Email

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/04/04

In episode 118 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Andrew Lee.Andrew is co-founder and CEO of Shortwave, a company dedicated to building a better product experience for email, particularly by leveraging AI. He previously co-founded and was CTO at Firebase.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach Daniel at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on

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83:59

Joss Fong: Videomaking, AI, and Science Communication

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/03/28

“You get more of what you engage with. Everyone who complains about coverage should understand that every click, every quote tweet, every argument is registered by these publications as engagement. If what you want is really meaty, dispassionate, balanced, and fair explainers, you need to click on that, you need to read the whole thing, you need to share it, talk about it, comment on it. We get the media that we deserve.”In episode 117 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joss Fong.Joss

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41:34

Kate Park: Data Engines for Vision and Language

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/03/21

In episode 116 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kate Park. Kate is the Director of Product at Scale AI. Prior to joining Scale, Kate worked on Tesla Autopilot as the AI team’s first and lead product manager building the industry’s first data engine. She has also published research on spoken natural language processing and a travel memoir.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient

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67:40

Ben Wellington: ML for Finance and Storytelling...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/03/14

In episode 115 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ben Wellington.Ben is the Deputy Head of Feature Forecasting at Two Sigma, a financial sciences company. Ben has been at Two Sigma for more than 15 years, and currently leads efforts focused on natural language processing and feature forecasting. He is also the author of data science blog I Quant NY, which has influenced local government policy, including changes in NYC street infrastructure and the design of NYC subway vending

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138:35

Venkatesh Rao: Protocols, Intelligence, and Scaling

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/03/07

“There is this move from generality in a relative sense of ‘we are not as specialized as insects’ to generality in the sense of omnipotent, omniscient, godlike capabilities. And I think there's something very dangerous that happens there, which is you start thinking of the word ‘general’ in completely unhinged ways.”In episode 114 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Venkatesh Rao. Venkatesh is a writer and consultant. He has been writing the widely read Ribbonfarm blog since 2007, and

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54:03

Sasha Rush: Building Better NLP Systems

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/02/29

In episode 113 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Sasha Rush.Professor Rush is an Associate Professor at Cornell University and a Researcher at HuggingFace. His research aims to develop natural language processing systems that are safe, fast, and controllable. His group is interested primarily in tasks that involve text generation, and they study data-driven probabilistic methods that combine deep-learning based models with probabilistic controls. He is also interested in

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119:26

Cameron Jones & Sean Trott: Understanding, Grounding,...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/02/22

In episode 112 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Cameron Jones and Sean Trott.Cameron is a PhD candidate in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. His research compares how humans and large language models process language about world knowledge, situation models, and theory of mind.Sean is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Cognitive Science Department at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests include probing large

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59:43

Nicholas Thompson: AI and Journalism

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/02/15

In episode 111 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nicholas Thompson.Nicholas is the CEO of The Atlantic. Previously, he served as editor-in-chief of Wired and editor of Newyorker.com. Nick also cofounded Atavist, which sold to Automattic in 2018. Publications under Nick’s leadership have won numerous National Magazine Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, and one WIRED story he edited was the basis for the movie Argo. Nick is also the co-founder of Speakeasy AI, a software platform designed to

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119:03

Subbarao Kambhampati: Planning, Reasoning, and...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/02/08

In episode 110 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Subbarao Kambhampati.Professor Kambhampati is a professor of computer science at Arizona State University. He studies fundamental problems in planning and decision making, motivated by the challenges of human-aware AI systems. He is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Association for Computing machinery, and was an NSF Young

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55:41

Russ Maschmeyer: Spatial Commerce and AI in Retail

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/02/01

In episode 109 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Russ Maschmeyer.Russ is the Product Lead for AI and Spatial Commerce at Shopify. At Shopify, he leads a team that looks at how AI can better empower entrepreneurs, with a particular interest in how image generation can help make the lives of business owners and merchants more productive. He previously led design for multiple services at Facebook and co-founded Primer, an AR-enabled interior design marketplace.Have suggestions for future

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67:45

Benjamin Breen: The Intersecting Histories of...

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/01/25

In episode 108 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Benjamin Breen.Professor Breen is an associate professor of history at UC Santa Cruz specializing in the history of science, medicine, globalization, and the impacts of technological change. He is the author of multiple books including The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade and the more recent Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, which you can

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133:24

Ted Gibson: The Structure and Purpose of Language

The Gradient: Perspectives on AI ·

2024/01/18

In episode 107 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Ted Gibson.Ted is a Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT. He leads the TedLab, which investigates why languages look the way they do; the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and how people learn, represent, and process language.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast: Apple Podcasts |

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147 results

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