The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
The Gradient: Perspectives on AI is a podcast featuring deeply researched, technical interviews with experts who are thinking about artificial intelligence and technology. Hosted by Daniel Bashir, the show explores cutting-edge AI topics through in-depth conversations. The podcast is part of The Gradient publication, which covers AI research and its societal implications.
Episodes
2025 in AI, with Nathan Benaich
Episode 144Happy New Year! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the fourth time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of AI news and advancements, including selections from this year’s State of AI Report.If you’ve stuck around and continue to listen, I’m really thankful you’re here. I love hearing from you.You can find Nathan and Air Street Press here on Substack and on Twi
Iason Gabriel: Value Alignment and the Ethics of Advanced AI Systems
Episode 143I spoke with Iason Gabriel about:* Value alignment* Technology and worldmaking* How AI systems affect individuals and the social worldIason is a philosopher and Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. His work focuses on the ethics of artificial intelligence, including questions about AI value alignment, distributive justice, language ethics and human rights.You can find him
2024 in AI, with Nathan Benaich
Episode 142Happy holidays! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the third time, Nathan Benaich and I did our yearly roundup of all the AI news and advancements you need to know. This includes selections from this year’s State of AI Report, some early takes on o3, a few minutes LARPing as China Guys……… If you’ve stuck around and continue to listen, I’m really thankful you’re here.
Philip Goff: Panpsychism as a Theory of Consciousness
Episode 141I spoke with Professor Philip Goff about:* What a “post-Galilean” science of consciousness looks like* How panpsychism helps explain consciousness and the hybrid cosmopsychist viewEnjoy!Philip Goff is a British author, idealist philosopher, and professor at Durham University whose research focuses on philosophy of mind and consciousness. Specifically, it focuses on how consciousness can
Some Changes at The Gradient
Hi everyone!If you’re a new subscriber or listener, welcome. If you’re not new, you’ve probably noticed that things have slowed down from us a bit recently. Hugh Zhang, Andrey Kurenkov and I sat down to recap some of The Gradient’s history, where we are now, and how things will look going forward. To summarize and give some context:The Gradient has been around for around 6 years now – we began as
Jacob Andreas: Language, Grounding, and World Models
Episode 140I spoke with Professor Jacob Andreas about:* Language and the world* World models* How he’s developed as a scientistEnjoy!Jacob is an associate professor at MIT in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as well as the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His research aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning, and to
Evan Ratliff: Our Future with Voice Agents
Episode 139I spoke with Evan Ratliff about:* Shell Game, Evan’s new podcast, where he creates an AI voice clone of himself and sets it loose. * The end of the Longform Podcast and his thoughts on the state of journalism. Enjoy!Evan is an award-winning investigative journalist, bestselling author, podcast host, and entrepreneur. He’s the author of the The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire,
Meredith Ringel Morris: Generative AI's HCI Moment
Episode 138I spoke with Meredith Morris about:* The intersection of AI and HCI and why we need more cross-pollination between AI and adjacent fields* Disability studies and AI* Generative ghosts and technological determinism* Developing a useful definition of AGII didn’t get to record an intro for this episode since I’ve been sick. Enjoy!Meredith is Director for Human-AI Interaction Research for G
Davidad Dalrymple: Towards Provably Safe AI
Episode 137I spoke with Davidad Dalrymple about:* His perspectives on AI risk* ARIA (the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency) and its Safeguarded AI ProgrammeEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Davidad is a Programme Director at ARIA. He was most recently a Research Fellow in technical AI safety at Oxford. He co-invented the top-40 cryptocurrency Filecoin, led an international neuroscienc
Clive Thompson: Tales of Technology
Episode 136I spoke with Clive Thompson about:* How he writes* Writing about the climate and biking across the US* Technology culture and persistent debates in AI* PoetryEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Clive is a journalist who writes about science and technology. He is a contributing writer forWired magazine, and is currently writing his next book about micromobility and cycling across the US
Judy Fan: Reverse Engineering the Human Cognitive Toolkit
Episode 136I spoke with Judy Fan about:* Our use of physical artifacts for sensemaking* Why cognitive tools can be a double-edged sword* Her approach to scientific inquiry and how that approach has developedEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Judy is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford and director of the Cognitive Tools Lab. Her lab employs converging approaches from cognitive science,
L.M. Sacasas: The Questions Concerning Technology
Episode 135I spoke with L. M. Sacasas about:* His writing and intellectual influences* The value of asking hard questions about technology and our relationship to it* What happens when we decide to outsource skills and competency* Evolving notions of what it means to be human and questions about how to live a good lifeEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Michael is Executive Director of the Christ
Pete Wolfendale: The Revenge of Reason
Episode 134I spoke with Pete Wolfendale about:* The flaws in longtermist thinking* Selections from his new book, The Revenge of Reason* Metaphysics* What philosophy has to say about reason and AIEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Pete is an independent philosopher based in Newcastle. Dr. Wolfendale got both his undergraduate degree and his Ph.D in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. His Ph.
Peter Lee: Computing Theory and Practice, and GPT-4's Impact
Episode 133I spoke with Peter Lee about:* His early work on compiler generation, metacircularity, and type theory* Paradoxical problems* GPT-4s impact, Microsoft’s “Sparks of AGI” paper, and responses and criticismEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Peter is President of Microsoft Research. He leads Microsoft Research and incubates new research-powered products and lines of business in areas such
Manuel & Lenore Blum: The Conscious Turing Machine
Episode 132I spoke with Manuel and Lenore Blum about:* Their early influences and mentors* The Conscious Turing Machine and what theoretical computer science can tell us about consciousnessEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Manuel is a pioneer in the field of theoretical computer science and the winner of the 1995 Turing Award in recognition of his contributions to the foundations of computation
Kevin Dorst: Against Irrationalist Narratives
Episode 131I spoke with Professor Kevin Dorst about:* Subjective Bayesianism and epistemology foundations* What happens when you’re uncertain about your evidence* Why it’s rational for people to polarize on political mattersEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Kevin is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He works at the border between philosophy and socia
David Pfau: Manifold Factorization and AI for Science
Episode 130I spoke with David Pfau about:* Spectral learning and ML* Learning to disentangle manifolds and (projective) representation theory* Deep learning for computational quantum mechanics* Picking and pursuing research problems and directionsDavid’s work is really (times k for some very large value of k) interesting—I’ve been inspired to descend a number of rabbit holes because of it. (if you
Dan Hart and Michelle Michael: Bringing AI to Students in New South Wales
Episode 129I spoke with Dan Hart and Michelle Michael about:* Developing NSWEduChat, an AI-powered chatbot designed and delivered by the NSW Department of Education for students and teachers.* The challenges in effectively teaching students as technology develops* Understanding and defining the importance of the classroomEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Dan Hart is Head of AI, and Michelle Mic
Kristin Lauter: Private AI, Homomorphic Encryption, and AI for Cryptography
Episode 129I spoke with Kristin Lauter about:* Elliptic curve cryptography and homomorphic encryption* Standardizing cryptographic protocols* Machine Learning on encrypted data* Attacking post-quantum cryptography with AIEnjoy—and let me know what you think!Kristin is Senior Director of FAIR Labs North America (2022—present), based in Seattle. Her current research areas are AI4Crypto and Private A
Sergiy Nesterenko: Automating Circuit Board Design
Episode 128I spoke with Sergiy Nesterenko about:* Developing an automated system for designing PCBs* Difficulties in human and automated PCB design* Building a startup at the intersection of different areas of expertiseBy the way — I hit 40 ratings on Apple Podcasts (and am at 66 on Spotify). It’d mean a lot (really, a lot) if you’d consider leaving a rating or a review. I read everything, and it’
C. Thi Nguyen: Values, Legibility, and Gamification
Episode 127I spoke with Christopher Thi Nguyen about:* How we lose control of our values* The tradeoffs of legibility, aggregation, and simplification* Gamification and its risksEnjoy—and let me know what you think!C. Thi Nguyen as of July 2020 is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah. His research focuses on how social structures and technology can shape our rationality and
Vivek Natarajan: Towards Biomedical AI
Episode 126I spoke with Vivek Natarajan about:* Improving access to medical knowledge with AI* How an LLM for medicine should behave* Aspects of training Med-PaLM and AMIE* How to facilitate appropriate amounts of trust in users of medical AI systemsVivek Natarajan is a Research Scientist at Google Health AI advancing biomedical AI to help scale world class healthcare to everyone. Vivek is particu
Thomas Mullaney: A Global History of the Information Age
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
Seth Lazar: Normative Philosophy of Computing
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 pub
Suhail Doshi: The Future of Computer Vision
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 edit
Azeem Azhar: The Exponential View
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 Exponentia
David Thorstad: Bounded Rationality and the Case Against Longtermism
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 Aff
Ryan Tibshirani: Statistics, Nonparametric Regression, Conformal Prediction
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,
Sasha Luccioni: Connecting the Dots Between AI's Environmental and Social Impacts
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, organ
Michael Sipser: Problems in the Theory of Computation
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 Mat
Andrew Lee: How AI will Shape the Future of Email
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
Joss Fong: Videomaking, AI, and Science Communication
Episode 117“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
Kate Park: Data Engines for Vision and Language
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 (
Ben Wellington: ML for Finance and Storytelling through Data
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 governm
Venkatesh Rao: Protocols, Intelligence, and Scaling
“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. Ven
Sasha Rush: Building Better NLP Systems
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 m
Cameron Jones & Sean Trott: Understanding, Grounding, and Reference in LLMs
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
Nicholas Thompson: AI and Journalism
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
Subbarao Kambhampati: Planning, Reasoning, and Interpretability in the Age of LLMs
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 Associat
Russ Maschmeyer: Spatial Commerce and AI in Retail
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
Benjamin Breen: The Intersecting Histories of Psychedelics and AI Research
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
Ted Gibson: The Structure and Purpose of Language
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 u
Harvey Lederman: Propositional Attitudes and Reference in Language Models
In episode 106 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Harvey Lederman.Professor Lederman is a professor of philosophy at UT Austin. He has broad interests in contemporary philosophy and in the history of philosophy: his areas of specialty include philosophical logic, the Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming, epistemology, and philosophy of language. He has recently been worki
Eric Jang: AI is Good For You
In episode 105 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Eric Jang.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 | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:25) Updates since Eric’s last interview* (06:07) The problem space
2023 in AI, with Nathan Benaich
In episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich.Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a VC firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts. Nathan co-au
Kathleen Fisher: DARPA and AI for National Security
In episode 103 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Dr. Kathleen Fisher.As the director of DARPA’s Information Innovation Office (I2O), Dr. Kathleen Fisher oversees a portfolio that includes most of the agency’s AI-related research and development efforts, including the recent AI Forward initiative. AI Forward explores new directions for AI research that will result in trustworthy syst
Peter Tse: The Neuroscience of Consciousness and Free Will
In episode 102 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Peter Tse.Professor Tse is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and chair of the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on using brain and behavioral data to constrain models of the neural bases of attention and consciousness, unconscious processing that precedes and constructs consc
Vera Liao: AI Explainability and Transparency
In episode 101 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Vera Liao.Vera is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) Montréal where she is part of the FATE (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) group. She is trained in human-computer interaction research and works on human-AI interaction, currently focusing on explainable AI and responsible AI. She aims to bridge eme
Thomas Dietterich: From the Foundations
In episode 100 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Thomas Dietterich.Professor Dietterich is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. He is a pioneer in the field of machine learning, and has authored more than 225 refereed publications and two books. His current research topics include robust a
Martin Wattenberg: ML Visualization and Interpretability
In episode 99 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Martin Wattenberg.Professor Wattenberg is a professor at Harvard and part-time member of Google Research’s People + AI Research (PAIR) initiative, which he co-founded. His work, with long-time collaborator Fernanda Viégas, focuses on making AI technology broadly accessible and reflective of human values. At Google, Professor
Laurence Liew: AI Singapore
In episode 98 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Laurence Liew.Laurence is the Director for AI Innovation at AI Singapore. He is driving the adoption of AI by the Singapore ecosystem through the 100 Experiments, AI Apprenticeship Programmes and the Generational AI Talent Development initiative. He is the current Co-Chair of the Innovations and Commercialisation working group and Co-C
Michael Levin & Adam Goldstein: Intelligence and its Many Scales
In episode 97 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Michael Levin and Adam Goldstein. Professor Levin is a Distinguished Professor and Vannevar Bush Chair in the Biology Department at Tufts University. He also directs the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His group, the Levin Lab, focuses on understanding the biophysical mechanisms that implement decision-making during complex
Jonathan Frankle: From Lottery Tickets to LLMs
In episode 96 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Jonathan Frankle.Jonathan is the Chief Scientist at MosaicML and (as of release). Jonathan completed his PhD at MIT, where he investigated the properties of sparse neural networks that allow them to train effectively through his lottery ticket hypothesis. He also spends a portion of his time working on technology policy, and currently
Nao Tokui: "Surfing" Musical Creativity with AI
In episode 95 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nao Tokui.Nao Tokui is an artist/DJ and researcher based in Tokyo. While pursuing his Ph.D. at The University of Tokyo, he produced his first music album and singles using AI, including a 12-inch record with Nujabes, a legendary Japanese hip-hop producer. After completing his Ph.D. research, he founded Qosmo, AI Creativity and Music La
Divyansh Kaushik: The Realities of AI Policy
In episode 94 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Divyansh Kaushik.Divyansh is the Associate Director for Emerging Technologies and National Security at the Federation of American Scientists where his focus areas include, amongst other things, AI policy, STEM immigration, and US-China strategic competition. He holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on designing
Tal Linzen: Psycholinguistics and Language Modeling
In episode 93 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Tal Linzen.Professor Linzen is an Associate Professor of Linguistics and Data Science at New York University and a Research Scientist at Google. He directs the Computation and Psycholinguistics Lab, where he and his collaborators use behavioral experiments and computational methods to study how people learn and understand lan
Kevin K. Yang: Engineering Proteins with ML
In episode 92 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Kevin K. Yang.Kevin is a senior researcher at Microsoft Research (MSR) who works on problems at the intersection of machine learning and biology, with an emphasis on protein engineering. He completed his PhD at Caltech with Frances Arnold on applying machine learning to protein engineering. Before joining MSR, he was a machine learning
Arjun Ramani & Zhengdong Wang: Why Transformative AI is Really, Really Hard to Achieve
In episode 91 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Arjun Ramani and Zhengdong Wang. Arjun is the global business and economics correspondent at The Economist.Zhengdong is a research engineer at Google DeepMind.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 | Spotif
Miles Grimshaw: Benchmark, LangChain, and Investing in AI
In episode 90 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Miles Grimshaw.Miles is General Partner at Benchmark. He was previously a General Partner at Thrive Capital, where he helped the firm raise its fourth and fifth funds, and sourced deals in Lattice, Mapbox, Benchling, and Airtable, among others.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us
Shreya Shankar: Machine Learning in the Real World
In episode 89 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Shreya Shankar.Shreya is a computer scientist pursuing her PhD in databases at UC Berkeley. Her research interest is in building end-to-end systems for people to develop production-grade machine learning applications. She was previously the first ML engineer at Viaduct, did research at Google Brain, and software engineering at Facebook
Stevan Harnad: AI's Symbol Grounding Problem
In episode 88 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stevan Harnad.Stevan Harnad is professor of psychology and cognitive science at Université du Québec à Montréal, adjunct professor of cognitive science at McGill University, and professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. His research is on category learning, categorical perception, symbol ground
Terry Winograd: AI, HCI, Language, and Cognition
In episode 87 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Terry Winograd. Professor Winograd is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University. His research focuses on human-computer interaction design and the design of technologies for development. He founded the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group, where he directed the teaching programs and HCI research. He i
Gil Strang: Linear Algebra and Deep Learning
In episode 86 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Gil Strang. Professor Strang is one of the world’s foremost mathematics educators and a mathematician with contributions to finite element theory, the calculus of variations, wavelet analysis, and linear algebra. He has spent six decades teaching mathematics at MIT, where he was the MathWorks Professor of Mathematics. He was
Anant Agarwal: AI for Education
In episode 85 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Anant AgarwalAnant Agarwal is the chief platform officer of 2U, and founder of edX. Anant taught the first edX course on circuits and electronics from MIT, which drew 155,000 students from 162 countries. He has served as the director of CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is a professor of electr
Raphaël Millière: The Vector Grounding Problem and Self-Consciousness
In episode 84 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Raphaël Millière.Professor Millière is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. Previously, he was the 2020 Robert A. Burt Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience in Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society, and completed h
Peli Grietzer: A Mathematized Philosophy of Literature
In episode 83 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Peli Grietzer. Peli is a scholar whose work borrows mathematical ideas from machine learning theory to think through “ambient” and ineffable phenomena like moods, vibes, cultural logics, and structures of feeling. He is working on a book titled Big Mood: A Transcendental-Computational Essay in Art and contributes to the experimental li
Ryan Drapeau: Battling Fraud with ML at Stripe
In episode 82 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ryan Drapeau.Ryan is a Staff Software Engineer at Stripe and technical lead for Stripe’s Payment Fraud organization, which uses machine learning to help prevent billions of dollars of credit card and payments fraud for business every year.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at ed
Shiv Rao: Enabling Better Patient Care with AI
In episode 81 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Shiv Rao.Shiv Rao, MD is the co-founder and CEO of Abridge, a healthcare conversation company that uses cutting-edge NLP and generative AI to bring context and understanding to every medical conversation. Shiv previously served as an Executive Vice President at UPMC Enterprises, managing the provider-facing portfolio of technology inve
Hugo Larochelle: Deep Learning as Science
In episode 80 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Hugo Larochelle. Professor Larochelle leads the Montreal Google DeepMind team and is adjunct professor at Université de Montréal and a Canada CIFAR Chair. His research focuses on the study and development of deep learning algorithms.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us a
Jeremie Harris: Realistic Alignment and AI Policy
In episode 79 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Jeremie Harris.Jeremie is co-founder of Gladstone AI, author of the book Quantum Physics Made Me Do It, and co-host of the Last Week in AI Podcast. Jeremy previously hosted the Towards Data Science podcast and worked on a number of other startups after leaving a PhD in physics.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedba
Antoine Blondeau: Alpha Intelligence Capital and Investing in AI
In episode 78 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Antoine Blondeau.Antoine is a serial AI entrepreneur and Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Alpha Intelligence Capital. He was chief executive at Dejima when the firm worked on CALO, one of the biggest AI projects in US history and precursor to Apple’s Siri. Later, he co-founded Sentient Technologies, which boasted the title of world’s
Joon Park: Generative Agents and Human-Computer Interaction
In episode 77 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Joon Park.Joon is a third-year PhD student at Stanford, advised by Professors Michael Bernstein and Percy Liang. He designs, builds, and evaluates interactive systems that support new forms of human-computer interaction by leveraging state-of-the-art advances in natural language processing such as large language models. His research in
Christoffer Holmgård: AI for Video Games
In episode 76 of The Gradient Podcast, Andrey Kurenkov speaks to Dr Christoffer HolmgårdDr. Holmgård is a co-founder and the CEO of Modl.ai, which is building AI Engine for game development. Before starting the company, Christoffer was director of the indie game studio Die Gute Fabrik (which is German for "The Good Factory"), and has also done extensive research as an assistant professor in AI and
Riley Goodside: The Art and Craft of Prompt Engineering
In episode 75 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Riley Goodside. Riley is a Staff Prompt Engineer at Scale AI. Riley began posting GPT-3 prompt examples and screenshot demonstrations in 2022. He previously worked as a data scientist at OkCupid, Grindr, and CopyAI.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubs
Talia Ringer: Formal Verification and Deep Learning
In episode 74 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Talia Ringer.Professor Ringer is an Assistant Professor with the Programming Languages, Formal Methods, and Software Engineering group at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Their research leverages proof engineering to allow programmers to more easily build formally verified software systems.Have suggestions for
Brigham Hyde: AI for Clinical Decision-Making
In episode 72 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Brigham Hyde.Brigham is Co-Founder and CEO of Atropos Health. Prior to Atropos, he served as President of Data and Analytics at Eversana, a life sciences commercialization service provider. He led the investment in Concert AI in the oncology real-world data space at Symphony AI. Brigham has also held research faculty positions at Tufts
Scott Aaronson: Against AI Doomerism
In episode 72 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Scott Aaronson. Scott is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center. His research interests focus on the capabilities and limits of quantum computers and computational complexity theory more broadly. He has recently been on leave to
Ted Underwood: Machine Learning and the Literary Imagination
In episode 71 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ted Underwood.Ted is a professor in the School of Information Sciences with an appointment in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Trained in English literary history, he turned his research focus to applying machine learning to large digital collections. His work explores literary patterns that
Irene Solaiman: AI Policy and Social Impact
In episode 70 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Irene Solaiman.Irene is an expert in AI safety and policy and the Policy Director at HuggingFace, where she conducts social impact research and develops public policy. In her former role at OpenAI, she initiated and led bias and social impact research at OpenAI in addition to leading public policy. She built AI policy at Zillow group a
Drago Anguelov: Waymo and Autonomous Vehicles
In episode 69 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Drago Anguelov.Drago is currently a Distinguished Scientist and Head of Research at Waymo, where he joined in 2018. Earlier, he spent eight years at Google working on 3D vision and pose estimation for StreetView, then leading a research team that developed computer vision systems for annotating Google Photos. He has been involved in de
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