Towards Data Science

130. Edouard Harris - New Research: Advanced AI may tend to seek power *by default*

12 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Progress in AI has been accelerating dramatically in recent years, and even months. It seems like every other day, there’s a new, previously-believe...

129. Amber Teng - Building apps with a new generation of language models

05 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It’s no secret that a new generation of powerful and highly scaled language models is taking the world by storm. Companies like OpenAI, AI21Labs, an...

128. David Hirko - AI observability and data as a cybersecurity weakness

28 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Imagine you’re a big hedge fund, and you want to go out and buy yourself some data. Data is really valuable for you — it’s literally going to sh...

127. Matthew Stewart - The emerging world of ML sensors

21 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Today, we live in the era of AI scaling. It seems like everywhere you look people are pushing to make large language models larger, or more multi-moda...

126. JR King - Does the brain run on deep learning?

14 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Deep learning models — transformers in particular — are defining the cutting edge of AI today. They’re based on an architecture called an artifi...

125. Ryan Fedasiuk - Can the U.S. and China collaborate on AI safety?

07 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It’s no secret that the US and China are geopolitical rivals. And it’s also no secret that that rivalry extends into AI — an area both count...

124. Alex Watson - Synthetic data could change everything

18 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a website called thispersondoesnotexist.com. When you visit it, you’re confronted by a high-resolution, photorealistic AI-generated pictur...

123. Ala Shaabana and Jacob Steeves - AI on the blockchain (it actually might just make sense)

12 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 —...

122. Sadie St. Lawrence - Trends in data science

04 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 an...

121. Alexei Baevski - data2vec and the future of multimodal learning

27 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 tw...

120. Liam Fedus and Barrett Zoph - AI scaling with mixture of expert models

20 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

119. Jaime Sevilla - Projecting AI progress from compute trends

13 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

118. Angela Fan - Generating Wikipedia articles with AI

06 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Generating well-referenced and accurate Wikipedia articles has always been an important problem: Wikipedia has essentially become the Internet's encyc...

117. Beena Ammanath - Defining trustworthy AI

30 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 trus...

116. Katya Sedova - AI-powered disinformation, present and future

23 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 wer...

115. Irina Rish - Out-of-distribution generalization

09 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 colo...

114. Sam Bowman - Are we *under-hyping* AI?

02 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Google the phrase “AI over-hyped”, and you’ll find literally dozens of articles from the likes of Forbes, Wired, and Scientific American, all ar...

113. Yaron Singer - Catching edge cases in AI

09 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 th...

112. Tali Raveh - AI, single cell genomics, and the new era of computational biology

02 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Until very recently, the study of human disease involved looking at big things — like organs or macroscopic systems — and figuring out when and ho...

111. Mo Gawdat - Scary Smart: A former Google exec’s perspective on AI risk

26 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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, “C...

110. Alex Turner - Will powerful AIs tend to seek power?

19 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

109. Danijar Hafner - Gaming our way to AGI

12 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Until recently, AI systems have been narrow — they’ve only been able to perform the specific tasks that they were explicitly trained for. And ...

108. Last Week In AI — 2021: The (full) year in review

05 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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...

107. Kevin Hu - Data observability and why it matters

15 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

106. Yang Gao - Sample-efficient AI

08 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Historically, AI systems have been slow learners. For example, a computer vision model often needs to see tens of thousands of hand-written digits bef...

105. Yannic Kilcher - A 10,000-foot view of AI

01 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

104. Ken Stanley - AI without objectives

24 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 wel...

103. Gillian Hadfield - How to create explainable AI regulations that actually make sense

17 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 pr...

102. Wendy Foster - AI ethics as a user experience challenge

10 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 f...

101. Ayanna Howard - AI and the trust problem

03 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

100. Max Jaderberg - Open-ended learning at DeepMind

27 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

99. Margaret Mitchell - (Practical) AI ethics

20 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 — ...

98. Mike Tung - Are knowledge graphs AI’s next big thing?

13 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

97. Anthony Habayeb - The present and future of AI regulation

06 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

96. Jan Leike - AI alignment at OpenAI

29 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

95. Francesca Rossi - Thinking, fast and slow: AI edition

22 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The recent success of large transformer models in AI raises new questions about the limits of current strategies: can we expect deep learning, reinfor...

94. Divya Siddarth - Are we thinking about AI wrong?

28 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

AI research is often framed as a kind of human-versus-machine rivalry that will inevitably lead to the defeat — and even wholesale replacement o...

93. 2021: A year in AI (so far) - Reviewing the biggest AI stories of 2021 with our friends at the Let’s Talk AI podcast

21 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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, Dee...

92. Daniel Filan - Peering into neural nets for AI safety

14 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

91. Peter Gao - Self-driving cars: Past, present and future

07 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

90. Jeffrey Ding - China’s AI ambitions and why they matter

30 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There are a lot of reasons to pay attention to China’s AI initiatives. Some are purely technological: Chinese companies are producing increasingly h...

89. Pointing AI in the right direction - A cross-over episode with the Banana Data podcast!

23 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

88. Oren Etzioni - The case against (worrying about) existential risk from AI

16 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 p...

87. Evan Hubinger - The Inner Alignment Problem

09 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

86. Andy Jones - AI Safety and the Scaling Hypothesis

02 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

85. Brian Christian - The Alignment Problem

26 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 maxi...

84. Eliano Marques - The (evolving) world of AI privacy and data security

19 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 th...

83. Rosie Campbell - Should all AI research be published?

12 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

82. Jakob Foerster - The high cost of automated weapons

05 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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

81. Nicolas Miailhe - AI risk is a global problem

28 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 gr...

80. Yan Li - The Surprising Challenges of Global AI Philanthropy

21 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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, align...

79. Ryan Carey - What does your AI want?

14 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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’...

78. Melanie Mitchell - Existential risk from AI: A skeptical perspective

07 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 co...

77. Josh Fairfield - AI advances, but can the law keep up?

31 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Powered by Moore’s law, and a cluster of related trends, technology has been improving at an exponential pace across many sectors. AI capabilities i...

76. Stuart Armstrong - AI: Humanity's Endgame?

24 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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 nex...

75. Georg Northoff - Consciousness and AI

17 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

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...

74. Ethan Perez - Making AI safe through debate

10 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Most AI researchers are confident that we will one day create superintelligent systems — machines that can significantly outperform humans acros...

73. David Roodman - Economic history and the road to the singularity

03 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There’s a minor mystery in economics that may suggest that things are about to get really, really weird for humanity. And that mystery is this: many...

72. Margot Gerritsen - Does AI have to be understandable to be ethical?

24 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As AI systems have become more ubiquitous, people have begun to pay more attention to their ethical implications. Those implications are potentially e...

71. Ben Garfinkel - Superhuman AI and the future of democracy and government

17 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As we continue to develop more and more sophisticated AI systems, an increasing number of economists, technologists and futurists have been trying to ...

70. Sarah Williams - What does ethical AI even mean?

10 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There’s no question that AI ethics has received a lot of well-deserved attention lately. But ask the average person what ethics AI means, and you’...

69. Anders Sandberg - Answering the Fermi Question: Is AI our Great Filter?

03 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The apparent absence of alien life in our universe has been a source of speculation and controversy in scientific circles for decades. If we assume th...

68. Silvia Milano - Ethical problems with recommender systems

27 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

One of the consequences of living in a world where we have every kind of data we could possible want at our fingertips, is that we have far more data ...

67. Joaquin Quiñonero-Candela - Responsible AI at Facebook

20 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Facebook routinely deploys recommendation systems and predictive models that affect the lives of billions of people everyday. That kind of reach comes...

66. Owain Evans - Predicting the future of AI

13 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Most researchers agree we’ll eventually reach a point where our AI systems begin to exceed human performance at virtually every economically valuabl...

65. Helen Toner - The strategic and security implications of AI

06 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

With every new technology comes the potential for abuse. And while AI is clearly starting to deliver an awful lot of value, it’s also creating new s...

64. David Krueger - Managing the incentives of AI

30 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What does a neural network system want to do? That might seem like a straightforward question. You might imagine that the answer is “whatever the lo...

63. Geordie Rose - Will AGI need to be embodied?

23 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The leap from today’s narrow AI to a more general kind of intelligence seems likely to happen at some point in the next century. But no one knows ex...

62. Nicolai Baldin - AI meets the law: Bias, fairness, privacy and regulation

16 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The fields of AI bias and AI fairness are still very young. And just like most young technical fields, they’re dominated by theoretical discussions:...

61. Ben Goertzel - The unorthodox path to AGI

09 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

No one knows for sure what it’s going to take to make artificial general intelligence work. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t prominent re...

60. Rob Miles - Why should I care about AI safety?

02 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Progress in AI capabilities has consistently surprised just about everyone, including the very developers and engineers who build today’s most advan...

59. Matthew Stewart - Tiny ML and the future of on-device AI

25 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

When it comes to machine learning, we’re often led to believe that bigger is better. It’s now pretty clear that all else being equal, more data, m...

58. David Duvenaud - Using generative models for explainable AI

18 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1900s, all of our predictions were the direct product of human brains. Scientists, analysts, climatologists, mathematicians, bankers, law...

57. Dylan Hadfield-Menell - Humans in the loop

11 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Human beings are collaborating with artificial intelligences on an increasing number of high-stakes tasks. I’m not just talking about robot-assisted...

56. Annette Zimmermann - The ethics of AI

04 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

As AI systems have become more powerful, they’ve been deployed to tackle an increasing number of problems. Take computer vision. Less than a decade ...

55. Rohin Shah - Effective altruism, AI safety, and learning human preferences from the state of the world

28 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

If you walked into a room filled with objects that were scattered around somewhat randomly, how important or expensive would you assume those objects ...

54. Tim Rocktäschel - Deep reinforcement learning, symbolic learning and the road to AGI

15 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Reinforcement learning can do some pretty impressive things. It can optimize ad targeting, help run self-driving cars, and even win StarCraft games. B...

53. Edouard Harris - Emerging problems in machine learning: making AI "good"

08 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Where do we want our technology to lead us? How are we falling short of that target? What risks might advanced AI systems pose to us in the future, an...

52. Sanyam Bhutani - Networking like a pro in data science

23 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Networking is the most valuable career advancement skill in data science. And yet, almost paradoxically, most data scientists don’t spend any time o...

51. Adrien Treuille and Tim Conkling - Streamlit Is All You Need

16 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

We’ve talked a lot about “full stack” data science on the podcast. To many, going full-stack is one of those long-term goals that we never get t...

50. Ken Jee - Building your brand in data science

09 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It’s no secret that data science is an area where brand matters a lot. In fact, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from A/B testing ways to help ...

49. Catherine Zhou - The data science of learning

02 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

If you’re interested in upping your coding game, or your data science game in general, then it’s worth taking some time to understand the process ...

48. Emmanuel Ameisen - Beyond the jupyter notebook: how to build data science products

26 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Data science is about much more than jupyter notebooks, because data science problems are about more than machine learning. What data should I collect...

47. Goku Mohandas - Industry research and how to show off your projects

19 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Project-building is the single most important activity that you can get up to if you’re trying to keep your machine learning skills sharp or break i...

46. Ihab Ilyas - Data cleaning is finally being automated

12 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

It’s cliché to say that data cleaning accounts for 80% of a data scientist’s job, but it’s directionally true. That’s too bad, because fun th...

45. Kenny Ning - Is data science merging with data engineering?

05 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

There’s been a lot of talk about the future direction of data science, and for good reason. The space is finally coming into its own, and as the Wil...

44. Jakob Foerster - Multi-agent reinforcement learning and the future of AI

29 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Reinforcement learning has gotten a lot of attention recently, thanks in large part to systems like AlphaGo and AlphaZero, which have highlighted its ...

43. Ian Scott - Data science at Deloitte

22 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Data science can look very different from one company to the next, and it’s generally difficult to get a consistent opinion on the question of what ...

42. Will Grathwohl - Energy-based models and the future of generative algorithms

15 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Machine learning in grad school and machine learning in industry are very different beasts. In industry, deployment and data collection become key, an...

41. Solmaz Shahalizadeh - Data science in high-growth companies

08 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

One of the themes that I’ve seen come up increasingly in the past few months is the critical importance of product thinking in data science. As new ...

40. David Meza - Data science at NASA

01 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Machine learning isn’t rocket science, unless you’re doing it at NASA. And if you happen to be doing data science at NASA, you have something in c...

39. Nick Pogrebnyakov - Data science at Reuters, and the remote work after the coronavirus

24 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Nick Pogrebnyakov is a Senior Data Scientist at Thomson Reuters, an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, and the founder of Leverness, a...

38. Matthew Stewart - Data privacy and machine learning in environmental science

17 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

One Thursday afternoon in 2015, I got a spontaneous notification on my phone telling me how long it would take to drive to my favourite restaurant und...

37. Sean Knapp - The brave new world of data engineering

10 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

There’s been a lot of talk in data science circles about techniques like AutoML, which are dramatically reducing the time it takes for data scientis...

36. Max Welling - The future of machine learning

03 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

For the last decade, advances in machine learning have come from two things: improved compute power and better algorithms. These two areas have become...

35. Rubén Harris - Learning and looking for jobs in quarantine

27 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Coronavirus quarantines fundamentally change the dynamics of learning, and the dynamics of the job search. Just a few months ago, in-person bootcamps ...

34. Denise Gosnell and Matthias Broecheler - You should really learn about graph databases. Here’s why.

20 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

One great way to get ahead in your career is to make good bets on what technologies are going to become important in the future, and to invest time in...

33. Roland Memisevic - Machines that can see and hear

13 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

One of the most interesting recent trends in machine learning has been the combination of different types of data in order to be able to unlock new us...

32. Bahador Khaleghi - Explainable AI and AI interpretability

06 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

If I were to ask you to explain why you’re reading this blog post, you could answer in many different ways. For example, you could tell me “it’s...

31. Russell Pollari - Building habits and breaking into data science

29 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Most of us want to change our identities. And we usually have an idealized version of ourselves that we aspire to become — one who’s fitter, s...