The Robot Brains Podcast

Jitendra Malik: Building AI from the ground-up, sensorimotor before language

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 03:06:43 GMT

Jitendra Malik, Professor of EECS at UC Berkeley discusses with host Pieter Abbeel building AI from the ground-up and sensorimotor before language.

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Seb Boyer of Farmwise: AI that helps feed the world

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 03:22:18 GMT

Seb Boyer of Farmwise discusses with host Pieter Abbeel AI that helps feed the world.

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John Schulman of OpenAI on ChatGPT: invention, capabilities and limitations

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 15:42:52 GMT

John Schulman, co-founder OpenAI, discusses with host Pieter Abbeel the invention, capabilities, and limitations of ChatGPT.

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Yaniv Altshuler: reducing cow methane emissions with AI

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 14:09:27 GMT

Yaniv Altshuler, MIT Media Lab researcher, joins Pieter Abbeel to discuss reducing cow methane emissions with AI and more.

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Woody Hoburg: NASA Astronaut directly from the International Space Station

Wed, 12 Jul 2023 07:22:04 GMT

Woody Hoburg, a member of NASA’s Expedition 69 crew, joined Pieter Abbeel to discuss his life and work currently aboard the International Space Station.

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Jesse Levinson of Zoox: reinventing personal transportation from the ground up

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 05:47:16 GMT

Jesse Levinson, co-founder and CTO of Zoox joins Pieter Abbeel to discuss reinventing personal transportation from the ground up.

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Noam Brown: from Open AI on solving Poker and Diplomacy with AI

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 20:14:45 GMT

Noam Brown joins host Pieter Abbeel to discuss solving poker and Diplomacy with AI.

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Stephen Balaban: building the most cost-effective AI cloud

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 21:30:28 GMT

Stephen Balaban, CEO and founder of Lambda joins host Pieter Abbeel to discuss building the most cost-effective AI cloud.

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Rocky Duan: from OpenAI to Covariant and building foundation models for robotic automation

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 14:36:10 GMT

Rocky Duan, CTO of Covariant joins joins Host Pieter Abbeel to talk about his time at OpenAI to founding Covariant to build foundation models for robotic automation.

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Raffaello D'Andrea of Verity: how drones can find misplaced items and put on art shows

Wed, 24 May 2023 14:21:50 GMT

Raffaello D'Andrea of Verity, Kiva Systems, and ETH Zurich joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss how drones misplace items and put on art shows.

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Yejin Choi: teaching AI common sense and morality

Wed, 17 May 2023 19:31:22 GMT

Yejin Choi joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss how we can teach AI common sense and morality and what ChatGPT can't do yet.

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Geoff Hinton Returns: the Godfather of AI on quitting Google to warn of AI risks

Wed, 10 May 2023 16:29:32 GMT

Geoff Hinton, the "Godfather of AI" returns to the Robot Brains with Pieter Abeel to discuss quitting Google to warn of AI risks. Geoff and Peter discuss whether AI is smarter than people, the role of regulation, fusing human and artificial intelligence, and what Geoff's next steps will be.

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Lukas Biewald of Weights and Biases: solving pain-points of AI researchers

Wed, 03 May 2023 12:58:21 GMT

Lukas Biewald of Weights and Biases joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss solving the pain-points of AI researchers and practitioners.

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Nando de Freitas of DeepMind: generalizable AI to benefit everyone

Wed, 26 Apr 2023 10:30:05 GMT

Nando de Freitas of DeepMind joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss generalizable AI to benefit everyone.

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Richard Socher of You.com: the David taking on the "Search" Goliath Google

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 10:00:04 GMT

Richard Socher from You.com (and before that, Stanford, MetaMind, Salesforce) joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss the future of search, LLMs, AGI, You.com, Metamind, AIX Ventures.

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Raluca Ada Popa: how to train AI and keep your data confidential

Wed, 12 Apr 2023 12:30:54 GMT

Raluca Ada Popa from UC Berkeley, Opaque Systems, PreVeil joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss data privacy and AI, cloud enclaves, confidential and encrypted computing, differential privacy, PreVeil, and Opaque Systems.

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Aidan Gomez of Cohere: building instructable agents

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 15:39:57 GMT

Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss transformers, large language models, command and instruct models, prompt engineering, and LLMs competitive landscape.

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Alexandr Wang of ScaleAI: in AI your data writes the program

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 15:37:40 GMT

Alexandr Wang from Scale AI joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss data, labeling, foundation models, LLMs, truthfulness, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and AI for defense.

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Chelsea Finn: how to build AI that can keep up with an always changing world

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 12:44:54 GMT

Chelsea Finn joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss distribution shift, meta-learning, editing LLMs, single-life RL, and what can AI not (yet) do today.

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Yoshua Bengio: equipping AI with higher level cognition and creativity

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 15:24:02 GMT

Yoshua Bengio joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss large language models, higher level cognition, causality, responsible AI, and human creativity.

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Twitter Q&A with Geoff Hinton

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 07:14:15 GMT

Last week, we were honored to have Professor Geoff Hinton join the show for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Hinton’s journey in academia, as well as past 10 years with Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the AlexNet/ImageNet breakthrough moment; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.

As you might recall, we also gave our audience an opportunity to contribute questions for Geoff via Twitter. We received so many amazing questions from our audience that we had to break down our time with Geoff into two parts! In this episode, we’ll discuss some of these questions with Geoff.

Tune in to get Geoff’s answers to the following questions AND MORE:

Are you concerned with AI becoming too successful?

What is the connection between mania and genius?

What childhood experiences shaped him the most?

What is next in AI?

What should PhD students focus on?

How conscious do you think today's neural nets are?

How important is embodiment for intelligence?

How does the brain work?

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Geoff Hinton on revolutionizing artificial intelligence... again

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 08:06:42 GMT

Over the past ten years, AI has experienced breakthrough after breakthrough in everything from computer vision to speech recognition, protein folding prediction, and so much more.

Many of these advancements hinge on the deep learning work conducted by our guest, Geoff Hinton, who has fundamentally changed the focus and direction of the field. A recipient of the Turing Award, the equivalent of the Nobel prize for computer science, he has over half a million citations of his work.

Hinton has spent about half a century on deep learning, most of the time researching in relative obscurity. But that all changed in 2012 when Hinton and his students showed deep learning is better at image recognition than any other approaches to computer vision, and by a very large margin. That result, that moment, known as the ImageNet moment, changed the whole AI field. Pretty much everyone dropped what they had been doing and switched to deep learning.

Geoff joins Pieter in our two-part season finale for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Hinton’s journey from academia to Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.

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Clement Delangue of Hugging Face on building the GitHub of machine learning

Wed, 25 May 2022 06:24:52 GMT

Originally created to be an open domain conversational AI, your own ‘artificial BFF' that you could chat with when your real friends weren’t available — fast forward six years, and Hugging Face is the leading Natural Language Processing (NLP) start-up. The company is currently valued at $2B with over 10,000 companies using the open-source AI platform - including Bing, Apple, and Monzo.

Our guest, Clement Delangue, CEO of Hugging Face, believes in the sustainable long-term benefits of open-science and open-source collaboration and has built a community that fosters this goal. And while Hugging Face was initially mainly aimed at NLP, recently it is expanding to more machine learning domains, including computer vision and reinforcement learning.

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Amit Aggarwal of THE YES is making AI fashionable

Wed, 18 May 2022 07:00:47 GMT

As we all re-entered society over the last year, after months of WFH sweatpants and t-shirts, a personal stylist would have been helpful.

Well, now there’s AI for that - THE YES. By taking a quick style quiz, you’ll have daily product and brand recommendations and a personalized feed displaying exactly what you’re looking for — in your size, budget and preferences. The more you say “yes”, the more personalized your feed gets. Right now, the company only offers women clothes but may expand in the future.

The CTO of THE YES, Amit Aggarwal, joins the show to share how the company uses ML to create millions of unique stores daily for each one of their users.

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Spotify's Gustav Söderström on machine learning to personalize user experiences

Thu, 12 May 2022 04:10:56 GMT

Music is universal. It transcends language. Melodies have the power to trigger strong emotions. In fact, our brains release dopamine - the “feel good” hormone - when we listen to music.

Today’s guest, Spotify’s Chief R&D Officer Gustav Söderström, has been helping to bring the magic of music, personalized playlists, and more recently, podcasts to people around the world. He’s also led the platform to personalize individual content experiences with the help of artificial intelligence.

Pieter and Gustav discuss the platform’s early approach to AI & ML, how he wants to help content creators reach more listeners and the technological details of Spotify’s ability to automatically generate millions of new playlists every day.

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Adam Bry of Skydio is leading the next generation of autonomous drones

Wed, 04 May 2022 08:00:52 GMT

When you are skiing down a mountain, riding your bike along a forest trail, or surfing 6-footers, it is hard enough just to concentrate on what you are doing, let alone try to capture a video of the moment.

But what if you could hire a professional videographer to follow you and capture every move?

Well, now you can in the form of AI-powered drones from Skydio. While personal use is just one application, the company has found success across a multitude of use cases. In this episode, we’re joined by Adam Bry, co-founder and CEO of the unicorn startup Skydio, which produces drones that are fully autonomous with AI software as their pilot.

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Catapult Sports on AI that is changing the game

Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:00:04 GMT

Sports and artificial intelligence aren’t two areas that often intersect. That has begun to change as IoT and wearables have begun to be adopted by more professional sports teams. The data that’s produced can be used to identify areas of performance improvement, potential future injuries and insights about team structure on the field.

Today’s guest, Param Hegde, former CTO of Catapult Sports joined the show to share how the company is using data-driven intelligence to help athletes reach the top of their game. Please note: this interview was taped in late 2021. Since then, Param Hegde has moved on from Catapult to another endeavor.

Originally founded in Australia, Catapult Sports has been a leader in the sports analytics sector for some time. This year, the winner of the 2022 Super Bowl, the Los Angeles Rams, even wore Catapult Sports tech demonstrating just how far the company has come. Param and Pieter discuss the technicalities of building such software and other areas of sports that AI may be applied.

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Amit Prakash of ThoughtSpot on empowering companies to make data-driven decisions

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 08:00:17 GMT

Every business wants to be a data-driven business these days; basing decisions on tangible facts derived from historical precedents and clear-cut numbers. But that’s a lot easier said than done.

This episode’s guest, Amit Prakash, is on a mission to change that. Based on his experience working on Microsoft’s Bing and then at Google working on Google Brain, he co-founded Thoughtspot to make querying data as easy as having a simple conversation. Thoughtspot provides artificial intelligence (AI) and search-driven analytics.

The Sunnyvale, California-based company reached unicorn status in 2019, its latest valuation is $4.2B, and counts Nike, Walmart, and Apple among its clients.

Amit shares the story behind building the massive search system, his views on relational search, and how to teach a machine what a user thinks is most interesting.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Eric Horvitz of Microsoft on AI for the greater good

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 08:00:50 GMT

On Episode 15 of Season 2, we’re joined by Eric Horvitz, Microsoft’s first ever Chief Scientific Officer. His research spans theoretical and practical challenges with developing systems that perceive, learn, and reason. He’s the company’s top inventor since joining in 1993 with over 300 patents filed.

He has been elected Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Fellow of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

He was a member of the National Security Commission on AI and he also co-founded important groups like the Partnership on AI, a non-profit organization bringing together Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, DeepMind, IBM, and Microsoft to document the quality and impact of AI systems on things like criminal justice, the economy, and media integrity.

In his interview, he discusses everything from Microsoft’s relationship with AI to his own personal views on security implications of a future in which AI is ubiquitous.

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Andrew Song of Whisper AI on solving hearing loss with AI

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 13:08:47 GMT

The five senses...touch, sight, smell, taste, and hearing. They are critical to how we perceive the world around us. Without them, we are lost. And as we grow older, they tend to weaken particularly when it comes to sight and hearing. Today’s guest, Andrew Song, is the co-founder and CEO of Whisper AI, and he is on a mission to help give people great hearing regardless of their age.

After graduating from the University of Waterloo with degrees in mathematics and computer science, Andrew went to work at Facebook. While there, he saw firsthand the positive benefits gained from connecting with family and friends but wanted to make more of a direct impact.

After watching his grandfather lose his hearing and consequently, his connection to others and ability to engage socially, he wanted to create a better hearing aid that was smart enough to deduce what was most important for the user to hear. Listen to his whole story as Pieter explores the inspiration and technology of Whisper AI.

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Dean Ayanna Howard on why AI can never be truly unbiased

Wed, 30 Mar 2022 08:00:30 GMT

For Episode 13, we're joined by industry pioneer, Dean Ayanna Howard. She began working at NASA's JPL at 18-years old to help build the Mars Rover and never slowed down from there. She is a successful roboticist, entrepreneur, educator, and is the author of the recent book: Sex, Race, and Robots: How to be Human in the Age of AI.

Dr. Ayanna Howard is the current dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering. Before joining Ohio State, she was Professor at Georgia Tech, where she was the founder and director of the Human-Automation Systems Lab (HumAnS). She led a range of projects including applying her knowledge of the Rover's SmartNav abilities to create robots that could explore remote areas of Antartica and Alaska to collect data for studying climate change. In addition to her leadership at Ohio State, she also started Zyrobotics, a non-profit dedicated to helping children that require extra development support.

The conversation spans Ayanna's childhood, her inspirations like the Bionic Woman, and her views on building a more equitable AI ecosystem for all individuals.

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Shakir Mohamed of DeepMind on the power of deep learning

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:33:36 GMT

If any company is at the top of most people’s minds when it comes to AI, it’s DeepMind. They have been at the forefront of many major breakthroughs including AlphaGo, the first AI to beat a human Go world champion and AlphaFold, which revolutionized protein structure prediction.

Our guest on this week’s episode, Shakir Mohamed, joined DeepMind in the early days and has been an instrumental part of their success ever since. Shakir is a Senior Staff Scientist at DeepMind, an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, and a Honorary Professor of University College London. Shakir is also a founder and trustee of the Deep Learning Indaba, a grassroots organization aiming to build pan-African capacity and leadership in AI.

Pieter and Shakir discuss his career journey of coming to DeepMind, his professional accomplishments like using ML to solve the problem of nowcasting (short-term weather predictions), and his personal work of growing AI's global inclusion with orgs like Deep Learning Indaba.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Revolution Robotics is bringing a robotics team to every school

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 14:53:25 GMT

It doesn’t matter what country you live in, or what industry you build a career in, STEM skills are increasingly important - particularly for children and students who are yet to join the world of work. Introducing robotics to children at a young age in the same way that we enroll them in soccer or piano lessons should be a real consideration. However, the participation costs are often so prohibitive that it's out of the question for most schools and parents.

On Episode 11 of Season 2, we're joined by entrepreneur and philanthropist, Jared Schrieber. He envisions a world where there are as many elementary and high school robotics teams as there are basketball or football teams. He founded Revolution Robotics; a non-profit dedicated to making robotics hardware and software kits accessible to all communities, to make his vision into a reality.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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George Netscher of SafelyYou on the role of AI for fall detection

Wed, 09 Mar 2022 09:00:00 GMT

On Episode 10 of Season 2, Pieter is joined by the CEO of SafelyYou, George Netscher. Pieter and George first met at UC Berkeley's AI lab when George was pursuing a PhD with a clear picture in his mind of how he would use it. And seven years later, George has stayed true to his mission of building AI to help people with dementia live better.

SafelyYou’s AI is raising the profile of technology solutions in the fight against dementia. While still a young company, SafelyYou has successfully reduced falls by 40% and has successfully reduced ER visits resulting from falls by 80%. George shares the company's technological successes and his vision for the future of AI, robots, and healthcare.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Flora Tasse on building computer vision-based customer service models

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 09:09:50 GMT

For Episode 9, we welcome an AI researcher and entrepreneur who has been on a remarkable journey, Flora Tasse. She grew up in Cameroon, where she completed her Bachelors in Mathematics at the University of Buea. She received a second Bachelors and a Masters in Computer Science at Rhodes and Cape Town in South Africa. She then went on to the UK, and earned her PhD in 3D computer vision at Cambridge, as well as interning at Microsoft and Google.

Rather than joining a tech giant, Flora decided instead to found her own company Selerio, pioneering the commercialization of Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality. Selerio got acquired by Streem. where she’s now leading the AI Research team. Streem offers AI and AR-powered communications, bringing AI to the frontlines of customer service.

Pieter and Flora also discuss her personal experience with the lack of diversity in AI and her work with organizations like Black in AI to improve inclusivity.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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How Wayve is teaching cars to drive

Wed, 23 Feb 2022 08:30:36 GMT

For Episode 8, Pieter Abbeel interviews Alex Kendall, the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, the London-based company pioneering AI technology to enable autonomous vehicles to drive in complex, never-seen-before environments. Alex is a world expert in deep learning and computer vision. Before founding Wayve, Alex was a research fellow at Cambridge University where he earned his Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Robotics.

Wayve is building global momentum for the use of deep learning to solve self-driving. Alex and his team are building AV2.0—a next generation autonomous driving system that can quickly and safely adapt to new driving domains anywhere in the world.

The interview spans a range of topics including Wayve's technological approach, its metrics for success, and Wayve's latest milestones.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Meet Ross Wightman, a prolific contributor to the AI/ML open source movement

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 08:42:42 GMT

One thing every AI researcher knows is that most foundational AI research is actually happening in open-source. Indeed, most AI researchers publish their research findings openly on arxiv, a freely accessible, open repository originally mostly used by physics researchers. And the code underlying many AI breakthroughs is often published on github, where it’s readily accessible to anyone.

Historically, these papers and codebases have originated from the leading universities and tech companies. But the open culture in the AI community means that aspiring researchers can study the latest AI breakthroughs and codebases, and in principle, start making their own contributions. It hasn't really been done before in a meaningful until Ross Wightman came along.

As an independent researcher, Ross Wightman has grown into one of the most prominent contributors to AI research and codebases. In a previous life, an engineer at a Canadian unicorn start-up, his current full-time occupation is building new AI models that are freely available for use by anyone and everyone. And he's essentially self-taught.

He chats with Pieter about his inspirations, his belief in open-source citing Kaggle, Hugging Face, Eleuther.AI, and his latest papers like ResNet Strike Back.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Cathy Wu of MIT on the future of our highways and roads

Wed, 09 Feb 2022 13:55:57 GMT

Previous guests on our podcasts - from Tesla, Aurora, Waymo - are building the brains of the cars and trucks of our future. This episode's guest, Professor Cathy Wu, is building the roadways of our future. She is building machine-learning to predict the ideal infrastructure for the world's future mobility, the cost of building this infrastructure, and most importantly, what's the solution that eliminates traffic jams and gridlock forever.

Currently at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Professor Cathy Wu (and previous student of Pieter Abbeel's) gives listeners an overview of the type of potential scenarios being modeled with machine-learning such as scenarios in which the road is filled with mixed-autonomy vehicles. What emergent behaviors might happen? Are there infrastructure solutions or software solutions that can help ensure smooth travel and safe roadways as our mode for transportation and delivery evolve? What are the policy considerations?

Throughout the talk, Wu cites building reinforcement learning for her work and why it's the right fit her research, "Reinforcement learning is essentially this paradigm at the intersection of machine learning and also control, and it is essentially about how agents learn from experience and in particular through trial and error." Her past and current research can be found here and you can watch her recent TedXMIT talk here.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Tanay Tandon of Athelas on the future of blood diagnostics using machine-learning

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 08:11:33 GMT

Analyzing a person’s blood (and the cells within it) is often used to diagnose many health conditions and illnesses, from infections to leukemia and bone marrow disorders. Generally it's a long and expensive process. You have to go to the doctor, have a sample taken, wait for a couple of days for a trained professional to analyze the blood, and finally get your diagnosis.

Athelas is using machine learning to dramatically improve the speed and efficiency of testing blood cells. From a simple finger prick’s worth of blood, Athelas devices can monitor and help healthcare professionals to remotely care for patients. To date over 40,000 people have used Athelas devices to monitor a range of conditions including hypertension and diabetes. With a recent valuation of $1.5B, the company is poised for major impact.

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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What matters in tech according to Benedict Evans

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 15:23:23 GMT

*Warning* Explicit language used in the episode.

Benedict Evans, long-time technology analyst and occasional VC at firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, is well-known for his analysis of mobile, media and technology trends. He writes a popular weekly newsletter on the most important happenings in tech and he is also famous for his annual presentations that analyze macro and strategic trends in the tech industry.

He’s a voice of reason trying to sort out the technology issues of the day. In this episode of The Robot Brains, he sits down with Pieter to discuss his opinion on the label of "AI", areas of business that ML is adding real value, and his predictions for the future.

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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David Rolnick on how machine learning can help tackle climate change

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 10:17:17 GMT

While the world’s temperature rises, there are scores of scientists working around the globe to study causes and solutions. One scientist in particular, David Rolnick, has stood out as a pioneer of machine-learning in the fight against climate change.

David successfully built a broader movement including others like Andrew Ng, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, and Jennifer Chayes to champion the amazing possibilities that exist at the intersection of AI and the climate. He organized the first-ever ever AI event at the United Nations Climate Change Conference. He was named a top innovator by the MIT Technology Review -- all before the age of 30.

He sits down with Pieter to discuss his landmark paper on the applications of ML to climate change looking at use cases like weather simulations, ecological monitoring, and predicting natural resource depletion.

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| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Mike Fisher of Etsy talks AI and E-commerce

Wed, 12 Jan 2022 04:13:23 GMT

In the second episode of Season Two of The Robot Brains, Pieter Abbeel interviews the Chief Technology Officer of Etsy, Mike Fisher. Etsy is a global online marketplace, where people come together to make, sell, buy, and collect unique items. It was founded in 2005 as an accessible listing site for DIY crafters and artists to sell their wares before blossoming into a widely-respected and mainstream online shopping site.

It still maintains its whimsical brand balanced by its listing on the NASDAQ and in 2021, it generated an impressive $1.7B in revenue. The CEO recently shared with Forbes that he's determined to keep growing bigger. One of his strategies? Using AI and machine-learning to keep improving the 1:1 selling and buying experience its so well-known for.

Mike sat down with Pieter to share the transformation the site has gone through starting with rebuilding its search engine capabilities all the way to designing more intelligent algorithms to provide better and more accurate recommendations. With the same number of items equivalent to 2500 grocery stores and inventory that changes every day, the site processes a lot of data!

Mike shares how Etsy manages it all and continues to innovate in the e-commerce space.

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Sergey Levine explains the challenges of real world robotics

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 17:09:37 GMT

In Episode One of Season Two, Host Pieter Abbeel is joined by guest (and close collaborator) Sergey Levine, professor at UC Berkeley, EECS. Sergey discusses the early years of his career, how Andrew Ng influenced him to become interested in machine learning, his current projects, and his lab's recent accomplishments.

The conversation concludes with Sergey's view on the dangers of machines not being intelligent enough and his advice for students seeking a career in robotic.

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Season Two: Trailer

Sun, 26 Dec 2021 19:15:10 GMT

Join host Pieter Abbeel on Season 2 of the The Robot Brains podcast as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines, and rational robots. Episode 1 of Season Two will air on 1/5/22.

Over the course of the season, you’ll learn about robots and AI that can drive you around a city, diagnose your health symptoms, and even keep your grandma safe from falls. Subscribe right now in Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you like to get your podcasts to be notified as soon as we publish each episode.

In the meantime, visit our website - https://therobotbrains.ai - to sign up for our newsletter or follow us on Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn to get alerts and updates from the team.

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Ilya Sutskever explains the origins of deep learning

Wed, 25 Aug 2021 14:00:04 GMT

On the last episode (Ep.22) of Season One of The Robot Brains Podcast our guest is Ilya Sutskever. Ilya is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. As a PhD student at Toronto, Ilya was one of the authors on the 2012 AlexNet paper that completely changed the field of AI, resulting in the widespread adoption of deep learning, resulting in the avalanche of AI breakthroughs we’ve seen the past 10 years. After the AlexNet breakthrough in computer vision, at Google, among many other breakthroughs, Ilya showed that neural networks are unexpectedly great at machine translation, at least at the time it was unexpected, now it’s long become the norm to use neural nets for machine translation. Late 2015 Ilya left Google to co-found OpenAI, where he is Chief Scientist. Some of his breakthroughs include GPT, CLIP, DallE, Codex. Ilya’s academic work, less than 10 years out of his PhD, has ben cited over 250,000 times, reflecting his absolutely mind-blowing influence on the field. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Josh Lessing on AppHarvest and the future of robotic farming

Wed, 18 Aug 2021 15:00:48 GMT

On the penultimate episode (Ep.21) of Season One of The Robot Brains Podcast our guest is Josh Lessing. Josh is the CTO of AppHarvest, one of the leading pioneers in Agricultural Technology (or AgTech). Farming is one of the world's oldest industries, but in many ways the technologies and techniques used by farmers hasn't progressed much in centuries. But with recent advances in AI and robotics, AgTech looks certain to transform the entire industry. At AppHarvest, Josh is helping to build some of America's largest and most technologically advanced greenhouses. AppHarvest’s flagship greenhouse is located in Morehead, Kentucky, and spans 60 acres. This modern greenhouse will use “90% less water than traditional open-field agriculture.” The company's greenhouse, which currently focuses on growing fruit, has a central US location that's within a day’s drive of 70% of the U.S. population, allowing AppHarvest to reduce the amount of fuel consumed in transportation by 80%. Inside the Greenhouse you’ll find conventional agriculture techniques combined with the most advanced AI and Robotics technologies to grow non-GMO, chemical-free produce. Josh joined AppHarvest through the acquisition of his own company Root-AI earlier this year. In his conversation with our host, Pieter Abbeel, Josh describes how AppHarvest's flagship tomato-picking robot actually works, what the future of AI farming looks like, and why Morehead, Kentucky is a great place to visit if you want to see robots in action. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Fei-Fei Li on revolutionizing AI for the real world

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 14:00:03 GMT

On Ep.20 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel is joined by Fei-Fei Li. Her legendary status in the field of AI precedes her on our podcast because she's been discussed frequently by many of our previous guests - many of whom are her former students. She is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, Co-Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centred Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI). She was also the leading scientist and instigator of ImageNet, arguably the most momentous episode in the history of AI which allowed vision systems and neural nets to break out of academia and into real industries all over the world. On the show we talk to Fei-Fei about her illustrious career in academia, her involvement in the ImageNet and AlexNet breakthroughs, and her new, deeply personal reasons for focusing her latest work on transforming healthcare with AI. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Boris Krumrey explains UiPath's dream of a robot for every office worker

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 14:00:53 GMT

Joining us for episode 19 of The Robot Brains Podcast is Boris Krumrey, Global VP of Automation Solutions at UI Path. We have all heard of physical robots, autonomous machines that help humans with tasks in the real world, but what about "software robots"? Digital helpers who can be built, trained and used to help increasingly digital workforces with their computer based tasks - from HR teams onboarding new hires to updating spreadsheets or presentation slides. UIPath is a market leader in this new and exciting field of "robotics", in particular “Robotic Process Automation” - or RPA. At UiPath, Boris leads the charge on the development of their RPA and UiPath’s ambition to “give every person a robot”. He has helped to bring UiPath “software robots” to companies all over the globe, including: Google, AutoDesk, General Electric, DHL, PwC, among others. UiPath recently IPO’ed (in April 2021) and it was one of the largest IPOs in history, with a 35.8BB market cap at close on its first trading day. In our conversation, Boris describes the new field of RPA and software robotics, as well as describing his vision for the future of AI-enhanced digital work. | SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Chris Urmson on Aurora and the future of autonomous vehicles

Wed, 28 Jul 2021 14:00:37 GMT

In episode 18 of The Robot Brains Podcast our host Pieter Abbeel meets Chris Urmson. Chris is one of the world-leading pioneers in self-driving. He led the Google self-driving project for several years - which later became Waymo. Then, in 2017, he co-founded his own self-driving company, Aurora where he is currently the CEO. In this episode, he discusses his involvement of the DARPA Grand Challenge, departure from Google, and his (and Aurora's) vision for the future of autonomous vehicles. | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on Twitter @therobotbrains, Instagram @therobotbrains and YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast | Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Peter Puchwein explains KNAPP's robotics-enhanced vision for the future of the logistics industry

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 14:55:46 GMT

In episode 17 of our host Pieter Abbeel meets Peter Puchwein. Peter is the Vice President of Innovation at KNAPP, one of the world market leaders in warehouse logistics and automation. During their interview Pieter and Peter discuss the many ways that KNAPP has "innovation" in its DNA: from the company's forward-thinking founder Gunter Knapp back in 1952 to the multi-million investments made in hardware and software R&D today. Peter explains how the use of industrial robotics in particular are taking KNAPP to new heights, including towards their "Holy Grail" of fulfilling the "20 Minute Delivery" of anything to anywhere at any time. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Matanya Horowitz explains how AMP Robotics is building a waste free world

Wed, 14 Jul 2021 16:10:09 GMT

In Ep.16 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel sits down with AMP Robotics CEO and founder, Matanya Horowitz. Matanya is the founder and CEO of AMP Robotics, an industrial AI robotics company using automation to modernize recycling. An estimated $200bn worth of recyclable materials go un-recycled by municipal waste centres around the world. AMP’s incredible "waste sorting robots" recover this recyclable material from waste at superhuman speeds and with extremely high accuracy. Matanya's AI-powered robots use advanced vision systems to recover valuable resources from junk, in the process, improving the ecological impact of waste on our environment. In his chat with Pieter, Matanya explains how he started AMP Robotics, why he decided to get into the trash business, and what he imagines the future of a "waste free world" will look like? Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Anca Dragan on why Asimov's three laws of robotics need updating

Wed, 07 Jul 2021 14:00:51 GMT

On Episode 15 of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter Abbeel is joined by Anca Dragan. Anca is a professor at UC Berkeley, where she is the director of the Interact Lab where she is working on the goal of enabling robots to work with, around, and in support of people. Because of her success in the field, Forbes magazine dubbed Anca: "the woman teaching AI about human values". Alongside her academic research, Anca is also a staff research scientist at the autonomous vehicle startup Waymo. In her discussion with Pieter, she explains why Asimov's three laws of robotics need updating if we want human robot interactions, why the future of robots probably isn't going to be a sci-fi dystopia, and how you teach a driverless car to understand human values. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Mike Volpi on why VCs are investing record amounts into AI startups

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 14:05:39 GMT

In episode 14 of The Robot Brains Podcast we sit down and chat with Mike Volpi of Index Ventures. Index is one of the largest and best known VC firms in Silicon Valley. Mike joined Index Ventures in 2009, helping to establish the firm's San Francisco office which has become one of the largest parts of their business today. Mike invests primarily in infrastructure, open-source, and artificial intelligence companies and he's currently on the boards of Aurora, Cockroach Labs, Confluent, Elastic, Kong, Sonos, Starburst, Wealthfront, and Covariant. He has been involved in the funding of some of the biggest AI companies on the planet, so he knows more about the business of AI than practically anyone. In his chat with our host, Pieter Abbeel, Mike explains what a VC does, why VCs and investors should be so excited about AI in particular, and gives his advice for startups who want to get their big idea funded. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Missy Cummings asks: should the US Military use AI weapons?

Wed, 23 Jun 2021 12:04:54 GMT

In episode thirteen of The Robot Brains Podcast we meet Mary "Missy" Cummings, former US Airforce fighter pilot and Professor at the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering. Missy tells us her incredible story moving from the theatre of war to the laboratories of computer sciences and explains how she became one of the chief proponents in the movement to ensure AI-to-human (like autonomous vehicles) interactions have stricter safety controls. During her chat with our host Pieter Abbeel, Missy also talks about her non-feud feud with Elon Musk and Tesla's autonomous vehicles, the role of AI and robotics in the military and how AI robots need to be built with human-centric safety controls. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Charles Isbell makes the case for more ethical AI

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 15:49:39 GMT

In episode twelve of The Robot Brains Podcast we are joined by Charles Isbell Jr, professor and Dean of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. After starting his career as an industrial researcher at the legendary Bell Labs, and a long research career in Interactive and Human-Centric AI, Charles has more recently turned his attention to the major issues of ethics, fairness and diversity that are becoming ever more important as AI is being deployed in the real world. Speaking with Pieter Abbeel, Charles explains why researchers can find making ethical AI challenging, his fascinating keynote speech at NeurIPS, and how more diversity in academic admissions can help to improve AI research. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Alison Gopnik on the different (and similar) ways robots and children learn

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 16:15:49 GMT

In episode eleven of The Robot Brains Podcast we are joined by Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology at UC Berkeley and author of the "Mind and Matter" science column for the Wall Street Journal. She has written numerous books about developmental psychology and researching the ways children learn. Her TED Talk: "What do babies think?" has been seen over 4.2 million times. During her conversation with our host, Pieter Abbeel, we discussed the similarities and differences between the way robots and human children learn. We also covered some the methods for testing what a child and a robot actually knows, the theory of the mind, and whether a robot can ever truly be curious? Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Mike Schuster on whether AI can help hedge fund investors to beat the market?

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 16:59:30 GMT

Episode ten of The Robot Brains Podcast investigates how hedge funds are using AI to find competitive advantages for their investments. Joining us to explain how AI is starting to be used for pure profit is Mike Schuster Managing Director and Head of AI Core Team at the New York-based Financial Sciences firm: Two Sigma. With decades of experience working in AI (including Google where he pioneered the ML technology that became Google Translation), when Mike first joined Two Sigma he was described as potentially being the “hedge fund’s last human employee”. In his chat with our host Pieter Abbeel, Mike explains that it actually takes a team to bring AI to banking, as well as explaining how working for a hedge fund is like working for a tech company and the future potential of AI robot investors.

Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Simon Knowles on pushing AI computing to the limit by rethinking chips

Wed, 26 May 2021 14:15:39 GMT

In the latest episode of The Robot Brains Podcast, we meet Graphcore's CTO, EVP of engineering and co-founder, Simon Knowles. Simon has had a long and illustrious career creating computer processors that have been used all over the world and in practically every industry. At Graphcore, he and his team have created the IPU, the world's first computer chip specifically designed to handle AI compute. In his chat with our host Pieter Abbeel, Simon discusses the history of AI compute, offers business advice from his experience as a tech startup founder and why we, if we want AI to change the world, we'll need a new breed of computer chips. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Peter Chen on building brains for robots in the real world

Wed, 19 May 2021 15:48:23 GMT

In episode seven of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is Covariant CEO and co-founder Peter Chen. Peter is one of Pieter Abbeel's closest collaborators for the past five years, with Peter having studied for his PhD in Pieter's lab in Berkley before then working together at OpenAI. Now they are co-founders of Covariant, which they started back in 2017 with Peter as the CEO. On this episode we explore the future of AI-powered robotics, looking at what happens when you teach industrial robots to "think" and "learn" from their environment. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Marc Segura talks about the millions of robots already changing industries around the world

Wed, 12 May 2021 13:26:34 GMT

In episode seven of The Robot Brains Podcast, our guest is ABB's Marc Segura. Marc is the Managing Director of consumer segments and service robotics at ABB. Founded in 1988, ABB is one of the largest producers and installers of robots around the world and Marc has been leading the charge on many of the company's efforts for 20+ years. He has seen the introduction of game-changing robots in practically every major industry, from car manufacturing in Germany to restaurants in China. On this week's show, he and Pieter Abbeel discuss the history of robotic automation and how AI is starting to really change where robotic automation is headed. Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Keenan Wyrobek discusses how Zipline's AI-drones are reshaping Africa

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 13:00:28 GMT

In episode six of The Robot Brains Podcast, Pieter is joined by Keenan Wyrobek, co-founder and head of product and engineering at Zipline. Founded in 2014, Zipline is an on-demand drone delivery service using cutting-edge drone engineering and AI to deliver urgent medical products. In our chat Keenan talks about his youth tearing down his school's 3D printers, how U2's Bono joined his company's board of directors and working with NASA to help his drones fly through extreme weather. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji.

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Andrea Thomaz on how Moxi the robot helped hospital nurses through Covid

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 14:30:00 GMT

In episode five of The Robot Brains Podcast we are exploring AI robotics in healthcare. We chat with Andrea Thomaz, the co-founder and CEO of Diligent Robotics and Professor at UT Austin. In our interview, Andrea talks about her hospital helper AI-robot: Moxi, which is already being used to help frontline medical clinicians and care workers with their complex daily routines. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji.

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Cade Metz talks about how AI took over the world

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 16:49:04 GMT

In episode four of The Robot Brains Podcast we meet Cade Metz, technology correspondent for the New York Times and the author Genius Makers: The Mavericks who brought AI to Google, Facebook and the world. In our interview, Cade and Pieter discusses the history of AI from the perspective of the brilliant academic and business minds who helped to invent it. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji.

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Yann LeCun explains why Facebook would crumble without AI

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 15:00:28 GMT

On episode three of The Robot Brains Podcast we have deep learning pioneer: Yann LeCun. Yann is a winner of the Turing Award (often called the Nobel Prize of Computer Science) who in 2013 was handpicked by Mark Zuckerberg to bring AI to Facebook. Yann also offers his predictions for the future of artificial general intelligence, talks about his life straddling the worlds of academia and business and explains why he likes to picture AI as a chocolate layer cake with a cherry on top. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerj

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Olga Russakovsky explains AI data's diversity problem

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 08:53:04 GMT

This week's guest is Princeton professor and co-founder of AI4All, Olga Russakovsky. Olga's research has focused on the societal biases in the data used to train machine learning AI. In our second episode, she talks about why we need more diversity in AI, problematic junk in, junk out data sets and what it was like being the only female researcher in early AI labs. Host: Pieter Abbeel Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji

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Andrej Karpathy on the visionary AI in Tesla's autonomous driving

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 21:24:11 GMT

On the first ever episode of The Robot Brains podcast, our host Pieter Abbeel sits down with Andrej Karpathy, director of AI at Tesla. Andrej is a world-leading expert when it comes to machine learning and training neural nets. In this episode he talks about what it's like working with Elon Musk, training driverless cars with machine learning and the time he had to sleep on a yoga mat at Tesla HQ... Host: Pieter Abbeel. Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones. Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji.

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Season One: Trailer

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 17:11:31 GMT

In each episode of The Robot Brains podcast (coming soon), renowned artificial intelligence researcher, professor and entrepreneur Pieter Abbeel meets the brilliant minds attempting to build robots with brains. Pieter is joined by leading experts in AI Robotics from all over the world as he explores how far humanity has come in its mission to create conscious computers, mindful machines and rational robots.

Hosted by Pieter Abbeel

Executive Producers Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones

Sound editing by Kieron Matthew Banerji

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