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The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
Stuart Russell: The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence
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Stuart Russell: The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence

On rationality, intelligence, reasoning, and their definitions and roles in AI.

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In episode 44 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stuart Russell.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and the Smith-Zadeh Professor in Engineering at UC Berkeley, as well as an Honorary Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. Professor Russell is the co-author with Peter Norvig of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, probably the most popular AI textbook in history. He is the founder and head of Berkeley’s Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence and recently authored the book Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control. He has also served as co-chair on the World Economic Forum’s Council on AI and Robotics.

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Outline:

  • (00:00) Intro

  • (02:45) Stuart’s introduction to AI

  • (05:50) The two most important questions

  • (07:25) Historical perspectives during Stuart’s PhD, agents and learning

  • (14:30) Rationality and Intelligence, Bounded Optimality

  • (20:30) Stuart’s work on Metareasoning

  • (29:45) How does Metareasoning fit with Bounded Optimality?

  • (37:39) “Civilization advances by reducing complex operations to be trivial”

  • (39:20) Reactions to the rise of Deep Learning, connectionist/symbolic debates, probabilistic modeling

  • (51:00) The Deep Learning and traditional AI communities will adopt each other’s ideas

  • (51:55) Why Stuart finds the self-driving car arena interesting, Waymo’s old-fashioned AI approach

  • (57:30) Effective generalization without the full expressive power of first-order logic—deep learning is a “weird way to go about it”

  • (1:03:00) A very short shrift of Human Compatible and its ideas

  • (1:10:42) Outro

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The Gradient
The Gradient: Perspectives on AI
Deeply researched, technical interviews with experts thinking about AI and technology.