Generally Intelligent

Tri Dao is a PhD student at Stanford, co-advised by Stefano Ermon and Chris Re. He'll be joining Princeton as an assistant professor next year. He works at the intersection of machine learning and systems, currently focused on efficient training and long-range context. About Generally Intelligent  We started Generally Intelligent because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We're dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.   We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.   Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We're excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.   Learn more about us Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/  Twitter: @genintelligent

Jamie Simon is a 4th year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley advised by Mike DeWeese, and also a Research Fellow with us at Generally Intelligent. He uses tools from theoretical physics to build fundamental understanding of deep neural networks so they can be designed from first-principles. In this episode, we discuss reverse engineering kernels, the conservation of learnability during training, infinite-width neural networks, and much more. About Generally Intelligent  We started Generally Intelligent because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We're dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.   We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.   Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We're excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.   Learn more about us Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/  Twitter: @genintelligent

Bill Thompson is a cognitive scientist and an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. He runs an experimental cognition laboratory where he and his students conduct research on human language and cognition using large-scale behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and machine learning. In this episode, we explore the impact of cultural evolution on human knowledge acquisition, how pure biological evolution can lead to slow adaptation and overfitting, and much more. About Generally Intelligent  We started Generally Intelligent because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We're dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.   We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.   Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We're excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.   Learn more about us Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/  Twitter: @genintelligent

Ben Eysenbach is a PhD student from CMU and a student researcher at Google Brain. He is co-advised by Sergey Levine and Ruslan Salakhutdinov and his research focuses on developing RL algorithms that get state-of-the-art performance while being more simple, scalable, and robust. Recent problems he's tackled include long horizon reasoning, exploration, and representation learning. In this episode, we discuss designing simpler and more principled RL algorithms, and much more. About Generally Intelligent  We started Generally Intelligent because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We're dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.   We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.   Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We're excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.   Learn more about us Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/  Twitter: @genintelligent

Jim Fan is a research scientist at NVIDIA and got his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li. Jim is interested in building generally capable autonomous agents, and he recently published MineDojo, a massively multiscale benchmarking suite built on Minecraft, which was an Outstanding Paper at NeurIPS. In this episode, we discuss the foundation models for embodied agents, scaling data, and why prompt engineering will become irrelevant. About Generally Intelligent We started Generally Intelligent because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We're dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one. We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research. Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We're excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research. Learn more about us Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/ Twitter: @genintelligent

Sergey Levine, an assistant professor of EECS at UC Berkeley, is one of the pioneers of modern deep reinforcement learning. His research focuses on developing general-purpose algorithms for autonomous agents to learn how to solve any task. In this episode, we talk about the bottlenecks to generalization in reinforcement learning, why simulation is doomed to succeed, and how to pick good research problems.

Noam Brown is a research scientist at FAIR. During his Ph.D. at CMU, he made the first AI to defeat top humans in No Limit Texas Hold 'Em poker. More recently, he was part of the team that built CICERO which achieved human-level performance in Diplomacy. In this episode, we extensively discuss ideas underlying both projects, the power of spending compute at inference time, and much more.

Sugandha Sharma is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT advised by Prof. Ila Fiete and Prof. Josh Tenenbaum. She explores the computational and theoretical principles underlying higher cognition in the brain by constructing neuro-inspired models and mathematical tools to discover how the brain navigates the world, or how to construct memory mechanisms that don't exhibit catastrophic forgetting. In this episode, we chat about biologically inspired neural architectures, how memory could be implemented, why control theory is underrated and much more.

Nicklas Hansen is a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego advised by Prof Xiaolong Wang and Prof Hao Su. He is also a student researcher at Meta AI. Nicklas' research interests involve developing machine learning systems, specifically neural agents, that have the ability to learn, generalize, and adapt over their lifetime. In this episode, we talk about long-horizon planning, adapting reinforcement learning policies during deployment, why algorithms don't drive research progress, and much more!

Jack Parker-Holder recently joined DeepMind after his Ph.D. with Stephen Roberts at Oxford. Jack is interested in using reinforcement learning to train generally capable agents, especially via an open-ended learning process where environments can adapt to constantly challenge the agent's capabilities. Before doing his Ph.D., Jack worked for 7 years in finance at JP Morgan. In this episode, we chat about open-endedness, evolving agents and environments, online adaptation, offline learning with world models, and much more.

Celeste Kidd is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Her lab studies the processes involved in knowledge acquisition; essentially, how we form our beliefs over time and what allows us to select a subset of all the information we encounter in the world to form those beliefs. In this episode, we chat about attention and curiosity, beliefs and expectations, where certainty comes from, and much more.

Archit Sharma is a Ph.D. student at Stanford advised by Chelsea Finn. His recent work is focused on autonomous deep reinforcement learning—that is, getting real world robots to learn to deal with unseen situations without human interventions. Prior to this, he was an AI resident at Google Brain and he interned with Yoshua Bengio at Mila. In this episode, we chat about unsupervised, non-episodic, autonomous reinforcement learning and much more.

Chelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor at Stanford and part of the Google Brain team. She's interested in the capability of robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction at scale. In this episode, we chat about some of the biggest bottlenecks in RL and robotics—including distribution shifts, Sim2Real, and sample efficiency—as well as what makes a great researcher, why she aspires to build a robot that can make cereal, and much more.

Hattie Zhou is a Ph.D. student at Mila working with Hugo Larochelle and Aaron Courville. Her research focuses on understanding how and why neural networks work, starting with deconstructing why lottery tickets work and most recently exploring how forgetting may be fundamental to learning. Prior to Mila, she was a data scientist at Uber and did research with Uber AI Labs. In this episode, we chat about supermasks and sparsity, coherent gradients, iterative learning, fortuitous forgetting, and much more.

Minqi Jiang is a Ph.D. student at UCL and FAIR, advised by Tim Rocktäschel and Edward Grefenstette. Minqi is interested in how simulators can enable AI agents to learn useful behaviors that generalize to new settings. He is especially focused on problems at the intersection of generalization, human-AI coordination, and open-ended systems. In this episode, we chat about environment and curriculum design for reinforcement learning, model-based RL, emergent communication, open-endedness, and artificial life.

Oleh Rybkin is a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania and a student researcher at Google. He is advised by Kostas Daniilidis and Sergey Levine. Oleh's research focus is on reinforcement learning, particularly unsupervised and model-based RL in the visual domain. In this episode, we discuss agents that explore and plan (and do yoga), how to learn world models from video, what's missing from current RL research, and much more!

Andrew Lampinen is a Research Scientist at DeepMind. He previously completed his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at Stanford. In this episode, we discuss generalization and transfer learning, how to think about language and symbols, what AI can learn from psychology (and vice versa), mental time travel, and the need for more human-like tasks. [Podcast errata: Susan Goldin-Meadow accidentally referred to as Susan Gelman @00:30:34]

Yilun Du is a graduate student at MIT advised by Professors Leslie Kaelbling, Tomas Lozano-Perez, and Josh Tenenbaum. He's interested in building robots that can understand the world like humans and construct world representations that enable task planning over long horizons.

Martín Arjovsky did his Ph.D. at NYU with Leon Bottou. Some of his well-known works include the Wasserstein GAN and a paradigm called Invariant Risk Minimization. In this episode, we discuss out-of-distribution generalization, geometric information theory, and the importance of good benchmarks.

Yash Sharma is a Ph.D. student at the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems. He previously studied electrical engineering at Cooper Union and has spent time at Borealis AI and IBM Research. Yash's early work was on adversarial examples and his current research interests span a variety of topics in representation disentanglement. In this episode, we discuss robustness to adversarial examples, causality vs. correlation in data, and how to make deep learning models generalize better.

Jonathan Frankle (Google Scholar) (Website) is finishing his PhD at MIT, advised by Michael Carbin. His main research interest is using experimental methods to understand the behavior of neural networks. His current work focuses on finding sparse, trainable neural networks. **Highlights from our conversation:**

Jacob Steinhardt (Google Scholar) (Website) is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. His main research interest is in designing machine learning systems that are reliable and aligned with human values. Some of his specific research directions include robustness, rewards specification and reward hacking, as well as scalable alignment. Highlights:

Vincent Sitzmann (Google Scholar) (Website) is a postdoc at MIT. His work is on neural scene representations in computer vision. Ultimately, he wants to make representations that AI agents can use to solve the same visual tasks humans solve regularly, but that are currently impossible for AI. **Highlights from our conversation:**

Dylan Hadfield-Menell (Google Scholar) (Website) recently finished his PhD at UC Berkeley and is starting as an assistant professor at MIT. He works on the problem of designing AI algorithms that pursue the intended goal of their users, designers, and society in general. This is known as the value alignment problem. Highlights from our conversation:

Drew Linsley (Google Scholar) (Website) is a Paul J. Salem senior research associate at Brown, advised by Thomas Serre. He is working on building computational models of the visual system that serve the dual purpose of (1) explaining biological function and (2) extending artificial vision. Prior to his work in the Serre lab, he completed a PhD in computational neuroscience at Boston College and a BA in Psychology at Hamilton College. His most recent paper at NeurIPS is Stable and expressive recurrent vision models. It presents an alternative to back-propagation through time (BPTT) for recurrent vision models called "contractor recurrent back-propagation" (C-RBP), which has O(1) complexity for an N step model vs. O(N) for BPTT, and which learns long-range spatial dependencies in cases where BPTT cannot. Drew is also organizing an ICLR 2021 workshop named Generalization Beyond the Training Distribution in Brains and Machines on Friday, May 7th, 2021. Find them on the website and @ICLR_brains. Lastly, Drew is looking to work with collaborators in robotics, so feel free to reach out! Highlights from our conversation:

Giancarlo Kerg (Google Scholar) is a PhD student at Mila, supervised by Yoshua Bengio and Guillaume Lajoie. He is working on out-of-distribution generalization and modularity in memory-augmented neural networks. Prior to his PhD, he studied pure mathematics at Cambridge and Université Libre de Bruxelles. His most recent paper at NeurIPS is Untangling tradeoffs between recurrence and self-attention in neural networks. It presents a proof for how self-attention mitigates the gradient vanishing problem when trying to capture long-term dependencies. Building on this, it proposes a way to scalably use sparse self-attention with recurrence, via a relevancy screening mechanism that mirrors the cognitive process of memory consolidation. Highlights from our conversation:

Yujia Huang (@YujiaHuangC) is a PhD student at Caltech, working at the intersection of deep learning and neuroscience. She worked on optics and biophotonics before venturing into machine learning. Now, she hopes to design “less artificial” artificial intelligence. Her most recent paper at NeurIPS is Neural Networks with Recurrent Generative Feedback, introducing Convolutional Neural Networks with Feedback (CNN-F). Yujia is open to working with collaborators from many areas: neuroscience, signal processing, and control experts — in addition to those interested in generative models for classification. Feel free to reach out to her! Highlights from our conversation:

Our next guest, Julian Chibane, is a PhD student at the Real Virtual Humans group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Germany. His recent work centers around intrinsic functions for 3D reconstruction, and his most recent paper at NeurIPS is Neural Unsigned Distance Fields for Implicit Function Learning. He also introduced Implicit Feature Networks (IF-Nets) in Implicit Functions in Feature Space for 3D Shape Reconstruction and Completion. Highlights

Katja Schwartz came to machine learning from physics, and is now working on 3D geometric scene understanding at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Her most recent work, “Generative Radiance Fields for 3D-Aware Image Synthesis,” revealed that radiance fields are a powerful representation for generative image synthesis, leading to 3D consistent models that render with high fidelity. We discuss the ideas in Katja’s work and more:

Joel Lehman was previously a founding member at Uber AI Labs and assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen. He's now a research scientist at OpenAI, where he focuses on open-endedness, reinforcement learning, and AI safety. Joel’s PhD dissertation introduced the novelty search algorithm. That work inspired him to write the popular science book, “Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned”, with his PhD advisor Ken Stanley, which discusses what evolutionary algorithms imply for how individuals and society should think about objectives. We discuss this and much more: - How discovering novelty search totally changed Joel’s philosophy of life - Sometimes, can you reach your objective more quickly by not trying to reach it? - How one might evolve intelligence - Why reinforcement learning is a natural framework for open-endedness

Cinjon Resnick was formerly from Google Brain and now doing his PhD at NYU. We talk about why he believes scene understanding is critical to out of distribution generalization, and how his theses have evolved since he started his PhD. Some topics we over: How Cinjon started his research by trying to grow a baby through language and games, before running into a wall with this approach How spending time at circuses

Sarah Jane Hong is the co-founder of Latent Space, a startup building the first fully AI-rendered 3D engine in order to democratize creativity. We touch on what it was like taking classes under Geoff Hinton in 2013, the trouble with using natural language prompts to render a scene, why a model’s ability to scale is more important than getting state-of-the-art results, and more.

We interview Kelvin Guu, a researcher at Google AI and the creator of REALM. The conversation is a wide-ranging tour of language models, how computers interact with world knowledge, and much more.