Wojciech Zaremba — What Could Make AI Conscious?

Wojciech Zaremba — What Could Make AI Conscious?

Author: Lukas Biewald June 3, 2021 Duration: 44:27
Wojciech joins us to talk the principles behind OpenAI, the Fermi Paradox, and the future stages of developments in AGI. --- Wojciech Zaremba is a co-founder of OpenAI, a research company dedicated to discovering and enacting the path to safe artificial general intelligence. He was also Head of Robotics, where his team developed general-purpose robots through new approaches to transfer learning, and taught robots complex behaviors. Connect with Wojciech: Personal website: https://wojzaremba.com// Twitter: https://twitter.com/woj_zaremba --- Topics Discussed: 0:00 Sneak peek and intro 1:03 The people and principles behind OpenAI 6:31 The stages of future AI developments 13:42 The Fermi paradox 16:18 What drives Wojciech? 19:17 Thoughts on robotics 24:58 Dota and other projects at OpenAI 33:42 What would make an AI conscious? 41:31 How to be succeed in robotics Transcript: http://wandb.me/gd-wojciech-zaremba Links: Fermi paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox OpenAI and Dota: https://openai.com/projects/five/ --- Get our podcast on these platforms: Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts​​ Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify​ Google Podcasts: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts​​ YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube​​ Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud​ Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMAs, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack​​ Check out Fully Connected, which features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, industry leaders sharing best practices, and more: https://wandb.ai/fully-connected

Lukas Biewald hosts Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI, a series that moves beyond theoretical discussions to examine how artificial intelligence is actually built and deployed. Each episode features a direct, unscripted talk with a leading practitioner-you’ll hear from engineers and researchers at places like NVIDIA, Meta, Google, Lyft, and OpenAI. The focus is on the tangible challenges and breakthroughs they encounter, from initial research to the complex reality of putting models into production. This isn't about abstract futures; it's a grounded look at the decisions shaping the field right now. Biewald, bringing his perspective from Weights & Biases, steers conversations toward the practical trade-offs and collaborative efforts that define modern AI work. For anyone in technology or business who wants to understand the mechanics behind the headlines, this podcast offers a rare, candid window into the process. You’ll come away with a clearer sense of how ideas become functional systems and what it really takes to operate at the cutting edge.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

Gradient Dissent: Conversations on AI
Podcast Episodes
What a $42B Software Co. Really Spends on AI Tools [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:07:46
“I don't worry about being replaced by AI. I worry about being replaced by someone who's really good at using AI.”Atlassian has 10,000+ engineers currently split-testing the world’s top AI coding tools, from GitHub Copil…
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Why Physical AI Needed a Completely New Data Stack [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:52
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The Engineering Behind the World’s Most Advanced Video AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 14:50
Is video AI a viable path toward AGI? Runway ML founder Cristóbal Valenzuela joins Lukas Biewald just after Gen 4.5 reached the #1 position on the Video Arena Leaderboard, according to community voting on Artificial Anal…
The Startup Powering The Data Behind AGI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 56:15
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald talks with the CEO & founder of Surge AI, the billion-dollar company quietly powering the next generation of frontier LLMs. They discuss Surge's origin story, why tradit…
Arvind Jain on Building Glean and the Future of Enterprise AI [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:41
In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Lukas Biewald sits down with Arvind Jain, CEO and founder of Glean. They discuss Glean's evolution from solving enterprise search to building agentic AI tools that understand internal…