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
Johannes Otterbach — Unlocking ML for Traditional Companies [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 44:50
Johannes Otterbach is VP of Machine Learning Research at Merantix Momentum, an ML consulting studio that helps their clients build AI solutions.Johannes and Lukas talk about Johannes' background in physics and applicatio…
Mircea Neagovici — Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and ML [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 46:22
Mircea Neagovici is VP, AI and Research at UiPath, where his team works on task mining and other ways of combining robotic process automation (RPA) with machine learning for their B2B products.Mircea and Lukas talk about…
Peter & Boris — Fine-tuning OpenAI's GPT-3 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 43:39
Peter Welinder is VP of Product & Partnerships at OpenAI, where he runs product and commercialization efforts of GPT-3, Codex, GitHub Copilot, and more. Boris Dayma is Machine Learning Engineer at Weights & Biases, and w…
Ion Stoica — Spark, Ray, and Enterprise Open Source [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:42
Ion Stoica is co-creator of the distributed computing frameworks Spark and Ray, and co-founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks and Anyscale. He is also a Professor of computer science at UC Berkeley and Principal In…
Chris Padwick — Smart Machines for More Sustainable Farming [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:00:59
Chris Padwick is Director of Computer Vision Machine Learning at Blue River Technology, a subsidiary of John Deere. Their core product, See & Spray, is a weeding robot that identifies crops and weeds in order to spray on…
Kathryn Hume — Financial Models, ML, and 17th-Century Philosophy [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:08
Kathryn Hume is Vice President Digital Investments Technology at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC). At the time of recording, she was Interim Head of Borealis AI, RBC's research institute for machine learning.Kathryn and Lu…
Sean & Greg — Biology and ML for Drug Discovery [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:25
Sean McClain is the founder and CEO, and Gregory Hannum is the VP of AI Research at Absci, a biotech company that's using deep learning to expedite drug discovery and development.Lukas, Sean, and Greg talk about why Absc…
Chris, Shawn, and Lukas — The Weights & Biases Journey [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 49:13
You might know him as the host of Gradient Dissent, but Lukas is also the CEO of Weights & Biases, a developer-first ML tools platform!In this special episode, the three W&B co-founders — Chris (CVP), Shawn (CTO), and Lu…