Episode 44: Skymind and Artificial Intelligence

The Nik Hawks Show

I've been curious about AI, or Artificial Intelligence, for a few years now. I read with interest the opposing points of view in Pedro Domingos The Master Algorithm and Nick Bostrum's Superintelligence regarding how quickly machines are approaching human capacities for general intelligence vs what's called "narrow learning", or the ability to operate in one very small segment of a problem but to do it exceedingly quickly.

This show brings an industry insider in the person of Chris Nicholson to talk about what's going on with AI right now, what it can do, and what it can't.

Chris is a co-founder of Skymind, a company built to help organizations who are not particularly "geeky" build their own AI for their tasks using the well known and very popular computer language Java. There are many flavors of AI, but Skymind is focused on what's called "deep learning", or the ability for a machine to teach itself to get better.

Sounds scary, but after hearing Chris walk you through the state of AI I think you'll be much more excited and hopeful than worried about our future.

In this conversation we talk about machine learning, hadoop, smal data, intrepretability, and dimensions of intelligence. All interesting stuff for those of us relatively unversed in the world of AI, enjoy the show!