Episode 6 - How AI Works

Greg and Anto talk about AI: what it is, how it's trained by software engineers, how you can use it for your personal or company projects, some interesting modern uses of AI, and societal and ethical implications of the technology.

What we discuss in this podcast:

  • What is and isn’t AI is increasingly blurred
  • My AI definition: fundamentally a computer that learns about its environment on its own
  • Difference from an algorithm (e.g. tax software is “intelligent” but it’s just adding numbers). Story about contracting with company that thought they were AI.
  • Where AI is really at: not machines taking over the world, it’s machines doing very specific jobs

  • Cool stuff:

  • AI vs ML vs RL
  • ML: classification vs regression
  • I’ve heard the word “training”. What the heck does that mean?
  • Some big names in AI right now: Bengio, Hinton, Andrew Ng, Rich Sutton