Computing Up Dave Ackley

Manon Revel (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), an Employee Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, joins Michael and Dave for a conversation about the past, present, and future of democracy, and ways to understand it in both computational and practical terms.
[Thumbnail based on image provided courtesy of
Manon Revel]

Martha White, associate professor of Computing Science at University of Alberta (🔗, 🔗) joins Michael and Dave in a conversation about AI, system prediction and control, the power of sparse representations, and many aspects of machine learning from new mathematical theory to the absolutely practical control of a real water treatment plant.
[Thumbnail based on image used courtesy of Martha White]

Computer scientist Rich Sutton, FRS (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), a quiet giant of machine learning, joins Michael and Dave in a sprawling conversation touching on reinforcement learning, a hopeful view of AI, the importance of ideas, and a host of other topics.
[Thumbnail image used courtesy of Rich Sutton]

Michael interviews Dave about his recent video (YouTube) on a 'theory of everything'. The conversation begins with Michael praising Dave for finally doing some theory, and descends from there.

Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at University of Washington, (🔗, 🔗, 🔗) joins Michael and Dave in a conversation that ranges all over, from AI hype and language models to alignment and existential risk and ethics and morality to information pollution and cryptography and politics and more.
[Thumbnail based on image licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by Carissapod link]

Jonathan Frankle, the new Chief Scientist - Neural Networks at Databricks (🔗, 🔗, 🔗), joins Michael and Dave in a fast conversation about topics ranging from AI risks and fairness to the problems of Computer Science education to the beautiful messiness of modern deep learning.
[Thumbnail based on image courtesy of Jonathan Frankle]