AI with AI
Episode 1.30: Better Lying Through Alchemy
In a review of the most recent news, Andy and Dave discuss the latest information on the fatal self-driving Uber accident, the AI community reacts (poorly) to Nature's announcement of a new closed-access section on machine learning, on-demand self-driving cars will be coming soon to north Dallas, and the Chinese government is adding AI to the high school curriculum with a mandated textbook. For more in-depth topics, Andy and Dave discuss the latest information from DARPA's Lifelong Learning Machines (L2M) project, which has announced its initial teams and topics, which seek to generate "paradigm-changing approaches" as opposed to incremental improvements. Next, they discuss an experiment from OpenAI that provides visibility into a dialogue between two AI on a topic, one of which is lying. This discussion segues into recent comparisons of the field of machine learning to the ancient art of alchemy. Dave avoids using the word "alcheneering," but thinks that "AI-chemy" might be worth considering. Finally, after a discussion on a couple of photography-related developments, they close with a discussion on some papers and videos of interest, including the splash of Google's new "Turing-test-beating" Duplex assistant for conducting natural conversations over the phone.