#74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI

Michael I. Jordan is a professor at Berkeley, and one of the most influential people in the history of machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. He has been cited over 170,000 times and has mentored many of the world-class researchers defining the field of AI today, including Andrew Ng, Zoubin Ghahramani, Ben Taskar, and Yoshua Bengio. EPISODE LINKS: (Blog post) Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon. This episode is presented by Cash App. Download it (App Store, Google Play), use code “LexPodcast”.  Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 – Introduction 03:02 – How far are we in development of AI? 08:25 – Neuralink and brain-computer interfaces 14:49 – The term “artificial intelligence” 19:00 – Does science progress by ideas or personalities? 19:55 – Disagreement with Yann LeCun 23:53 – Recommender systems and distributed decision-making at scale 43:34 – Facebook, privacy, and trust 1:01:11 – Are human beings fundamentally good? 1:02:32 – Can a human life and society be modeled as an optimization problem? 1:04:27 – Is the world deterministic? 1:04:59 – Role of optimization in multi-agent systems 1:09:52 – Optimization of neural networks 1:16:08 – Beautiful idea in optimization: Nesterov acceleration 1:19:02 – What is statistics? 1:29:21 – What is intelligence? 1:37:01 – Advice for students 1:39:57 – Which language is more beautiful: English or French?