Sean Gourley — NLP, National Defense, and Establishing Ground Truth

In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Primer CEO Sean Gourley and Lukas Biewald sit down to talk about NLP, working with vast amounts of information, and how crucially it relates to national defense. They also chat about their experience of being second-time founders coming from a data science background and how it affects the way they run their companies. We hope you enjoy this episode!Sean Gourley is the founder and CEO Primer, a natural language processing startup in San Francisco. Previously, he was CTO of Quid an augmented intelligence company that he cofounded back in 2009. And prior to that, he worked on self-repairing nano circuits at NASA Ames. Sean has a PhD in physics from Oxford, where his research as a road scholar focused on graph theory, complex systems, and the mathematical patterns underlying modern war.Follow Sean on Twitter:https://primer.ai/https://twitter.com/sgourleyTopics Covered:0:00 Sneak peek, intro1:42 Primer's mission and purpose4:29 The Diamond Age – How do we train machines to observe the world and help us understand it7:44 a self-writing Wikipedia9:30 second-time founder11:26 being a founder as a data scientist15:44 commercializing algorithms17:54 Is GPT-3 worth the hype? The mind-blowing scale of transformers23:00 AI Safety, military/defense29:20 disinformation, does ML play a role?34:55 Establishing ground truth and informational provenance39:10 COVID misinformation, Masks, division44:07 most underrated aspect of ML45:09 biggest bottlenecks in ML?Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes!www.wandb.com/podcastGet our podcast on these other platforms:YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtubeSoundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloudApple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcastsSpotify: http://wandb.me/spotifyGoogle: http://wandb.me/google-podcastsJoin our bi-weekly virtual salon and listen to industry leaders and researchers in machine learning share their work:http://wandb.me/salonJoin our community of ML practitioners where we host AMA's, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning:http://wandb.me/slackOur gallery features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, and industry leaders sharing best practices.https://wandb.ai/gallery