Season 1 Ep. 22 OpenAI's Ilya Sutskever: The man who made AI work

On the last episode of Season One, our guest is Ilya Sutskever. Ilya is the Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of OpenAI. As a PhD student at Toronto, Ilya was one of the authors on the 2012 AlexNet paper that completely changed the field of AI, resulting in the widespread adoption of deep learning and the avalanche of AI breakthroughs we’ve seen the past 10 years.

After the AlexNet breakthrough in computer vision, at Google, among many other breakthroughs, Ilya showed that neural networks are unexpectedly great at machine translation, at least at the time it was unexpected, now it’s long become the norm to use neural nets for machine translation. Late 2015 Ilya left Google to co-found OpenAI, where he is Chief Scientist. Some of his breakthroughs include GPT, CLIP, DallE, Codex. Ilya’s academic work, less than 10 years out of his PhD, has ben cited over 250,000 times, reflecting his absolutely mind-blowing influence on the field.

What's in this episode:

00:00:00 Introductions
00:03:00 Why take a closer look at neural net works originally?
00:08:25 What was going through Ilya's mind during the AlexNet discovery?
00:18:25 Ilya's early years
00:21:19 How Ilya stayed motivated
00:29:07 Sam Altman and the beginning of OpenAI
00:36:22 LSTM models and reinforcement learning
00:56:06 How will our productivity change?
01:00:22 Instruction-following models
01:12:13 Ilya's vision of the future of work
01:16:14 Ilya's advice to be productive

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY |
Website: https://therobotbrains.ai
Twitter:   / therobotbrains  
LinkedIn:  / the-robot-brains-podcast  

Host: Pieter Abbeel
Executive Producers: Ricardo Reyes & Henry Tobias Jones
Associate Producer: Alice Patel
Audio: Kieron Matthew Banerji
Video: Bo Obradovic
Music: Alejandro Del Pozo