I was fortunate to be invited to the wonderful (huge) campus of TU Delft earlier this year to give a talk on “Designing for AI.” I felt a little bit more of an imposter than usual – as I’d left my role in the field nearly a year ago – but it felt like a […]
Real-world RL: DeepMind controls a fusion reactor:…The era of the centaur scientist cometh…DeepMind researchers have trained a reinforcement learning agent to shape the distribution of plasma in a Tokamak fusion reactor. This requires training an agent that “can manipulate the magnetic field through a precise control of several coils that are magnetically coupled to the […]
If you (or anyone) still read this you’re probably aware I’ve been banging on about Centaurs for a little while. I started idly sketching something that could become a shorthand for a ‘centaur’ actor in a system. The kind of visual shorthand that you might often use on whiteboards or in sketches of flows in […]
A couple of weeks ago when AlphaGo beat a human opponent at Go, Jason Kottke noted “Generally speaking, until recently machines were predictable and more or less easily understood. That’s central to the definition of a machine, you might say. You build them to do X, Y, & Z and that’s what they do. A car […]
Got some fun speaking gigs lined up, mainly going to be talking (somewhat obliquely) about my work at Google AI over the last few years and why we need to make centaurs not butlers. June June 12th Speaking at Cog.X in London as part of the “Cutting Edge” (!) track curated by Exponential View‘s estimable Azeem […]
Petafloptimism 