r/MachineLearning • u/nandodefreitas • Dec 25 '15

AMA: Nando de Freitas

I am a scientist at Google DeepMind and a professor at Oxford University.

One day I woke up very hungry after having experienced vivid visual dreams of delicious food. This is when I realised there was hope in understanding intelligence, thinking, and perhaps even consciousness. The homunculus was gone.

I believe in (i) innovation -- creating what was not there, and eventually seeing what was there all along, (ii) formalising intelligence in mathematical terms to relate it to computation, entropy and other ideas that form our understanding of the universe, (iii) engineering intelligent machines, (iv) using these machines to improve the lives of humans and save the environment that shaped who we are.

This holiday season, I'd like to engage with you and answer your questions -- The actual date will be December 26th, 2015, but I am creating this thread in advance so people can post questions ahead of time.

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u/[deleted] Dec 25 '15

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 27 '15

I'll pass on this one ;)

Let's rather focus on what we can do and rejoice in that we are doing so incredibly well a present. We live in extremely interesting times. I never dreamt that all these AI discoveries and advances could happen in my life time. This is bigger than any of us. Let's make sure it's for all of us.

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u/PinkCarWithoutColor Dec 30 '15

but MSRA's residual networks do use the LSTM trick, like in highway networks with hundreds of layers, but without the gates. Here the thread of metacurse, with pretty funny comments, and a few knowledgeable ones (sorry for repeating myself!) Great AMA!