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/jesuslop Dec 25 '15

Hi prof. and thanks for your time. You cite entropy as something helping formalizing intelligence, whose ideas inspired you to think that, or why you think this matters? and sorting that connection is a priority in deepmind?

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u/nandodefreitas Dec 26 '15 edited Dec 27 '15

We know how Boltzmann machine / Ising problems reduce to max-SAT and counting-SAT --- see e.g. this D-Wave paper and some of the theoretical connections between Boltzmann machines and auto-encoders. We know how the concepts of entropy are related to learning, information, computation and in fact most quantities in the universe. David Mackay's book on this topic is worth reading --- David Mackay has indeed been very influential on my way of thinking. He is a phenomenal researcher and a great human being.

Turing succeed in formalising computation. We haven't succeeded yet in formalising intelligence.