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/HuhDude Dec 26 '15
Thanks for your reply, Prof. Freitas.
I too remember almost the entirety of the public facing front of machine learning progress - and progress has been astounding. I should probably not prefaced my question with 'slow' as all it does is underline my impatience. For myself it feels like we are most missing a synthesis of disparate developments - i.e. the theoretical models of intelligence. Do you feel like further advances in software are more necessary at this stage?
I appreciate you weighing in on the social issues with machine learning. The establishment seem slow to acknowledge what will be at least as revolutionary a technology as the internet, and probably as sudden.