Sean Gourley — NLP, National Defense, and Establishing Ground Truth

In this episode of Gradient Dissent, Primer CEO Sean Gourley and Lukas Biewald sit down to talk about NLP, working with vast amounts of information, and how crucially it relates to national defense. They also chat about their experience of being second-time founders coming from a data science background and how it affects the way they run their companies. We hope you enjoy this episode! Sean Gourley is the founder and CEO Primer, a natural language processing startup in San Francisco. Previously, he was CTO of Quid an augmented intelligence company that he cofounded back in 2009. And prior to that, he worked on self-repairing nano circuits at NASA Ames. Sean has a PhD in physics from Oxford, where his research as a road scholar focused on graph theory, complex systems, and the mathematical patterns underlying modern war. Follow Sean on Twitter: https://primer.ai/ https://twitter.com/sgourley Topics Covered: 0:00 Sneak peek, intro 1:42 Primer's mission and purpose 4:29 The Diamond Age – How do we train machines to observe the world and help us understand it 7:44 a self-writing Wikipedia 9:30 second-time founder 11:26 being a founder as a data scientist 15:44 commercializing algorithms 17:54 Is GPT-3 worth the hype? The mind-blowing scale of transformers 23:00 AI Safety, military/defense 29:20 disinformation, does ML play a role? 34:55 Establishing ground truth and informational provenance 39:10 COVID misinformation, Masks, division 44:07 most underrated aspect of ML 45:09 biggest bottlenecks in ML? Visit our podcasts homepage for transcripts and more episodes! www.wandb.com/podcast Get our podcast on these other platforms: YouTube: http://wandb.me/youtube Soundcloud: http://wandb.me/soundcloud Apple Podcasts: http://wandb.me/apple-podcasts Spotify: http://wandb.me/spotify Google: http://wandb.me/google-podcasts Join our bi-weekly virtual salon and listen to industry leaders and researchers in machine learning share their work: http://wandb.me/salon Join our community of ML practitioners where we host AMA's, share interesting projects and meet other people working in Deep Learning: http://wandb.me/slack Our gallery features curated machine learning reports by researchers exploring deep learning techniques, Kagglers showcasing winning models, and industry leaders sharing best practices. https://wandb.ai/gallery