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?

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