Episode 35: Percy Liang, Stanford: On the paradigm shift and societal effects of foundation models

Percy Liang is an associate professor of computer science and statistics at Stanford. These days, he’s interested in understanding how foundation models work, how to make them more efficient, modular, and robust, and how they shift the way people interact with AI-although he’s been working on language models for long before foundation models appeared. Percy is also a big proponent of reproducible research, and toward that end he’s shipped most of his recent papers as executable papers using the CodaLab Worksheets platform his lab developed, and published a wide variety of benchmarks.
Generally Intelligent is a podcast by Imbue where we interview researchers about their behind-the-scenes ideas, opinions, and intuitions that are hard to share in papers and talks.
About Imbue
Imbue is an independent research company developing AI agents that mirror the fundamentals of human-like intelligence and that can learn to safely solve problems in the real world. We started Imbue because we believe that software with human-level intelligence will have a transformative impact on the world. We’re dedicated to ensuring that that impact is a positive one.We have enough funding to freely pursue our research goals over the next decade, and our backers include Y Combinator, researchers from OpenAI, Astera Institute, and a number of private individuals who care about effective altruism and scientific research.Our research is focused on agents for digital environments (ex: browser, desktop, documents), using RL, large language models, and self supervised learning. We’re excited about opportunities to use simulated data, network architecture search, and good theoretical understanding of deep learning to make progress on these problems. We take a focused, engineering-driven approach to research.
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[@williamjmccartan8879]

Sounds like the your talking about a dictionary that we already use to define the meaning of words, around 18:20, understand. I think the team here would really enjoy a conversation with Jamie Joyce of the society library, and internet archives, I'm sure if you reached out she would be generous with her time, nice lady. Thank you all very much for sharing your time and work, really interesting conversations posing questions that are relevant for our current time-line, thank you Percy,and the great hosts of the podcast, ✌🏻

[@keithwins]

56:13 there needs to be some sort of shared reality, the delicate dance between duality and consensus