Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)
Welcome! We engage in fascinating discussions with pre-eminent figures in the AI field. Our flagship show covers current affairs in AI, cognitive science, neuroscience and philosophy of mind with in-depth analysis. Our approach is unrivalled in terms of scope and rigour – we believe in intellectual diversity in AI, and we touch on all of the main ideas in the field with the hype surgically removed. MLST is run by Tim Scarfe, Ph.D (https://www.linkedin.com/in/ecsquizor/) and features regular appearances from MIT Doctor of Philosophy Keith Duggar (https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-keith-duggar/).
Show episodes
We interview Professor Christopher Summerfield from Oxford University about his new book "These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It". AI learned to understand the world just by reading text - something scientists thought was impossible. You don't need to see a cat to know what one is; you can learn ev
"Blurring Reality" - Chai's Social AI Platform - sponsored This episode of MLST explores the groundbreaking work of Chai, a social AI platform that quietly built one of the world's largest AI companion ecosystems before ChatGPT's mainstream adoption. With over 10 million active users and just 13 engineers serving 2 tri
Today GoogleDeepMind released AlphaEvolve: a Gemini coding agent for algorithm discovery. It beat the famous Strassen algorithm for matrix multiplication set 56 years ago. Google has been killing it recently. We had early access to the paper and interviewed the researchers behind the work. AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered
Randall Balestriero joins the show to discuss some counterintuitive findings in AI. He shares research showing that huge language models, even when started from scratch (randomly initialized) without massive pre-training, can learn specific tasks like sentiment analysis surprisingly well, train stably, and avoid severe
Prof. Kevin Ellis and Dr. Zenna Tavares talk about making AI smarter, like humans. They want AI to learn from just a little bit of information by actively trying things out, not just by looking at tons of data. They discuss two main ways AI can "think": one way is like following specific rules or steps (like a computer
Eiso Kant, CTO of poolside AI, discusses the company's approach to building frontier AI foundation models, particularly focused on software development. Their unique strategy is reinforcement learning from code execution feedback which is an important axis for scaling AI capabilities beyond just increasing model size o
