The Rational View episode 35 reviews some of the coolest stuff that is being done with AI right now. The cover art shows Miquela, an Instagram influencer with over 1 million followers. Miquela posts stylish pictures of herself in Prada outfits, and provides helpful advice to her followers. Miquela, it turns out, is an artificial intelligence. Other AI applications include improved medical diagnoses, interpretation of radiograms, identification of cancers, development of new medicines, personally tailored drug treatments, self-driving cars, and many more.

Self-trained AI systems have defeated the best human chess and Go players in the world. AlphaZero taught itself to play chess better than any human after only four hours of reinforcement learning on Google's supercomputers. It's predecessor, AlphaGo defeated the reigning human Go champion in a stunning upset in 2016--a feat that many thought would never happen. Now human grandmasters are re-learning these games from the true masters.

As a special treat, the podcast finale is an interview with a chatbot AI from a company called Replika. This robot provides an engaging chat, and seems able to understand challenging language and understanding concepts. The Replika bots take on personality traits of their owners and over time. The prickly ethical question is, would you want to train an AI that could one day take over your social media feeds without anyone else knowing the difference? Whoever owns the AI could sell access to your grieving friends and relatives after you pass on. Hmmmm. Stay tuned for next week!

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