Generally Intelligent

Ben Eysenbach is a PhD student from CMU and a student researcher at Google Brain. He is co-advised by Sergey Levine and Ruslan Salakhutdinov and his research focuses on developing RL algorithms that get state-of-the-art performance while being more simple, scalable, and robust. Recent problems he’s tackled include long horizon reasoning, exploration, and representation learning. In this episode, we discuss designing simpler and more principled RL algorithms, and much more.

About Generally Intelligent 

We started Generally Intelligent 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.  

Learn more about us

Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/ 

Twitter: @genintelligent

Jim Fan is a research scientist at NVIDIA and got his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li. Jim is interested in building generally capable autonomous agents, and he recently published MineDojo, a massively multiscale benchmarking suite built on Minecraft, which was an Outstanding Paper at NeurIPS. In this episode, we discuss the foundation models for embodied agents, scaling data, and why prompt engineering will become irrelevant.  

About Generally Intelligent 

We started Generally Intelligent 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.  

Learn more about us

Website: https://generallyintelligent.com/

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/generallyintelligent/ 

Twitter: @genintelligent

Sergey Levine, an assistant professor of EECS at UC Berkeley, is one of the pioneers of modern deep reinforcement learning. His research focuses on developing general-purpose algorithms for autonomous agents to learn how to solve any task. In this episode, we talk about the bottlenecks to generalization in reinforcement learning, why simulation is doomed to succeed, and how to pick good research problems.

Noam Brown is a research scientist at FAIR. During his Ph.D. at CMU, he made the first AI to defeat top humans in No Limit Texas Hold 'Em poker. More recently, he was part of the team that built CICERO which achieved human-level performance in Diplomacy. In this episode, we extensively discuss ideas underlying both projects, the power of spending compute at inference time, and much more.

Sugandha Sharma is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT advised by Prof. Ila Fiete and Prof. Josh Tenenbaum. She explores the computational and theoretical principles underlying higher cognition in the brain by constructing neuro-inspired models and mathematical tools to discover how the brain navigates the world, or how to construct memory mechanisms that don’t exhibit catastrophic forgetting. In this episode, we chat about biologically inspired neural architectures, how memory could be implemented, why control theory is underrated and much more.

Nicklas Hansen is a Ph.D. student at UC San Diego advised by Prof Xiaolong Wang and Prof Hao Su. He is also a student researcher at Meta AI. Nicklas' research interests involve developing machine learning systems, specifically neural agents, that have the ability to learn, generalize, and adapt over their lifetime. In this episode, we talk about long-horizon planning, adapting reinforcement learning policies during deployment, why algorithms don't drive research progress, and much more!

Jack Parker-Holder recently joined DeepMind after his Ph.D. with Stephen Roberts at Oxford. Jack is interested in using reinforcement learning to train generally capable agents, especially via an open-ended learning process where environments can adapt to constantly challenge the agent's capabilities. Before doing his Ph.D., Jack worked for 7 years in finance at JP Morgan. In this episode, we chat about open-endedness, evolving agents and environments, online adaptation, offline learning with world models, and much more.

Celeste Kidd is a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. Her lab studies the processes involved in knowledge acquisition; essentially, how we form our beliefs over time and what allows us to select a subset of all the information we encounter in the world to form those beliefs. In this episode, we chat about attention and curiosity, beliefs and expectations, where certainty comes from, and much more.

Archit Sharma is a Ph.D. student at Stanford advised by Chelsea Finn. His recent work is focused on autonomous deep reinforcement learning—that is, getting real world robots to learn to deal with unseen situations without human interventions. Prior to this, he was an AI resident at Google Brain and he interned with Yoshua Bengio at Mila. In this episode, we chat about unsupervised, non-episodic, autonomous reinforcement learning and much more.

Chelsea Finn is an Assistant Professor at Stanford and part of the Google Brain team. She's interested in the capability of robots and other agents to develop broadly intelligent behavior through learning and interaction at scale. In this episode, we chat about some of the biggest bottlenecks in RL and robotics—including distribution shifts, Sim2Real, and sample efficiency—as well as what makes a great researcher, why she aspires to build a robot that can make cereal, and much more.