In this episode Kanjun Qiu, the CEO and co-founder of Generally Intelligent joins us to chat about replicators, Genes, Memes and “Temes”, talk about what her company does and help us understand the fundamentals of learning across humans and machines.

Generalized Darwinism is the principle that when any kind of information is copied with variation and selection an evolutionary process inevitably begins.

Genes, memes, and now what? Evolution's third replicator: technological “Temes”. Digital information is now being copied, varied and selected fast. This new kind of meme, which spreads itself via technology and finds ways to keep itself alive, is emerging and evolving into new types of intelligence.

Generally Intelligent investigates the fundamentals of learning across humans and machines, in order to create more capable and humane machine intelligence.

This company tries to get AI to understand very specific forms of how humans learn. AI tries to learn by itself things like object permanence (understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be sensed) and then uses that as a building block to learn other kinds of more generally intelligent behaviors.

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Who is Kanjun Qiu?

Kanjun Qiu is the CEO and co-founder of Generally Intelligent, an AI research company working directly on human-like general intelligence.

Previously she co-founded and was CEO of Sourceress, an AI recruiting company that went through YC and raised $13M. Prior to Sourceress, Kanjun grew Dropbox from 300 to 1500 people as the Chief of Staff after college, and was fortunate to get the equivalent of a business school education along the way. She co-founded and lived at The Archive and co-authored Sew Electric, a book that teaches kids programming using sewable electronics.

Kanjun was recognized as the 2020 Forbes 30 Under 30 Featured Honoree in Enterprise Technology.

She has a bachelor’s and master's degree in computer science and electrical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and worked as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab.

Topics:

Welcome Kanjun Qiu to The Rhys Show: (00:00:00)

All about Kanjun’s company, Generally Intelligent: (00:03:06)

Kanju’s benchmark: (00:19:13)

Using transformers in architecture: (00:23:36)

Talking about sequence to sequence: (00:25:40)

Creating an environment to express tasks & environment design problems: (00:33:47)

Actively changing the world in order to fix your priors: (00:39:18)

Genes and memes as replicators: (00:45:04)

Rejecting the the premise that genes and memes are replicators: (00:54:38)

System framing & digital being framing: (01:05:07)

Is AI overrated?: (01:026:36)

Are transformers overrated?: (01:27:27)

About San Francisco & Kanjun’s new neighborhood: (01:28:33)

Mentioned resources:

Josh Albrecht (co-founder and CTO of Generally Intelligent): https://joshalbrecht.com/

“Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind” book by Kevin N. Laland: https://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Unfinished-Symphony-Culture-Human/dp/0691151180

Connect with Kanjun Qiu:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kanjun/

Web: https://kanjun.me/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/kanjun

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kanjun

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kanjunqiu

Generally Intelligent Web: https://generallyintelligent.ai/

Generally Intelligent podcast (for machine learning): https://generallyintelligent.ai/podcast/