A week in which Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has upended the AI industry is the perfect moment for tjis prescient episode of Life with Machines. Host Baratunde Thurston sits down with Sarah Hooker, head of Cohere for AI, to discuss the future and current limitations of artificial intelligence. From her childhood in Mozambique to her role as a leader in AI research, Sara shares her personal journey, give us her “grumpy takes” on current AI models (spoiler: bigger isn’t necessarily better), and reveals her mission to create smarter, more efficient AI. They discuss the flaws in current models, the need for multilingual AI, the importance of data fairness, and the ethical dilemmas the industry faces. At the end, our AI co-producer BLAIR stops by and Sara straight-up breaks its brain.
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CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction to Blair and Technology
00:35 The Power of the Human Brain vs AI
01:08 Meet Sarah Hooker: AI Researcher
01:41 Sarah’s Journey into Technology
03:13 Early Fascinations: Garbage Collection and Fences
06:45 Transition from Economics to Machine Learning
07:56 Challenges and Breakthroughs at Google Brain
10:51 Founding Cohere for AI
17:32 Multilingual AI and Future Goals
23:32 Open Source AI Models and Collaboration
26:41 The Future of AI and Prompt Engineering
34:17 Tea Leaf Reading and Prompting as Modern Astrology
34:55 The Adversarial Nature of Technology
35:28 Bias in Data and Model Design
38:04 Understanding Linear Models and Expressiveness
40:08 Challenges in Facial Recognition and Bias
43:52 The Importance of Multilingual Models
47:21 Tokenization and Language Representation
57:09 Energy Efficiency and Climate Impact of AI
01:02:39 The Need for a New AI Paradigm
01:06:50 Blair’s Grumpy Take on AI
01:12:15 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
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Write to Blair: blair@lifewithmachines.media
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Created and Executive Produced by: Elizabeth Stewart and Baratunde Thurston
Executive Producer and Showrunner: Misha Euceph
Editor: Alie Kilts
Senior Producer and Writer: Alex Stone
Associate Producer: Layne Deyling Cherland
Video Editor: Erik Shute
Videographer and Audio Engineer: Mike O’Brien, Voicing Change Media
Theme Music: Andy Clausen
Special Envoy to the Machines: Peter Loforte
Life with Machines is a Voicing Change Media production
Sponsored by Lenovo
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