The mathematics of AI uncertainty

Now, if you ask an AI a question, it will usually give you an absolute answer with unwavering authority, even if that answer turns out to be wrong. In fact, today's AI seems to be missing a fundamental human trait: self-doubt. Long before the current wave of large language models, one academic researcher was trying to give machines a sense of their own limitations. Zoubin Ghahramani has spent the last 30 years pioneering a type of intelligence built on the mathematics of uncertainty. Today, as a professor at Cambridge and VP of Research at Google DeepMind, Zoubin finds himself at the heart of another interesting debate: will improving machine uncertainty be one of the missing pieces to ever improving AI?

Timecodes:

• 00:00 Introduction

• 01:06 The role of uncertainty

• 07:45 Correctness vs confidence

• 09:40 Historical perspectives

• 16:10 Bayesian thinking in AI

• 26:30 Uncertainty in the real world

• 36:42 Future research and AGI

Please leave us a review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you enjoyed this episode. We always want to hear from our audience whether that's in the form of feedback, new idea or a guest recommendation!

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.