The AI Podcast

Entrepreneur Jason Mars calls conversation our “first technology.” Before humans invented the wheel, crafted a spear or tamed fire, we mastered the superpower of talking to one another. That makes conversation an incredibly important tool. But if you’ve dealt with the automated chatbots deployed by the customer service arms of just about any big organization lately — whether banks or airlines — you also know how hard it can be to get it right. Deep learning AI and new techniques such as zero-shot learning promise to change that. On this episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravitz — whose intelligence is anything but artificial — spoke with Mars about how the latest AI techniques intersect with the very ancient art of conversation. In addition to being an entrepreneur and CEO of several startups, including Zero Shot Bot, Mars is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Michigan and the author of “Breaking Bots: Inventing a New Voice in the AI Revolution” (ForbesBooks, 2021).

Previous episodes discussed deep learning systems trained to master games like Chess, Go, and even Texas Hold 'Em. But training a deep neural net on a racing game like Mario Kart 64? What can you learn from that? A lot, it turns out, explains Kevin Hughes.

Take brains, a few hundred bones and a pink Barbie jeep. What have you got? For inventive hackers, a new sport filled with f-words -- fast, furious, frugal. Founder of the Power Racing Series Jim Burke talks about why he’s bringing autonomous vehicles to a racing event built on the backs of $500 kiddie cars.

Whether brewing hearty stouts or crisp lagers, flavor is a fickle thing. Not only is it hard to create consistently good brew, as humans our ability to identify - and remember - flavors is flawed. Yet brands worth billions rely on creating consistent flavors. We talk to Jason Cohen, founder of Gastrograph, who is using AI to help businesses that create beer, chocolate, wine, coffee, and spirits better understand flavor.

Scientists at Matice Biosciences are using AI to study the regeneration of tissues in animals known as super-regenerators, such as salamanders and planarians. The goal of the research is to develop new treatments that will help humans heal from injuries without scarring. On the latest episode of NVIDIA’s AI Podcast, host Noah Kravtiz spoke with Jessica Whited, a regenerative biologist at Harvard University and co-founder of Matice Biosciences. https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2023/06/21/matice/