The Robot Brains Podcast

In the second episode of Season Two of The Robot Brains, Pieter Abbeel interviews the Chief Technology Officer of Etsy, Mike Fisher. Etsy is a global online marketplace, where people come together to make, sell, buy, and collect unique items. It was founded in 2005 as an accessible listing site for DIY crafters and artists to sell their wares before blossoming into a widely-respected and mainstream online shopping site.

It still maintains its whimsical brand balanced by its listing on the NASDAQ and in 2021, it generated an impressive $1.7B in revenue. The CEO recently shared with Forbes that he's determined to keep growing bigger. One of his strategies? Using AI and machine-learning to keep improving the 1:1 selling and buying experience its so well-known for.

Mike sat down with Pieter to share the transformation the site has gone through starting with rebuilding its search engine capabilities all the way to designing more intelligent algorithms to provide better and more accurate recommendations. With the same number of items equivalent to 2500 grocery stores and inventory that changes every day, the site processes a lot of data!

Mike shares how Etsy manages it all and continues to innovate in the e-commerce space.

| SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Audio Production: Kieron Matthew Banerji | Title Music: Alejandro Del Pozo

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Lukas Biewald of Weights and Biases joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss solving the pain-points of AI researchers and practitioners.

Subscribe to the Robot Brains Podcast today | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast and Twitter @therobotbrains.

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Previous guests on our podcasts - from Tesla, Aurora, Waymo - are building the brains of the cars and trucks of our future. This episode's guest, Professor Cathy Wu, is building the roadways of our future. She is building machine-learning to predict the ideal infrastructure for the world's future mobility, the cost of building this infrastructure, and most importantly, what's the solution that eliminates traffic jams and gridlock forever.

Currently at MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Professor Cathy Wu (and previous student of Pieter Abbeel's) gives listeners an overview of the type of potential scenarios being modeled with machine-learning such as scenarios in which the road is filled with mixed-autonomy vehicles. What emergent behaviors might happen? Are there infrastructure solutions or software solutions that can help ensure smooth travel and safe roadways as our mode for transportation and delivery evolve? What are the policy considerations?

Throughout the talk, Wu cites building reinforcement learning for her work and why it's the right fit her research, "Reinforcement learning is essentially this paradigm at the intersection of machine learning and also control, and it is essentially about how agents learn from experience and in particular through trial and error." Her past and current research can be found here and you can watch her recent TedXMIT talk here.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

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Last week, we were honored to have Professor Geoff Hinton join the show for a wide-ranging discussion inspired by insights gleaned from Hinton’s journey in academia, as well as past 10 years with Google Brain. The episode covers how existing neural networks and backpropagation models operate differently than how the brain actually works; the AlexNet/ImageNet breakthrough moment; the purpose of sleep; and why it’s better to grow our computers than manufacture them.

As you might recall, we also gave our audience an opportunity to contribute questions for Geoff via Twitter. We received so many amazing questions from our audience that we had to break down our time with Geoff into two parts! In this episode, we’ll discuss some of these questions with Geoff.

Tune in to get Geoff’s answers to the following questions AND MORE:

Are you concerned with AI becoming too successful?

What is the connection between mania and genius?

What childhood experiences shaped him the most?

What is next in AI?

What should PhD students focus on?

How conscious do you think today's neural nets are?

How important is embodiment for intelligence?

How does the brain work?

SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

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It doesn’t matter what country you live in, or what industry you build a career in, STEM skills are increasingly important - particularly for children and students who are yet to join the world of work. Introducing robotics to children at a young age in the same way that we enroll them in soccer or piano lessons should be a real consideration. However, the participation costs are often so prohibitive that it's out of the question for most schools and parents.

On Episode 11 of Season 2, we're joined by entrepreneur and philanthropist, Jared Schrieber. He envisions a world where there are as many elementary and high school robotics teams as there are basketball or football teams. He founded Revolution Robotics; a non-profit dedicated to making robotics hardware and software kits accessible to all communities, to make his vision into a reality.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE ROBOT BRAINS PODCAST TODAY | Visit therobotbrains.ai and follow us on YouTube at TheRobotBrainsPodcast, Twitter @therobotbrains, and Instagram @therobotbrains.

| Host: Pieter Abbeel | Executive Producers: Alice Patel & Henry Tobias Jones | Production: Fresh Air Production

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.