In this wide-ranging conversation, we dig into the details of how Linus goes about his explorations. He shares his toolkit, from PyTorch as a foundation to the custom tools he's built over time for data visualization, model evaluation, and rapid experimentation.
Hello, and welcome back to the Cognitive Revolution!
Today my guest is Linus Lee, AI product leader at Notion and AI explorer extraordinaire.
I have followed Linus online for a couple of years now, fascinated by his many groundbreaking projects and unique way of thinking about AI systems. From creating novel interfaces that visualize and manipulate generative models in their latent space, to developing techniques for semantically editing text and images, Linus has been a pioneering tinkerer.
In this wide-ranging conversation, we dig into the details of how Linus goes about his explorations. He shares his toolkit, from PyTorch as a foundation to the custom tools he's built over time for data visualization, model evaluation, and rapid experimentation. We discuss the importance of spending time with data and failure cases, and the value of building your own tools to deeply understand the problems you're trying to solve.
Linus also offers his perspective on the current capabilities of language models, and where he sees the biggest opportunities for improvement. Beyond hallucination reduction, instruction following, and cost efficiency, he emphasizes the need for better general reasoning as a longer-term goal.
We speculate about the future, considering scenarios like models communicating with one another via high-dimensional embeddings, techniques to connect latent spaces across modalities, and the societal implications as AI capabilities continue to advance. Linus articulates a vision centered on amplifying rather than replacing human intelligence, a principle he believes should guide the development and deployment of AI-powered products.
Throughout this episode, Linus demonstrates the curiosity, resourcefulness, and thoughtfulness that have made him such an influential figure in the AI community. His work inspires us to engage more deeply with these systems, to build the tools we need to understand them, and to steer their development in a direction that deepens rather than diminishes human creativity and agency.
As always, if you find value in the show, please share it with others who might appreciate it. Particularly right now as we are establishing the new feed, a tweet or a comment on Youtube would be especially valuable.
And of course, we invite you to reach out with feedback or suggestions on our website, cognitiverevolution.ai
Now, please enjoy this deep dive into the art and science of exploring AI systems with Linus Lee.
You can read along the transcript of the video, which is time marked, by following the link.
Nathan Labenz
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Katja Grace, Cofounder and Lead Researcher at AI Impacts. They discuss the survey Katja and team conducted including over 2,700+ AI researchers, the methodology, and the results’ implications for the industry as a whole.
In this episode, Nathan sits down with Tim Reutemann, author of “Liquid Reign”. They discuss liquid democracy, reshaping political participation using AI and biometrics, and practical advances in technology and their impacts on identity verification, rehabilitation, and gaming.
Diving into Google DeepMind Robotics' latest research, we uncover breakthroughs in robot autonomy and ethics, paving the way for a future where robots seamlessly integrate into our daily lives.
Nathan sits down with Pablo Arredondo. They discuss the evolution of legal research, how GPT-4 has changed legal practices, security and privacy in AI driven legal services, and more.
Be the first to know when new episodes drop. Subscribe now for exclusive insights from AI trailblazers and in-depth analysis straight to your inbox.
