AI's Research Frontier: Memory, World Models, & Planning — With Joelle Pineau
Joelle Pineau is the chief AI officer at Cohere. Pineau joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss where the cutting edge of AI research is headed — and what it will take to move from impressive demos to reliable agents. Tune in to hear why memory, world models, and more efficient reasoning are emerging as the next big frontiers, plus what current approaches are missing. We also cover the “capability overhang” in enterprise AI, why consumer assistants still aren’t lighting the world on fire, what AI sovereignty actually means, and whether the major labs can ever pull away from each other. Hit play for a cool-headed, deeply practical look at what’s next for AI and how it gets deployed in the real world.
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20VC: Cohere's Chief AI Officer on Why Scaling Laws Will Continue | Whether You Can Buy Success in AI with Talent Acquisitions | The Future of Synthetic Data & What It Means for Models | Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015 with Joelle Pineau
Joelle Pineau is the Chief AI Officer at Cohere, where she leads research on advancing large language models and practical AI systems. Before joining Cohere, she was VP of AI Research at Meta, where she founded and led Meta AI's Montreal lab. A professor at McGill University, Joelle is renowned for her pioneering work in reinforcement learning, robotics, and responsible AI development.
AGENDA:
00:00 Introduction to AI Scaling Laws
03:00 How Meta Shaped How I Think About AI Research
04:36 Challenges in Reinforcement Learning
10:00 Is It Possible to be Capital Efficient in AI
15:52 AI in Enterprise: Efficiency and Adoption
22:15 Security Concerns with AI Agents
28:34 Can Zuck Win By Buying the Galacticos of AI
32:15 The Rising Cost of Data
35:28 Synthetic Data and Model Degradation
37:22 Why AI Coding is Akin to Image Generation in 2015
48:46 If Joelle Was a VC Where Would She Invest?
52:17 Quickfire: Lessons from Zuck, Biggest Mindset Shift
Building Connections Through Open Research: Meta’s Joelle Pineau
Joelle Pineau’s curiosity led her to pursue a doctorate in engineering with a focus on robotics, which she describes as her “gateway into AI.” As vice president of AI research at Meta, Joelle leads a team committed to openness in the service of high-quality research, responsible AI development, and community contribution.
In this episode, Joelle, who is also a professor at McGill University, weighs the advantages industry and academia each have for conducting artificial intelligence research. She also describes specific AI research projects Meta is working on, including scientific discovery initiatives focused on addressing societal problems like carbon capture. Read the episode transcript here.
Guest bio:
Joelle Pineau is vice president of AI research at Meta and a professor at McGill University. Her research focuses primarily on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex, partially observable domains. She also applies these algorithms to robotics, health care, games, and conversational agents. Pineau serves on the board of the <cite>Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research</cite> and the <cite>Journal of Machine Learning Research</cite>. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Waterloo and master’s degree and doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Andy Goffin.
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Why Meta Wants To Build Artificial General Intelligence — With Joelle Pineau
Joelle Pineau is the head of Meta's AI Research division. She joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss the company's recent proclamation that it intends to build Artificial General Intelligence, digging into how we get there and why it feels it must. In a wide-ranging discussion, we cover the latest research trends, the company's open-source practices, what actual products developers have been built with AI, video generation, and the reasons why NVIDIA chips are so in demand. Tune in for a deep dive into the world's most crucial technology from someone directing one of its most important research labs.
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