Why the Future of AI Isn't Just Bigger Models. It's Models That Evolve | Risto Miikkulainen of Cognizant
Most AI systems follow a gradient, a mathematical slope that tells them exactly how to improve, step by step, toward a known goal. Neuroevolution doesn't follow any gradient. Instead, it runs hundreds or thousands of competing solutions simultaneously, spreads them across the space of possibilities as broadly as possible, and lets the best ones recombine, the same logic that drives biological evolution. The result, as Risto Miikkulainen explains to Craig Smith, is creativity: solutions that no human designer would have anticipated, that emerge routinely from the evolutionary process.
Miikkulainen is a professor at UT Austin and VP of AI Research at Cognizant AI Labs, and he has been working on this field since the 1980s, which makes him both a historian of it and one of its most active frontiersmen.
The conversation covers a remarkable range: a mystery model that outperformed every competitor in a recent stock trading competition with forensic footprints pointing to neuroevolutionary AI; Sakana AI's system that autonomously designed experiments, wrote a paper, and had it accepted at a major machine learning conference; and a pandemic decision system that trained overnight and made country-specific recommendations by morning, with Iceland actually following some of them, all the way to the prime minister.
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#177 – Risto Miikkulainen: Neuroevolution and Evolutionary Computation
Risto Miikkulainen is a computer scientist at UT Austin. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Risto’s Website: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/risto/
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(06:51) – If we re-ran Earth over 1 million times
(10:08) – Would aliens detect humans?
(12:46) – Evolution of intelligent life
(16:31) – Fear of death
(22:47) – Hyenas
(26:12) – Language
(29:43) – The magic of programming
(35:43) – Neuralink
(43:15) – Surprising discoveries by AI
(46:49) – How evolutionary computation works
(58:12) – Learning to walk
(1:01:25) – Robots and a theory of mind
(1:10:29) – Neuroevolution
(1:20:47) – Tesla Autopilot
(1:24:11) – Language and vision
(1:29:53) – Aliens communicating with humans
(1:35:29) – Would AI learn to lie to humans?
(1:42:03) – Artificial life
(1:46:56) – Cellular automata
(1:52:32) – Advice for young people
(1:57:09) – Meaning of life
The Evolution of Evolutionary AI with Risto Miikkulainen - #367
Today we’re joined by Risto Miikkulainen, Associate VP of Evolutionary AI at Cognizant AI. Risto joined us back on episode #47 to discuss evolutionary algorithms, and today we get an update on the latest on the topic. In our conversation, we discuss use cases for evolutionary AI and the latest approaches to deploying evolutionary models. We also explore his paper “Better Future through AI: Avoiding Pitfalls and Guiding AI Towards its Full Potential,” which digs into the historical evolution of AI.
Evolutionary Algorithms in Machine Learning with Risto Miikkulainen - TWiML Talk #47
My guest this week is Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science at UT-Austin and vice president of Research at Sentient Technologies. Risto came locked and loaded to discuss a topic that we've received a ton of requests for -- evolutionary algorithms. During our talk we discuss some of the things Sentient is working on in the financial services and retail fields, and we dig into the technology behind it, evolutionary algorithms, which is also the focus of Risto’s research at UT. I really enjoyed this interview and learned a ton, and I’m sure you will too! Notes for this show can be found at twimlai.com/talk/47.
067: Latest Developments in the Field of AI and How it is Changing the World
In this episode of the SuperDataScience Podcast, I chat with Vice President of Research at Sentient AI, Risto Miikkulainen. You will hear about the applications of AI across multiple fields, learn about the 2 types of AI - the Evolutionary Algorithms and Reinforcement Learning Algorithms, and also get valuable insights on how AI is changing the employment landscape.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out show notes, resources, and more at www.superdatascience.com/67