Summary
The latest episode of Dr. Pawd features Alexander Wang, the founder and CEO of Scale AI. The company provides an end-to-end solution to manage the entire machine learning life cycle, catering to both large companies and the US Air Force and Army. Scale AI has two parts; Scale Data provides high-quality data for algorithms, while Scale Applied AI provides AI models and products for specific business use cases.
Alexander started Scale AI in 2016 focusing on data annotation and labeling after dropping out of MIT. He realized that in the deep learning era, the thing that varies from application to application is actually the data or the data sets, making data sets crucial infrastructure in competitive playing for most companies. While many people originally questioned the importance of the business, it proved to be a real and needed service in the market.
The process of breaking down a complex and manually intensive task into smaller, more manageable tasks is crucial for generating high-quality data with less effort. Quality control is also important as humans tend to make mistakes. Alexander believes that AI can play an important role in the military, and the country that utilizes AI most effectively for defense intelligence and national security will be militarily dominant.
The episode also discusses the paradigm shift in AI towards foundation models and language-based large language models that have dramatically reduced the barriers of entry for using AI effectively and created democratization in the AI industry. The shift towards generalization in training is highlighted, which has shown that a single model trained on everything is better than specialized models for different tasks.
Reinforcement learning with human feedback is a growing trend in the industry for improving the alignment of powerful AI systems with human intents, which utilizes human insights and emphasizes what humans are good at. Advanced prompt engineering is a new paradigm for the future of programming cognitive computers. The speaker believes that new computers will continue to be used in interesting ways and that people will need to know how to use them.
Finally, Alexander stresses that there are arts around getting humans to do what you want, such as management, sales, and marketing. He believes that there is a valuable field of human knowledge around how to get models to behave as desired and notes the security implications related to large language models. Healthcare and health insurance are both industries that could be transformed by AI, and generative AI will be used to automate advertising.
