#50 Christian Szegedy - Formal Reasoning, Program Synthesis

Dr. Christian Szegedy from Google Research is a deep learning heavyweight. He invented adversarial examples, one of the first object detection algorithms, the inceptionnet architecture, and co-invented batchnorm. He thinks that if you bet on computers and software in 1990 you would have been as right as if you bet on AI now. But he thinks that we have been programming computers the same way since the 1950s and there has been a huge stagnation ever since. Mathematics is the process of taking a fuzzy thought and formalising it. But could we automate that? Could we create a system which will act like a super human mathematician but you can talk to it in natural language? This is what Christian calls autoformalisation. Christian thinks that automating many of the things we do in mathematics is the first step towards software synthesis and building human-level AGI. Mathematics ability is the litmus test for general reasoning ability. Christian has a fascinating take on transformers too. 

With Yannic Lightspeed Kilcher and Dr. Mathew Salvaris

Whimsical Canvas with Tim's Notes:

https://whimsical.com/mar-26th-christian-szegedy-CpgGhnEYDBrDMFoATU6XYC

YouTube version (with detailed table of contents) https://youtu.be/ehNGGYFO6ms