Eye On A.I.

Turing Award winner David Patterson talks about the end of Moore's law and the evolution of computer chips from general purpose CPUs to GPUs to the recent Cambrian explosion of specialized AI chips, including Google's TPU, in the first episode of five about the machine-learning model-development pipeline with Ameet Talwalkar, co-founder of Determined AI, an open-source platform for ML model development.

NSCAI commissioner Gilman Louie talks about great power competition in the digital age and the US need for a more technologically literate diplomatic core to counter China's increasing diplomatic efforts on the technology front.

Ken Ford, an NSCAI commissioner, talks about turning AI from a tool to a teammate and unshackling research and implementation of AI from government bureaucracy in order to compete with nimbler countries such as China.

Katharina McFarland, an NSCAI commissioner, talks about the commission's recommendations on inserting AI into the National Defense Strategy and how war games should integrate AI enabled applications in order to inform US military doctrine

Eric Horvitz, Chief Scientific Officer at Microsoft and a commissioner with the National Security Commission on AI, talks about the commission's recommendations that responsible and ethical uses be a primary consideration in any AI system for national security.

Jason Matheny, an NSCAI commissioner who now leads a think tank at Georgetown University focused on the intersections of technology, policy and national security, spoke in this week's episode about the Commission's recommendations on export controls for sensitive technology and the difficult problem of protecting digital assets like algorithms and data.

Mignon Clyburn, an NSCAI commissioner and longtime regulator at the FCC, talks about the Commission's recommendations to increase competency in artificial intelligence at the Department of Defense and other government agencies. Ms. Clyburn talked about establishing a National Reserve Digital Corps with a scholarship program modeled after the ROTC and the creation of a United States Digital Service Academy similar to mint a new class of civil servants with deep technical knowledge.

The Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge is a competition for university students to create a social bot that can converse coherently and engagingly with humans. This year's prize goes to the team from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I speak with Prem Natarajan, vice president of natural understanding in the Alexa AI organization, about the prize, the evolution of conversational AI, its current challenges and its future promise

Qualcomm Technologies is powering the shift to fifth generation wireless communications, known as 5G. In this sponsored episode, I speak to two of the company's product managers leading the company's efforts to use AI to enhance 5G, reduce on-device power consumption, and give developers the tools necessary to make devices smarter and faster.

This week I speak to Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, recently retired Director of the Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center,or JAIC. He was instrumental in starting Project Maven to integrate state-of-the-art computer vision into drone technology. He then started the JAIC, the central hub for the military's AI efforts. Gen. Shanahan spoke about the challenges of nurturing innovation within a rigid and multilayered organization like the DOD and the threats the US faces ahead.