Alex Wang: Synthetic data is nowhere close to impacting machine learning progress
Alex Wang · 20VC: Scale Founder Alex Wang on How To Hire Incredible Talent Before You Are A Hot Company, Why Beating Competition Is Not As Clear Cut As Investors Believe & Why AI Is Under-Hyped Today In Terms of Total Impact · Sep 6, 2019 · at 14:00
Alex Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, discusses why synthetic data generation platforms fail to deliver in practical machine learning applications.
0:00 / 0:46exact quote · 46.1s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“It hasn't really worked in practice in most situations, particularly when it comes to visual data or even textual data. It really hasn't worked, and a lot of the reasons why it's sort of limited in terms of its overall impact is that at the end of the day, whenever you generate data, there's always some sort of weird artifacts or bias in the synthetic data that you generate. You can see this, like, When people generate deepfakes, there's always some weird artifacts in that data. And the thing is, machine learning models are really good at picking up those little points of bias in a way that they basically won't generalize very well. And so all that is to say, I think it's this very alluring idea. And if you talk about a high level, it's very exciting. But if you really dig in on like, where is the state of the technology and how impactful is it really? It's nowhere close to actually impact the curve of machine learning yet.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Alex Wang
Alex Wang: AI could be a greater military asset than nuclear weapons
“At its core, this AI technology has the potential to be one of the greatest military assets that humanity has ever seen. Potentially even more of a military asset than nukes.”
Alex Wang: China or Russia would use AGI to conquer if developed first
“Let's say China or Russia had AGI today and the United States didn't, I would imagine they would use that to conquer.”
Alex Wang: Most advanced AI models must remain closed for national security
“I think we need to think about the most cutting edge and the most advanced systems. Those we will want to ensure are closed for geopolitical reasons, for military reasons, for whatever reasons, like as we develop systems that are genuinely so, so powerful, we …”
Alex Wang: Founders should ignore traditional press and use direct distribution
“I would argue we're in an era now where they shouldn't and they should think about they should think about what is a, what is an interesting point of view they can have, and what are the, what is the most pure way to get that point of view across?”
Wang: Candidates asking about work hours lack startup readiness
“When candidates ask about, oh, how long do you guys work, and what is the policy there? I think the reality is that if you look at most startups, people need to realize that it is a fight for survival, and so it kind of needs to be in the spot where you're oka…”