Joelle Pineau, Chief AI Officer at Cohere, discusses which sectors she would focus on if she were investing in AI verticals today.
Opinion
Pineau dismisses catastrophic AI existential risk predictions as unscientific
“I don't have a lot of patience as a scientist for people who are predicting the extremist scenarios, the catastrophic risks of AI, you know, AI becomes our overlord kind of scenario.”
Opinion
Pineau: Out-of-the-box reinforcement learning will not deliver AGI
“Now, you know, where we're maybe getting a little bit ahead is thinking that just RL out of the box is gonna give us AGI. That part, a lot less so. You know, if you look at the curve of progress, RL is terribly inefficient, and so the amount of signal you need…”
Opinion
Pineau: Reinforcement learning is fundamental to AI and will not disappear
“Oh, I'm still super bullish on RL in that, like, the concept itself is so fundamental. You know, this idea of training through a system of rewards, of indicating what's valuable and what's not valuable through numerical values, like, that is so fundamental. It…”
Insight
Pineau: Using reinforcement learning to teach AI social behavior remains unsolved
“RL, to shape the behavior of models, to get them to be social creatures, that we have no idea how to do. I mean, I don't know if you have children, but like shaping their behaviors, you know, the number of times you can repeat the same thing, and still they do…”
Insight
Pineau: Compute and Data Scale AI Linearly, While Algorithms Cause Step-Functions
“Compute and data have a more linear effect on progress. You build more compute. You run bigger models. You can typically get better performance. You feed in more data. It's not just quantity. You need to worry about quality and diversity as well, but roughly i…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Pineau warns against betting that AI compute scaling will hit a wall
“They've been, the scaling laws have been remarkably robust. They don't play exactly as we expect, but still, they've been remarkably robust. Lots of people have bet against scaling laws in the past. And I would say overall, you know, we've seen a pretty, prett…”