Working at DeepMind with Aleksa Gordic

The Minhaaj's Podcast

Aleksa Gordic is an ex-software/ML engineer at Microsoft & DeepMind with a broad background across the "whole stack" - maths, electronics, software engineering, algorithms, ML & deep learning (computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), geometric DL, reinforcement learning (RL)...), web, mobile, etc. He is a Top Linkedin Voice in AI for 2023. He has The AI Epiphany YouTube channel, and occasionally shares his projects on GitHub and blogs on Medium.

# Timestamps

00:00 Intro

00:45 Dropping Out, Self Learning & Chris Olah

03:20 From Android Developer to ML Engineer

06:25 LeetCode and CodeForces, Coding vs Soft Skills

17:30 Input and Output Mode of Learning

21:41 Yugoslavian Education, Cevap Cici, Hate for Schooling

25:46 Maths Teaching, Lack of Incentivizatiion and PISA Scores around the World

29:29 Inspirational Teachers

31:50 Microsoft HoloLens Summer Camp & Apple Vision

39:26 Microsoft Research, Google Ai, OpenAI & ResNet

41:50 Culture at Microsoft vs Google, Teams & Research Areas

50:00 Proprietary vs Open Source Models, Falcon 40B, MosaicML

01:01:02 Microsoft’s Gameplan, Profits vs User Acquisition

01:10:27 Alan Turing’s Paper, Definition of ‘Machines’ & ‘Think’

01:14:05 Neuromoprhic Computing, Neuronal Pathways & Future of Hardware

01:16:18 LLM benchmark Saturation & Research Directions

01:20:37 Disinformation, Adobe Firefly and Social Fabric

01:23:33 Lawsuits against Stability AI & OpenAI, Transition from Non-profit to For-Profit

01:28:30 Politicization of AI, Supercomputing & Technological Real Politik

01:31:14 EU AI Regulation, European Innovation Stifling & Repurcussions

01:38:54 US restrictive Visa Regime, H1B Tech Visa problems & Tech Talent Moving out of the US

01:47:00 Life outside Work, Sports & Calisthenics