Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles [MUSIC PLAYING] DIANE GREENE: Hello. FEI-FEI LI: Hi. DIANE GREENE: Who's interested in AI? [CHEERING] Me too. Me three. OK. So I'm the moderator today. I'm Diane Greene, and I'm running Google Cloud and on the Alphabet board. And I'm going to briefly introduce our really amazing guests we have here. I also live on the Stanford campus, so I've known one of our guests for a long time, because she's a neighbor. So let me just introduce them. First is Dr. Fei-Fei Li, and she is the Chief Scientist for Google Cloud. She also runs AI Lab at Stanford University, the Vision Lab, and then she also founded SAILORS, which is now AI4ALL, which you'll hear about a little bit later. And is there anything you want to add to that, Fei-Fei? FEI-FEI LI: I'm your neighbor. [LAUGHTER] That's the best. DIANE GREENE: And so now we have Greg Corrado. And actually there's one amazing coincidence. Both Fei-Fei and Greg were undergraduate physics majors at Princeton together at the same time. And didn't really know each other that well in the 18-person class. FEI-FEI LI: We were studying too hard. GREG CORRADO: No, it was kind of surprising to go to undergrad together, neither of us in computer science, and then rejoin later only once we were here at Google. DIANE GREENE: All paths lead to AI and neural networks and so forth. But anyhow, so Greg is the Principal Scientist in the Google Brain Group. He co-founded it. And more recently, he's been doing a lot of amazing work in health with neural networks and machine learning. He has a PhD in neuroscience from Stanford. And so he came into AI in a very interesting way. And maybe he'll talk about the similarities between the brain and what's going on in AI. Would you like to add anything else? GREG CORRADO: No, sounds good. DIANE GREENE: OK. So I thought since both of them have been involved in the AI field for a while and it's recently become a really big deal, but it'd be nice to get a little perspective on the history, yours in Vision and yours in neuroscience, about AI and how it was so natural for it to evolve to where it is now and what you're doing. And start with Fei-Fei. FEI-FEI LI: I guess I'll start. So first of all, AI is a very nascent field in the history of science of human civilization. This is a field of only 60 years of age. And it started with a very, very simple but fundamental quest-- is can machines think? And we all know thinkers and thought leaders like Alan Turing challenged humanity with that question. Can machines think? So about 60 years ago, a group of very pioneering scientists, computer scientists like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, started really this field. In fact, John McCarthy, who founded Stanford's AI lab, coined the very word artificial intelligence. So where do we begin to build machines that think? Humanity is best at looking inward in ourselves and try to draw inspiration from who we are. So we started thinking about building machines that resemble human thinking. And when you think about human intelligence, you start thinking about different aspects like ability to reason and ability to see and ability to hear, to speak, to move around, make decisions, manipulate. So AI started from that very core, foundational dream 60 years ago, started to proliferate as a field of multiple subfield, which includes robotics, computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition. And then a very important development happened around the '80s and '90s, which is a sister field called machine learning started to blossom. And that's a field combining statistical learnings, statistics, with computer science. And combining the quest of machine intelligence, which is what AI was born out of, with the tools and capabilities of machine learning. AI as a field went through an extremely fruitful, productive, blossoming period of time. And fast-forward to the second decade of 21st century. The latest machine learning booming that we are observing is called deep learning, which has a deep root in neuroscience, which I'll let you talk about. And so combining deep learning as a powerful statistical machine learning tool with the quest of making machines more intelligent. Whether it's to see or is it to hear or to speak, we're seeing this blossom. And last I just want to say, three critical factors converged around the last decade, which is the 2000s and the beginning of 2010s, which are the three computing factors. One is the advance of hardware that enabled more powerful and capable computing. Second is the emergence of big data, powerful data that can drive the statistical learning algorithms. And I was lucky to be involved myself in some of the effort. And then the third one is the advances of machine learning and deep learning algorithms. So this convergence of three major factors brought us the AI boom that we're seeing today. And Google has been investing in all three areas, honestly, earlier than the curve. Most of the effort started even in early 2000s. And as a company, we're doing a lot of AI work from research to products. GREG CORRADO: And it's been really interesting to watch the divergence in exploration in various academic fields and then the re-convergence as we see ideas that are aligned. So it wasn't, as Fei-Fei says, it wasn't so long ago that fields like cognitive science, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, even things that we don't talk about much more like cybernetics, were really all aligned in a single discipline. And then they've moved apart from each other and explored these ideas independently for a couple of decades. And then with the renaissance in artificial neural networks and deep learning, we're starting to see some re-convergence. So some of these ideas that were popular only in a small community for a couple of decades are now coming back into the mainstream of what artificial intelligence is, what statistical pattern recognition is, and it's really been delightful to see. But it's not just one idea. It's actually multiple ideas that you see that were maintained for a long time in fields like cognitive science that are coming back into the fold. So another example beyond deep learning is actually reinforcement learning. So for the longest time, if you looked at a university catalog of courses and you were looking for any mention of reinforcement learning whatsoever, you were going to find it in a psychology department or a cognitive science department. But today, as we all know, we look at reinforcement learning as a new opportunity, as something that we actually look at for the future of AI that might be something that's important to get machines to really learn in completely dynamic environments, in environments where they have to explore entirely new stimuli. So I've been really excited to see how this convergence has happened back in the direction from those ideas into mainstream computer science. And I think that there's some hope for exchange back in the other direction. So neuroscientists and cognitive scientists today are starting to ask whether we can take the kind of computer vision models that Fei-Fei helped pioneer and use those as hypotheses for how it is that neural systems actually compute, how our own biological brains see. And I think that that's really exciting to see this kind of exchange between disciplines that have been separated for a little while. DIANE GREENE: You know, one little piece of history I think that's also interesting is what you did, Fei-Fei, with ImageNet, which is a nice way of explaining building these neural networks where you labeled all these images and then people could refine their algorithms by-- go ahead and explain that just real quickly. FEI-FEI LI: OK, sure. So about 10 years ago, the whole community of computer vision, which is a subfield of AI, was working on a holy grail problem of object recognition, which is you open your eyes, you can see the world full of objects like flowers, chairs, people. And that's a building block of visual intelligence and intelligence in general. And to crack that problem, we were building, as a field, different machine learning models. We're making small progress, but we're hitting a lot of walls. And when my student and I started working on this problem and started thinking deeply about what is missing in the way we're approaching this problem, we recognize this important interplay between data as statistical machine learning models. They really reinforce each other in very deep mathematical ways that we're not going to talk about the details here. That realization was also inspired by human vision. If you look at how children learn, it's a lot of learning through big data experiences and exploration. So combining that, we decided to put together a pretty epic effort of we wanted to label all the images we can get on the internet. And of course, we Google Searched a lot and we downloaded billions of images and used crowdsourcing technology to label all the images, organize them into a data set of 50 million images, organized in 22,000 categories of objects, and put that together, and that's the ImageNet project. And we democratized it to the research world and released the open source. And then starting in 2010, we held an international challenge for the whole AI community called ImageNet Challenge. And one of the teams from Toronto, which is now at Google, won the ImageNet Challenge with the deep learning convolutional neural network model. And that was year 2012. And a lot of people think the combination of ImageNet and the deep learning model in 2012 was the onset of what Greg-- DIANE GREENE: A way to compare how they were doing. And it was really good. So yeah. And so Greg, you've been doing a lot of brain-inspired research, very interesting research. And I know you've been doing a lot of very impactful research in the health area. Could you tell us a little bit about that? GREG CORRADO: Sure. So I mean, I think the ImageNet example actually sort of sets a playbook for how we can try to approach a problem. The kind of machine learning and AI that is most practical and most useful today is ones where machines learn through imitation. It's an imitation game where if you have examples of a task being performed correctly, the machine can learn to imitate this. And this is called supervised learning. And so what happened in the image recognition case is that by Fei-Fei building an object recognition data set, we could all focus on that problem in a really concrete, tractable way in order to compare different methods. And it turned out that methods like deep learning and artificial neural networks were able to do something really interesting in that space that previous machine learning and artificial intelligence methods had not, which was that they were able to go directly from the data to the predictions and break the problem up into many smaller steps without having being told exactly how to do that. So that's what we were doing before is that we were trying to engineer features or cues, things that we could see in the stimuli that then we would do a little bit of statistical learning on to figure out how to combine these signals. But with artificial neural networks and deep learning, we're actually learning to do those things all together. And this applies not only to computer vision, but it applies to most things that you could imagine a machine imitating. And so the kinds of things that we've done like with Google Smart Reply and now Smart Compose, we're taking that same approach. That if you have a lot of text data, which it turns out the internet is full of, what you can actually do is you can look at the sequence of words so far in a conversation or in an email exchange and try to guess what comes next. DIANE GREENE: I'm going to interrupt here a little bit and get a little more provocative here. GREG CORRADO: All right. DIANE GREENE: So you're talking about neural-inspired machine learning and so forth. And so this artificial intelligence is kind of bringing into question what are we humans? And then there's this thing out there called AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. What do you think's going on here? Are we getting to AGI? GREG CORRADO: I really don't think so. So there's a variety of opinions in the community. But my feeling is that, OK, we've finally gotten artificial neural networks to be able to recognize photos of cats. That's really great. We also now can-- DIANE GREENE: Fei-Fei, was that AGI when we recognized a cat? FEI-FEI LI: No. That's not enough to define AGI. GREG CORRADO: So the kind of thing that's working well right now is this sort of pattern recognition, this immediate response where we're able to recognize something kind of reflexively. And we now have, I believe, machines can do pattern recognition every bit as well as humans can. And that's why they can recognize objects in photos, that's why they can do speech recognition, and that's why they can win at a game like Go. But that is only one small sliver, a tiny sliver, of what goes into something like intelligence. Notions of memory and planning and strategy and contingencies, even emotional intelligence, these are things that we haven't even scratched the surface. And so to me, I feel like it's really a leap too far to imagine that having finally cracked pattern recognition, after some decades of trying, that we are therefore on the verge of cracking all of these other problems that go into what constitutes general intelligence. DIANE GREENE: Although we have gone way faster than either of you ever expected us to go, I believe. FEI-FEI LI: Yes and no. Humanity has a tendency to overestimate short-term progress and underestimate long-term progress. So eventually, we will be achieving things that we cannot dream of. But Diane and Greg, I want to just give a simple example to define AGI. So the definition of AGI, again, is an introspective definition of what humans and human intelligence can do. I have a two-year-old daughter who doesn't like napping. And I thought I'm smart enough to scheme to put her in a very complicated sleeping bag that doesn't get herself out of the crib. And just a couple of months ago, I was on the monitor watching this kid, two-year-old, where for the first time I was training her for napping by herself. She was very angry. So she looked around, figured out a weak spot on the crib where she might be able to climb out, figured out how to unzip her complicated sleeping bag that I thought I schemed to try to prevent that, and figured out a way to climb out of a crib that's way taller than who she is and managed to escape safely and without breaking her legs. DIANE GREENE: OK, how about AGI equivalent to my cat or equivalent to a mouse? FEI-FEI LI: If you're shifting the definition, sure. DIANE GREENE: I see, OK. FEI-FEI LI: But even cat, I think there are things that a cat is capable of doing. GREG CORRADO: So I do think that if you look at an organism like a cat from a behavioral level, like how cats behave and how they respond to their environments, I think that you could imagine a world where you have something like a toy that is for entertainment purposes that approximates a cat in a bunch of ways in that the sorts of behaviors that the human observe, you're like, oh, it walks around. It doesn't bump into things. It meows at me every once in a while. I do believe that we can build a system like that. But what you can't do is you can't take that robot and then dump it in the forest and have it figure out what it needs to do in order to survive and make things work. FEI-FEI LI: But it's a goal. It's a healthy goal. DIANE GREENE: It's a healthy goal. And along the way, at least we all three agree that AI's capacity to help us solve all our big problems is going to outweigh any kind of negative, and we're pretty excited about that, I guess. In Cloud, you're kind of doing some cool things with AutoML and so forth. FEI-FEI LI: Yeah, so we talk a lot, Diane, about the belief of building benevolent technology for human use. Our technology reflect our values. So I personally, and I know Greg's whole team is working on bringing AI to people and to the fields that really need it to make a positive difference. So at Cloud, we're very lucky to be working with customers and partners from all kinds of vertical industries, from health care where we collaborate, to agriculture, to sustainability, to entertainment, to retail, to commerce, to finance, where our customers bring some of the toughest problem and their pain points, and we can work with them hand-in-hand to solve some of that. So for example, recently we rolled out AutoML. And that is the recognition of the pain of entering machine learning. It's still a highly technical field. The bar is still high. Not enough people are trained experts in the world of machine learning. But yet our industry already has so much need to tag pictures, understand imageries, just as an example, in vision. So how do we answer that call of need? So we've worked hard and thought about this suite of product called AutoML where the customer-- we lower the entry barrier by relieving them from coding machine learning custom models themselves. All they have to do is to give us the kind of-- provide the kind of data and concept they need. Here's an example of a ramen company in Tokyo that has many shops of ramens and they want to build an app that recognize the ramens from different ramen stores. And they give us the pictures of ramens and the concepts of their store. One store, two store, three. And what we do is to use a technique, a machine learning technique that Google and many others have developed called learning to learn, and then build a customized model for the customer that recognize ramens for their different stores. And then the customer can take that model to do what they want. DIANE GREENE: I can write a little C++, maybe some JavaScript. Could I do AutoML? FEI-FEI LI: Absolutely. Absolutely. We're working with teams that they don't have not even C++ experience. And we have a drag and drop interface, and you can use AutoML that way. GREG CORRADO: Because I really believe that there are so many problems that can be solved using this technique that it's critical that we share as much as possible about how these things work. I don't believe that these technologies should live in walled gardens, but instead we should develop tools that can be used by everyone in the community. And that's part of why we have a very aggressive open source stance to our software packages, particularly in AI. And that includes things like TensorFlow that are available completely freely, and it includes the kinds of services that are available on Cloud to do the kind of compute, storage, and model tuning and serving that you need to use these things in practice. And I think it's amazing that the same tools that my applied machine learning team uses to tackle problems that we're interested in, those same tools are accessible to all of you as well to try to solve the same problems in the same way. And I've been really excited with how great the uptake is and how we're seeing expanding to other languages. Mentioning JavaScript. Quick plug for tensorflow.js is actually really awesome. DIANE GREENE: Oh, and you should probably run it on a TPU. GREG CORRADO: Yes, exactly. DIANE GREENE: It does give a nice boost. So you're building, I mean, with machine learning, we're bringing it to market in so many ways, because we have the tools to build your own models, the TensorFlow. We have the AutoML that brings it to any programmer. And then what's going on with all the APIs, and how is that going to affect every industry, and what do you see going on there? FEI-FEI LI: So Cloud already has a suite of APIs for a lot of our industry partners and customers, from Translate to Speech to Vision. DIANE GREENE: Which are based on models we build. FEI-FEI LI: Yes. For example, Box is a major partner with Google Cloud where they recognize a tremendous need for organizing customers' imagery data to help customers. So they actually use Google's Vision API to do that. And that's a model easily delivered to our customers through our service. DIANE GREENE: Yeah, it's pretty exciting. I mean, Greg, how do you think that's going to play out in the health industry? I know you've been thinking about that. GREG CORRADO: So health care is one of the problems that a bunch of people are working on at Google, and a lot of people are working on outside as well, because I think there's a huge opportunity to use these technologies to expand the availability and the accuracy of health care. And part of that is because doctors today are basically trying to weather an information hurricane in order to provide care. And so I think there are thousands of individual opportunities to make doctors' work more fluid, to build tools to solve problems that they want solved, and to do things that help patients and improve patient care. DIANE GREENE: I mean, I think you were telling me that so many doctors are so unhappy because they have so much drudgery to do. Is this a big breakthrough? GREG CORRADO: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I believe that there's been a great-- when you go to a doctor, you're looking for medical attention. And right now a huge amount of their attention is not actually focused on the practice of medicine, but is focused on a whole bunch of other work that they have to do that doesn't require the kind of insights and care and connection the real practice of medicine does. And so I believe that machine learning and AI is going to come in for health care through assistive technologies that help the doctors do what they want to do better. DIANE GREENE: By understanding what they do in a system. No substitute for the humans. GREG CORRADO: No. FEI-FEI LI: No substitutes. DIANE GREENE: Speaking of human, Fei-Fei, do you want to talk a little bit about why you think this humanistic AI approach is so critical? FEI-FEI LI: Yeah. Thank you. So if we look at the history of AI, we've entered phase two. The first 60 years is AI as more or less a niche technical field where we're still laying down scientific foundations. But starting this point on, AI is one of the biggest drivers of societal changes to come. So how do we think about AI in the next phase? What is the frame of mind that should be driving us has been on top of my mind. And I think deeply about the need for human-centered AI, which in my opinion, includes three elements to complete the human-center AI thinking. The first element is really advancing AI to the next stage. And here we bring our collective background from neuroscience, cognitive science. Whether we're getting to AGI tomorrow or in 50 years, there is a need for AI to be a lot more flexible, nuanced, learn faster, and more unsupervised, semi-supervised [INAUDIBLE] learning ways to be able to understand emotion, to be able to communicate with humans. So that is the more human-centered way of advancing AI science. The second part is the human-center AI technology and application is that I love what you're saying that there's no substitute for humans. This technology, like all technology, is to enhance humans, to augment humans, not to replace humans. We'll replace certain tasks. We'll replace humans out of danger or tasks that we cannot perform. But the bottom line is we can use AI to help our doctors, to help our disaster relief workers, to help decision makers. So there is a lot of technology in robotics, in design, in natural language processing that is centered around human-centered AI technology and application. The third element of human-centered AI is really to combine the thinking of AI as a technology as well as the societal impact. We are so nascent in seeing the impact of this technology. But already, like Diane said, that we are seeing the impact in different ways, ways that we might not even predict. So I think it's really important. And it's a responsibility of everyone from academia to industry to government to bring social scientists, philosophers, law scholars, policy makers, ethicists, and historians at the table and to study more deeply about AI's social and humanistic impact. And that is the three elements of human-centered AI. DIANE GREENE: That's pretty wonderful. And I think we at Google here, Alphabet, are working as hard as we can to do humanistic AI. You mentioned what we need to be careful about out there with AI and regulatory. What are some of the barriers to-- I think every company in the world has a use for AI in many, many ways. I mean, it's just exploding in all the verticals. But there are some impediments to adoption. For example, in the financial industry they need to have something called explainable AI. And could you just talk about some of the different barriers you see to being able to take advantage of AI? FEI-FEI LI: We should start with health care. GREG CORRADO: Yeah, so I think that there are a bunch of really important things to consider. So one of the things is, of course, we want to have machine learning systems that are designed to fit the needs of the folks that are using them and applying them. And that can often include not just giving me the answer, but telling me something about how that was derived. So some kind of explainability. So in the health care space, for example, we've been working on a bunch of things in medical imaging. And it's not acceptable to just tell the doctor that, oh, something looks fishy in this x-ray or this pathology slide or this retinal scan. You have to tell them, well, what do you think is wrong? But more importantly, you actually have to show them where in the image you think the evidence for that conclusion lies so that they can then look at it and decide whether they concur or they disagree or, oh, well, there was a speck of dust there and that's what the machine is picking up on. And the good news is that these things actually are possible. And I think there's kind of been this unfortunate mythology that AI and deep learning in particular is a black box. And it really isn't. We didn't study how it worked, because for a long time it really didn't work that well. But now that it's working well, there are a lot of tools and techniques that go into examining how these systems work. And I think explainability is a big part of it in terms of making these things available for a bunch of applications. FEI-FEI LI: So in addition to the explainability, I would add bias. I think bias is an issue we need to address in AI. And I see bias, from where I sit, two major kind of bias we need to address. One is the pipeline of AI development, starting from the bias of the data to the outcome of the bias. And we have heard a lot about if the machine learning algorithm is fed with data that does not represent the problem domain in a fair way, we will introduce bias. Whether it's missing a group of people's data or biasing it to a skewed distribution, those are things that would have deep consequences, whether you're in the health care domain or finance or legal decision making. So I think that is a huge issue very nicely that Google is already addressing that. We have a whole team at Google working on bias. DIANE GREENE: Yeah. That's true. FEI-FEI LI: And another bias I think is important is the people who are developing AIs. The human bias and the lack of diversity is also another bias. DIANE GREENE: It's so important. And that kind of brings me to maybe some of our-- we're getting close to the end. But where is AI going? I mean, how prevalent is it going to be? I mean, we look at our universities and these machine learning classes have 800 people, 900 people. There is such a demand. Every computer science graduate wants to know it. Where is it going? I mean, will every high school graduating senior be able to customize AI to their own purposes? And what does it look like five, 10 years from now? FEI-FEI LI: So from a technology point of view, I think that because of the tremendous investment in resource, both in the private sector as well in the public sector now, many countries are waking up to investing AI, we're going to see a huge continue development of AI technology. I'm mostly excited either at Cloud or seeing what Greg's team is doing, AI being delivered to the industries that really matter to people's lives and the work quality and productivity. But Diane, I think you're also asking is how are we educating more people in AI? DIANE GREENE: Both making it easier to use and educating them and what's it going to look like? What do you predict? FEI-FEI LI: That's a really tough question, because at the core of today's AI is still calculus. And that's not going to change. GREG CORRADO: So I think that from the kind of tech industry perspective or from the computer science education perspective, I think that we're going to see AI and ML become as essential as networking is. No one really thinks about, oh, well, I'm going to write some software and it's going to be standalone on a box and it's not going to have a TCPI connection. We all know that you're going to have a TCPI connection at the end of the day somewhere. And everyone understands the basics of the networking stack. And that's not just at the level of engineers. That's the level of designers, of executives, of product developers and leaders. And the same thing, I think, is going to happen with machine learning and AI, which is that designers are going to start to understand, how can I make a completely revolutionary kind of product that folds in machine learning the same way that we fold in networking and internet technologies into almost everything we build? So I think we're going to see tremendous uptake and it becoming kind of a pervasive background part of the technologies. But I think in that process the ways that we use AI are going to evolve. So I think right now we're seeing a lot of things where AI and machine learning add some spice, some extra, a little coolness on a feature. And I think that what you're going to see over the next decade is you're going to see more of a core integration into what it means for the product to actually work. And I think that one of the great opportunities there is actually going to be the development of artificial emotional intelligence that allows products to actually have much more natural and much more fluid human interaction. We're beginning to see that in the Assistant now with speech recognition, speech synthesis, understanding dialogues and exchanges. But I think that this is still in its infancy. We're going to get to a point where the products that we build, they interact with humans in the way that the humans find most useful just out of the box. FEI-FEI LI: And I spend a lot of time with high schoolers, because I really believe in the future. We always talk about AI changing the world. And I always say the question is, who is changing AI? And to me, bringing more human mission thinking into technology development and thought leadership is really important. Not only important for the future of our technology and the value we instill in our technology, but also in bringing the diverse group of students and future leaders into the development of AI. So at [? Server ?] at Google, we all work a lot on this issue. And personally, I'm very involved with AI4ALL, which is a nonprofit that educates high schoolers around the country from diverse backgrounds, whether they're girls or students of underrepresented minority groups. And we bring them onto university campus and work with them on AI thinking and AI studies. DIANE GREENE: And at Google, we're just completely committed to bringing all our best technologies to everybody in the world. And we're doing that through the cloud, and we're bringing these tools, we're bringing these APIs and the training and the partnering and the processors. And we're pretty excited to see what all you guys are going to do with it. Thank you very much. GREG CORRADO: Thanks, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING]
B1 US fei ai diane greene learning greg Building the future of artificial intelligence for everyone (Google I/O '18) 318 11 Tony Yu posted on 2019/01/02 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary