Episode 13: A Conversation with Bryan Catanzaro

Byron Reese: This is "Voices in AI" brought to you by Gigaom. Today, our guest is Bryan Catanzaro. He is the head of Applied AI Research at NVIDIA. He has a BS in computer science and Russian from BYU, an MS in electrical engineering from BYU, and a PhD in both electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley. Welcome to the show, Bryan. It's great to be here. Let's start off with my favorite opening question. I like to think about artificial intelligence as making tools that can perform intellectual work. Hopefully, those are useful tools that can help people be more productive in the things that they need to do. There's a lot of different ways of thinking about artificial intelligence, and maybe the way that I'm talking about it is a little bit more narrow, but I think it's also a little bit more connected with why artificial intelligence is changing so many companies and so many things about the way that we do things in the world economy today is because it actually is a practical thing that helps people be more productive in their work. We've been able to create industrialized societies with a lot of mechanization that help people do physical work. Artificial intelligence is making tools that help people do intellectual work. I ask you what artificial intelligence is, and you said it's doing intellectual work. That's sort of using the word to define it, isn't it? Yeah, wow…I'm not a philosopher, so I actually don't have like a… Let me try a different tact. Is it artificial in the sense that it isn't really intelligent and it's just pretending to be, or is it really smart? Is it actually intelligent and we just call it artificial because we built it? I really liked this idea from Yuval Harari that I read a while back where he said there's the difference between intelligence and sentience, where intelligence is more about the capacity to do things and sentience is more about being self-aware and being able to reason in the way that human beings reason. My belief is that we're building increasingly intelligent systems that can perform what I would call intellectual work.