The Killer App for Machine Learning: In Conversation with Pedro Domingos, Head of Machine Learning, D.E. Shaw

Shaw: Pedro Domingos has one of the most incredible resumes in the world of AI, and we were thrilled to host him for a fireside chat at our most recent Data Driven NYC. We covered a bunch of things, including why finance is a killer app for machine learning, his much-lauded book, 'The Master Algorithm' and what's truly scary about AI (hint: not the Terminator). The video is below, followed by some conversation notes. Finance is "the killer app for machine learning": Having said that if you look at the number of connections that the state of the art machine learning systems for some of these problems have, they're more than many animals – they have many hundreds of millions or billions of connections. What we're trying to do with AI is just to repeat that but a million times faster, or even 10 or 100 million times faster – and I think we can. But for evolution there is a bottleneck, which is the size of your genome.