Google AI chief Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020

At the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference this week in Vancouver, Canada, machine learning took center stage as 13,000 researchers explored things like neuroscience, how to interpret neural network outputs, and how AI can help solve big real-world problems. With more than 1,400 works accepted for publication, you have to choose how to prioritize your time. For Google AI chief Jeff Dean, that means giving talks at workshops about how machine learning can help confront the threat posed by climate change and how machine learning is reshaping systems and semiconductors. VentureBeat spoke with Dean Thursday about Google's early work on the use of ML to create semiconductors for machine learning, the impact of Google's BERT on conversational AI, and machine learning trends to watch in 2020. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.