Episode 11: A Conversation with Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro

Byron Reese: This is "Voices in AI", brought to you by Gigaom. Today our guest is Gregory Piatetsky. Twenty years ago, he founded and continues to operate a site called KDnuggets about knowledge discovery. It's dedicated to the various topics he's interested in. Many people think it's a must-read resource. It has over 400,000 regular monthly readers. He holds an MS and a PhD in computer science from NYU. Gregory Piatetsky: Thank you, Byron. Glad to be with you. I always like to start off with definitions, because in a way we're in such a nascent field in the grand scheme of things that people don't necessarily start off agreeing on what terms mean. How do you define artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is really machines doing things that people think require intelligence, and by that definition the goalposts of artificial intelligence are constantly moving. It was considered very intelligent to play checkers back in the 1950s, then there was a program. The next boundary was playing chess, and then computers mastered it.