Jay Shah Podcast

Dr. Aida Nematzadeh is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google DeepMind where her research focused on multimodal AI models. She works on developing evaluation methods and analyze model’s learning abilities to detect failure modes and guide improvements. Before joining DeepMind, she was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley and completed her PhD and Masters in Computer Science from the University of Toronto. During her graduate studies she studied how children learn semantic information through computational (cognitive) modeling. Time stamps of the conversation00:00 Highlights01:20 Introduction02:08 Entry point in AI03:04 Background in Cognitive Science & Computer Science 04:55 Research at Google DeepMind05:47 Importance of language-vision in AI10:36 Impact of architecture vs. data on performance 13:06 Transformer architecture 14:30 Evaluating AI models19:02 Can LLMs understand numerical concepts 24:40 Theory-of-mind in AI27:58 Do LLMs learn theory of mind?29:25 LLMs as judge35:56 Publish vs. perish culture in AI research40:00 Working at Google DeepMind42:50 Doing a Ph.D. vs not in AI (at least in 2025)48:20 Looking back on research careerMore about Aida: http://www.aidanematzadeh.me/About the Host:Jay is a Machine Learning Engineer at PathAI working on improving AI for medical diagnosis and prognosis. Linkedin: shahjay22  Twitter:  jaygshah22  Homepage: https://jaygshah.github.io/ for any queries.Stay tuned for upcoming webinars!**Disclaimer: The information in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.**

Manos is the CEO of Oumi, a platform focused on open sourcing the entire lifecycle of foundation and large models. Prior to that he was at Google leading efforts on developing large language models within Cloud services. He also has experience working at Facebook on AR/VR projects and at Microsoft’s cloud division developing machine learning based services. Manos received his PhD in computer engineering from Princeton University and has extensive hands-on experience building and deploying models at large scale. Time stamps of the conversation00:00:00 Highlights00:01:20 Introduction00:02:08 From Google to Oumi00:08:58 Why big tech models cannot beat ChatGPT00:12:00 Future of open-source AI00:18:00 Performance gap between open-source and closed AI models00:23:58 Parts of the AI stack that must remain open for innovation00:27:45 Risks of open-sourcing AI00:34:38 Current limitations of Large Language Models00:39:15 Deepseek moment 00:44:38 Maintaining AI leadership - USA vs. China00:48:16 Oumi 00:55:38 Open-sourcing a model with AGI tomorrow, or wait for safeguards?00:58:12 Milestones in open-source AI01:02:50 Nurturing a developers community01:06:12 Ongoing research projects01:09:50 Tips for AI enthusiasts 01:13:00 Competition in AI nowadays More about Manos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/koukoumidis/And Oumi: https://github.com/oumi-ai/oumiAbout the Host:Jay is a PhD student at Arizona State University working on improving AI for medical diagnosis and prognosis. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahjay22/Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaygshah22Homepage: https://jaygshah.github.io/ for any queries.Stay tuned for upcoming webinars!***Disclaimer: The information in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.***

Niloofar is a Postdoctoral researcher at University of Washington with research interests in building privacy preserving AI systems and studying the societal implications of machine learning models. She received her PhD in Computer Science from UC San Diego in 2023 and has received multiple awards and honors for research contributions. Time stamps of the conversation 00:00:00 Highlights 00:01:35 Introduction 00:02:56 Entry point in AI 00:06:50 Differential privacy in AI systems 00:11:08 Privacy leaks in large language models 00:15:30 Dangers of training AI on public data on internet 00:23:28 How auto-regressive training makes things worse 00:30:46 Impact of Synthetic data for fine-tuning 00:37:38 Most critical stage in AI pipeline to combat data leaks 00:44:20 Contextual Integrity 00:47:10 Are LLMs creative? 00:55:24 Under vs. Overpromises of LLMs 01:01:40 Publish vs. perish culture in AI research recently 01:07:50 Role of academia in LLM research 01:11:35 Choosing academia vs. industry 01:17:34 Mental Health and overarching More about Niloofar: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~niloofar/ And references to some of the papers discussed: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.17884 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.17566 https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.05520 About the Host: Jay is a PhD student at Arizona State University working on improving AI for medical diagnosis and prognosis. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahjay22/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaygshah22 Homepage: http://jayshah.me/ for any queries. Stay tuned for upcoming webinars! ***Disclaimer: The information in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.***

Vivek is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State university. Prior to that, he was at the University of Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral researcher and completed his PhD in CS from the University of Utah. His PhD research focused on inference and reasoning for semi structured data and his current research spans reasoning in large language models (LLMs), multimodal learning, and instilling models with common sense for question answering. He has also received multiple awards and fellowships for his research works over the years. Conversation time stamps: 00:01:40 Introduction 00:02:52 Background in AI research 00:05:00 Finding your niche 00:12:42 Traditional AI models vs. LLMs in semi-structured data 00:18:00 Why is reasoning hard in LLMs? 00:27:10 Will scaling AI models hit a plateau? 00:31:02 Has ChatGPT pushed boundaries of AI research 00:38:28 Role of Academia in AI research in the era of LLMs 00:56:35 Keeping up with research: filtering noise vs. signal 01:09:14 Getting started in AI in 2024? 01:20:25 Maintaining mental health in research (especially AI) 01:34:18 Building good habits 01:37:22 Do you need a PhD to contribute to AI? 01:45:42 Wrap up More about Vivek: https://vgupta123.github.io/ ASU lab website: https://coral-lab-asu.github.io/ And Vivek's blog on research struggles: https://vgupta123.github.io/docs/phd_struggles.pdf About the Host:Jay is a PhD student at Arizona State University working on improving AI for medical diagnosis and prognosis. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahjay22/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaygshah22 Homepage: http://jayshah.me/ for any queries. Stay tuned for upcoming webinars! ***Disclaimer: The information in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.***

Max is the CEO and co-founder of Nixtla, where he is developing highly accurate forecasting models using time series data and deep learning techniques, which developers can use to build their own pipelines. Max is a self-taught programmer and researcher with a lot of prior experience building things from scratch. 00:00:50 Introduction 00:01:26 Entry point in AI 00:04:25 Origins of Nixtla 00:07:30 Idea to product 00:11:21 Behavioral economics & psychology to time series prediction 00:16:00 Landscape of time series prediction 00:26:10 Foundation models in time series 00:29:15 Building TimeGPT 00:31:36 Numbers and GPT models 00:34:35 Generalization to real-world datasets 00:38:10 Math reasoning with LLMs 00:40:48 Neural Hierarchical Interpolation for Time Series Forecasting 00:47:15 TimeGPT applications 00:52:20 Pros and Cons of open-source in AI 00:57:20 Insights from building AI products 01:02:15 Tips to researchers & hype vs Reality of AI More about Max: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mergenthaler/ and Nixtla: https://www.nixtla.io/ Check out TimeGPT: https://github.com/Nixtla/nixtla About the Host: Jay is a PhD student at Arizona State University working on improving AI for medical diagnosis and prognosis. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahjay22/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaygshah22 Homepage: https://www.public.asu.edu/~jgshah1/ for any queries. Stay tuned for upcoming webinars! ***Disclaimer: The information in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.***