Dr. Brandon Rohrer - Robotics, Creativity and Intelligence

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Brandon Rohrer who obtained his Ph.D from MIT is driven by understanding algorithms ALL the way down to their nuts and bolts, so he can make them accessible to everyone by first explaining them in the way HE himself would have wanted to learn!

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Brandon Rohrer is a seasoned data science leader and educator with a rich background in creating robust, efficient machine learning algorithms and tools. With a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, his expertise encompasses a broad spectrum of AI applications — from computer vision and natural language processing to reinforcement learning and robotics. Brandon's career has seen him in Principle-level roles at Microsoft and Facebook. An educator at heart, he also shares his knowledge through detailed tutorials, courses, and his forthcoming book, "How to Train Your Robot."

YT version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ps7ahonRCY

Brandon's links:

https://github.com/brohrer

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsBKTrp45lTfHa_p49I2AEQ

https://www.linkedin.com/in/brohrer/

How transformers work:

https://e2eml.school/transformers

Brandon's End-to-End Machine Learning school courses, posts, and tutorials

https://e2eml.school

Free course:

https://end-to-end-machine-learning.teachable.com/p/complete-course-library-full-end-to-end-machine-learning-catalog

Blog: https://e2eml.school/blog.html

Ziptie: Learning Useful Features [Brandon Rohrer]

https://www.brandonrohrer.com/ziptie

TOC should be baked into the MP3 file now

00:00:00 - Intro to Brandon

00:00:36 - RLHF

00:01:09 - Limitations of transformers

00:07:23 - Agency - we are all GPTs

00:09:07 - BPE / representation bias

00:12:00 - LLM true believers

00:16:42 - Brandon's style of teaching

00:19:50 - ML vs real world = Robotics

00:29:59 - Reward shaping

00:37:08 - No true Scotsman - when do we accept capabilities as real

00:38:50 - Externalism

00:43:03 - Building flexible robots

00:45:37 - Is reward enough

00:54:30 - Optimization curse

00:58:15 - Collective intelligence

01:01:51 - Intelligence + creativity

01:13:35 - ChatGPT + Creativity

01:25:19 - Transformers Tutorial