François Chollet: Measures of Intelligence | Lex Fridman Podcast #120

The following is a conversation with Francois Chollet, his second time on the podcast. He's both a world-class engineer and a philosopher in the realm of deep learning and artificial intelligence. This time, we talk a lot about his paper titled On the Measure of Intelligence that discusses how we might define and measure general intelligence in our computing machinery. Quick summary of the sponsors: Babbel, MasterClass, and Cash App. Click the sponsor links in the description to get a discount and to support this podcast. As a side note, let me say that the serious, rigorous, scientific study of artificial general intelligence is a rare thing. The mainstream machine learning community works on very narrow AI with very narrow benchmarks. This is very good for incremental and sometimes big incremental progress. On the other hand, the outside-the-mainstream, renegade, you could say, AGI community works on approaches that verge on the philosophical and even the literary without big public benchmarks. Walking the line between the two worlds is a rare breed, but it doesn't have to be. I ran the AGI series at MIT as an attempt to inspire more people to walk this line. DeepMind and OpenAI for a time, and still on occasion, walk this line. Francois Chollet does as well. I hope to also. It's a beautiful dream to work towards and to make real one day. If you enjoy this thing, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, support on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter @LexFridman. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now and no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but I give you timestamps so you can skip. But still, please do check out the sponsors by clicking the links in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. This show is sponsored by Babbel, an app and website that gets you speaking in a new language within weeks. Go to babbel.com and use code LEX to get three months free. They offer 14 languages, including Spanish, French, Italian, German, and yes, Russian. Daily lessons are 10 to 15 minutes, super easy, effective, designed by over 100 language experts. Let me read a few lines from the Russian poem, (Russian) , by Alexander Blok, that you'll start to understand if you sign up to Babbel. Ночь. Улица. Фонарь. Аптека. Бессмысленный и тусклый свет. Живи еще хоть четверть века. Все будет так. Исхода нет. Now, I say that you'll start to understand this poem because Russian starts with a language and ends with vodka. Now, the latter part is definitely not endorsed or provided by Babbel and will probably lose me the sponsorship, although it hasn't yet. But once you graduate with Babbel, you can enroll in my advanced course of late-night Russian conversation over vodka. No app for that yet. So get started by visiting babbel.com and use code LEX to get three months free. This show is also sponsored by MasterClass. Sign up at masterclass.com/lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. When I first heard about MasterClass, I thought it was too good to be true. I still think it's too good to be true. For $180 a year, you get an all-access pass to watch courses from, to list some of my favorites, Chris Hadfield on space exploration; hope to have him on this podcast one day. Neil deGrasse Tyson on scientific thinking and communication. Neil too. Will Wright, creator of SimCity and Sims on game design. Carlos Santana on guitar. Garry Kasparov on chess. Daniel Negreanu on poker and many more. Chris Hadfield explaining how rockets work and the experience of being launched to space alone is worth the money. By the way, you can watch it on basically any device. Once again, sign up at masterclass.com/lex to get a discount and to support this podcast. This show, finally, is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App allows you to send and receive money digitally, let me mention a surprising fact related to physical money. Of all the currency in the world, roughly 8% of it is actually physical money. The other 92% of the money only exists digitally, and that's only going to increase. So again, if you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use code LEXPODCAST, you get 10 bucks. And Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Francois Chollet. What philosophers, thinkers, or ideas had a big impact on you growing up? And today?