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Michael I. Jordan

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135
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2020-02-24
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2020-02-24
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  1. “Massive uncertainty Massive uncertainty. And so the best I can do is have kind of rough sense or probability distribution on things and somehow use that in my reasoning about what to do now.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “That's easy. I mean, I'm a statistician. You know, the world is highly stochastic. I don't know what's going to happen in the next five minutes, right? What you're going to ask, what we're going to do.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, you can, if you're a kind of the certain kind of mathematician, you can try to blend them and make them seem to be sort of the same thing. But optimization is roughly speaking trying to find a point that a single point, that is the optimum of a criterion function of some kind. And sampling is trying to from that same surface treat that as a distribution or density and find points that have high density. So I want the entire distribution and a sampling paradigm and I want the single point that's the best point in the optimization paradigm. Now, if you were optimizing in the space of probability measures, the output of that could be a whole probability distribution. So you can start to make these things the same. But in mathematics, if you go too high up that kind of abstraction arc, you start to lose the ability to do the interesting theorems. So you kind of don't try to overly over abstract.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “So, optimization is just one piece of mathematics. Even in our era, we're aware that, say, sampling is coming up examples of something coming up with a distribution.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Both. I mean, individual human life is amazingly complex. So, you know, optimization is kind of just one branch of mathematics that talks about certain kind of things. And it just feels way too limited for the complexity of such things.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Not the way I think typically. I mean, that's you're talking about one of the most complex phenomena in the whole universe.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So, my answer is fundamentally good, but fundamentally limited. All of us have very blinkers on. We don't see the other person's pain that easily. We don't see the other person's point of view that easily. We're very much in our own head, in our own world. And on my good days, I think that technology could open us up to more perspectives and more less blinkered and more understanding. A lot of wars in human history happen because of just ignorance. They thought the other person was doing this. Well, the other person wasn't doing this. And we have a huge amount of that. But in my lifetime, I've not seen technology really help in that way yet. And I do believe in that. But no, I think fundamentally humans are good. People suffer. People have grievances. You have grudges and those things cause them to do things they probably wouldn't want. They regret it often. So no, I think it's, you know, part of the progress of technology is to indeed allow it to be easier to be the real good.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Quite dark. Yeah. I think a lot of us are, especially those of us who really loved the advent of technology, I love social networks when they came out. I didn't say any negatives there at all. But then I started seeing comment sections. I think it was maybe one of the CNN or something. And I started going, wow, this darkness, I just did not know about. And our technology is now amplifying it.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I don't know the answers, but it's less anonymity, a little more locality. There's a lot of wasting enough time. A lot of us, I pulled out of Facebook early on because it was clearly going to waste a lot of my time, even though there was some value. And so, yeah, worlds that are somehow you enter in and you know what you're getting, and it kind of appeals to you. You might new things might happen, but you kind of have some trust in that world.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Lot of money to be made, and all these things that provide human services, and people recognize them as useful parts of their lives. So yeah, so yeah, the dialogue sometimes goes from the exuberant technologists to the no technology is good, kind of. And that's, you know, in our public discourse, you know, and newspapers, you see too much of this kind of thing. And the sober discussions in the middle, which are the challenging ones to have are where we need to be having our conversations. And, you know, actually, there's not many forum fora for those. You know, that's kind of what I would look for. Maybe I could go and I could read a comment section of something. And it would actually be this kind of dialogue going back and forth. You don't see much of this, right?”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So, I don't know how to do this. I'm not a privacy researcher per se. I just recognize the vast complexity of this. It's not just technology. It's not just legal scholars, medium technologists. There's got to be kind of a whole layers around it. And so when I allude to this emerging engineering field, this is a big part of it. When electrical engineering came, I wasn't around in the time, but you just didn't plug electricity into walls and it all kind of worked. You don't have like underwriters laboratory that reassured you that that plug's not going to burn up your house and that that machine will do this and that and everything. There'll be whole people who can install things. There'll be people who can watch the installers. There'll be a whole layer of onion of these kind of things. And for things that's deep and interesting as privacy, which is at least as interesting as electricity, that's going to take decades to kind of work out, but it's going to require a lot of new structures that we don't have right now. So it's kind of hard to talk about it.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “No, it's much more than that. I mean, first of all, it should be an individual decision. Some people don't want privacy, they want their whole life out there. Other people want it Privacy is not a zero one. It's not a legal thing. It's not just about which data is available and which is not. I like to recall to people that a couple hundred years ago everyone, there was not really big cities. Everyone lived around the countryside and villages. And in villages, everybody knew everything about you. You didn't have any privacy. Is that bad? Are we better off now? Well, you know, arguably no, because what did you get for that loss of certain kinds of privacy? Well, people helped you each other because they know everything about you. They know something's bad's happening. They will help you with that, right? And now you live in a big city. No one knows the amount of you. You get no help. So it kind of depends, the answer. I want certain people who I trust and there should be relationships. I should kind of manage all those. But who knows what about me? I should have some agency there. I shouldn't just be a drift in a sea of technology where I have no agency. And I don't want to go reading things and checking boxes.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And if the company can stand up and give me that in the context of technology, I think they're going to, first of all, be way more successful than our current generation. And like I said, I was mentioning Microsoft earlier. I really think they're pivoting to kind of be the trusted old uncle. But, you know, I think that they get that this is a way to go, that if you let people find technology empowers them to have more control and have control, not just over privacy, but over this rich set of interactions, that that people are going to like that a lot more. And that's the right business model going forward.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “No, no. I don't want a lecture to feel intrusive, and I don't want just the designer of the system to kind of work all this out. I really want to have a lot of control, and I want transparency and control.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Well, a good Alexis done right. I think Alexa's a research platform right now more than anything else. But Alexa done right could do things like I leave the water running in my garden and I say, hey, Alexa, the water's running in my garden and even have Alexa figure out that that means when my wife comes home that she should be told about that. That's a little bit of a reasoning. I would call that AI and by any kind of stretch. It's a little bit of reasoning. And it actually kind of would make my life a little easier and better. You know, I wouldn't call this a wow moment, but I kind of think that overall rises human happiness up to have that kind of thing.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, no, good. Human interaction on our daily, the context around me in my own home is something that I don't want some big company to know about at all. But I would be more than happy to have technology help me with it.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, no, I'm not against any of this. I just wanted to push back against maybe you're saying you have autism for Facebook. So there I think it's misplaced. But I think that distributing... Yeah, I know. So good for you. Go for it.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It in a great way. So, no, I'm not a pessimist, but I'm very much an optimist by nature, but I think that's just been the wrong path for the whole technology to take. Be more limited, create, let humans rise up. Don't try to replace them. That's the AI mantra. Don't try to anticipate them. Don't try to predict them because you're not going to be able to do those things. You're going to make things worse.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I want them to provide a forum, a market, a place that I kind of go and buy hook or by crook, this happens. I'm walking down the street and I hear some Chilean music being played and I never knew I liked chili music, but wow. So there is that side. And I want them to provide a limited but interesting place to go, right? And so don't try to use your AI to kind of, you know, figure me out and then put me in a world where you figured me out. You know, no, create spaces for human beings where our creativity and our style will be enriched and come forward and it'll be a lot more transparency. I won't have people randomly anonymously putting comments up and I'll special based on stuff they know about me, facts that you know we are so broken right now if you're, you know, especially if you're a celebrity, but you know, it's about anybody that anonymous people are hurting lots and lots of people right now. That's part of this thing that Silicon Valley is thinking that just collect all this information and use it.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “No, I think so. I think we are humans, are just amazingly rich and complicated. Every one of us has our little quirks. Everyone else has our little things that could intrigue us that we don't even know and will intrigue us. And there's no sign of it in our past. But by God, there it comes. And, you know, you fall in love with it. And I don't want a company trying to figure that out for me and anticipate that.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “But you don't. Because, for example, this morning I clicked on, I was pretty sleepy this morning. I clicked on a story about the Queen of England. I do not give a damn about the Queen of England. I really do not. But it was clickbait. It kind of looked funny and I had to say, what the heck are they talking about there? I don't want to have my life heading in that direction. Now that's in my browsing history.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Hot open questions, but also, yeah, I do want good recommendation systems that recommend cool stuff to me, but it's pretty hard, right? I don't like them to recommend stuff just based on my browsing history. I don't like that based on stuff they know about me, quote unquote. What's unknown about me is the most interesting.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “But I wouldn't have wanted it. I wouldn't have wanted it per se because there should be also sites where that's not actually the goal. The goal is to actually have a broadcast channel that I monetize in some other way. If I chose to. I mean, I could now. People know about it. I could. I'm not doing it. But that's fine with me. Also, the musicians who are making all this music, I don't think the right model is that you pay a little subscription fee to them. All right. Because people can copy the bits too easily. And it's just not that. It's not where the value is. The value is that a connection was made between rural human beings. Then you can follow up on that, right? And create yet more value. So no, I think.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “So, first of all, I pay little bits of money to say there's something called courts that does financial things. I like medium as a site. I don't pay there, but I would.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “You have 100,000 artists now signed on, and they've done things like gone to the NBA and the NBA, the music you find behind NBA Eclipse right now is their music. That's a company that had the right business model in mind from the get-go, executed on that. And from day one, there was value brought to, so here you have a kid who made some songs who suddenly their songs are on the NBA website, right? That's really economic value to people. And so, you know.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I didn't say that. I said they won't cover. They won't do it. But in the shower, I think a lot of other people will discover it. I think that this guy, so I should also, full disclosure, there's a company called United Masters, which I'm on their board. And they've created this music market.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Something that people would value. And I don't think they have that business model. And I don't think they will suddenly discover it by what, you know, a long hot shower.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Don't see that. I think that optimism is misplaced because there's not a bit. You have to have a business model behind these things. Create a beautiful thing is really clear. It's about.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Moment, I don't want to be led down very directly, you know, that's annoying. I want to just go and have it be extremely easy to do what I want. Other moments, I might say, no, it's like today I'm going to the shopping mall. I want to walk around and see things and see people and be exposed to stuff. So I want control over that though. I don't want the company's algorithms to decide for me. And I think that's the thing. It's a total loss of control if Facebook thinks they should take the control from us of deciding when we want to have certain kinds of information, when we don't, what information that is, how much it relates to what they know about us that we didn't really want them to know about us. I don't want them to be helping me in that way. I don't want them to be helping them by they decide they have control over what I want and when.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Trust Microsoft more. Well, Microsoft is pivoting. Microsoft, you know, under Satya Nedel, has decided this is really important. We don't want to do creepy things. Really want people to trust us to actually only use information in ways that they really would approve of, that we don't decide, right? And I'm just kind of adding that health of a market is that when I connect to someone who produces a consumer, it's not just a random producer or consumer. It's people who see each other, they don't like each other, but they sense that if they transact, some happiness will go up on both sides. If a company helps me to do that in moments that I choose of my choosing, then fine. And also think about the difference between browsing versus buying, right? There are moments in my life, I just want to buy, you know, a gadget or something. I need something for that moment. I need some ammonia for my house or something because I got a problem, a spill. I want to just go in. I don't want to be advertised at it.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “And that Facebook knows things about a lot of people and could exploit it and does exploit it at times. I think most people do find that creepy. It's not for them. It's not that Facebook is not doing it because they care about them, right, in any real sense. And they shouldn't. They should not be a big brother caring about us. That is not the role of a company like that.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “You don't find it creepy that right now we're talking that I might walk out on the street right now that some unknown person who I don't know kind of comes up to me and says, I hear you going to India. I mean, that's not even Facebook. That's just I want transparency in human society. I want to have if you know something about me, there's actually some reason you know something about me that's something that if I look at it later and audit it kind of, I approve. You know something about me because you care in some way. There's a caring relationship, even an economic one or something. Not just that you're someone who could exploit it in ways I don't know about or care about or I'm troubled by or whatever. We're in a world right now where that happened way too much.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “That's a good question. So let's put on that push on that. First of all, what we just talked about, I was defending advertising. Okay. So I was defending it as a way to get signals into a market that don't come any other way, especially algorithmically. It's a sign that someone spent money on it. It's a sign they think it's valuable. And if I think that if someone else thinks it's valuable and if I trust other people, I might be willing to listen. I don't trust that Facebook, though, who's an intermediary between this. I don't think they care about me. Okay. I don't think they do. And I find it creepy that they know I'm going to India next week because of our conversation.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “Producer consumer, I think they will just continue to make money and then buy the next social network company and then buy the next one. And the innovation level will not be high and the health issues will not go away.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “It will change because the society is just don't you know stick with things that annoy a lot of people and advertising currently annoys people more than it provides information I think that Google probably is smart enough to figure out that this is a dead, this is a bad model, even though it's a huge, huge amount of money and they'll have to figure out how to pull it away from it slowly. And I'm sure the CEO there will figure it out. But they need to do it and they need to, so if you reduce advertising not to zero, but you reduce it at the same time, you bring up producer, consumer, actual real value being delivered so real money is being paid and they take a 5% cut, that 5% could start to get big enough to cancel out the lost revenue from the kind of the poor kind of advertising. And I think that a good company will do that. We'll realize that. And there are, you know, Facebook, again, God bless them. They bring grandmothers' pictures into grandmother's lives. It's fantastic. But they need to think of a new business model. And that's the core problem there until they start to connect.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “You allow that vacuum cleaner to start to get in front of people be sold? Well, advertising. And here what advertising is, it's a signal that you believe in your product enough, that you're willing to pay some real money for it. And to me as a consumer, I look at that signal and I say, well, first of all, I know these are not just cheap little ads because we have now right now. I know that, you know, these are super cheap, you know, pennies. If I see an ad where it's actually, I know the company is only doing a few of these and they're making real money is kind of flowing and I see an ad, I may pay more attention to it. And I actually might want that because I see, hey, that guy spent money on his vacuum cleaner. Maybe there's something good there. So I will look at it. And so that's part of the overall information flow in a good market. So advertising has a role. But the problem is, of course, that that signal is now completely gone because it just dominated by these tiny little things that add up to big money for the company. I think it will just, I think.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “That's a good question. So it has become not crucial, but it's become more and more present if you go to Amazon website. And without revealing too many deep secrets about Amazon, I can tell you that a lot of people in the company question this. And there's a huge questioning going on. You do not want a world where there's zero advertising. That actually is a bad world. So here's a way to think about it. A company that like Amazon is trying to bring products to customers, right? And the customer at any given moment, oh, you want to buy a vacuum cleaner, say you want to know what's available for me. And, you know, it's not going to be that obvious. You have to do a little bit of work at it. The recommendation system will sort of help, right? But now suppose this other person over here has just made the world, you know, they spend a huge amount of energy. They had a great idea. They made a great vacuum cleaner. They know they really did it. They nailed it. It's an MIT Wiz kid that made a great new vacuum cleaner. It's not going to be in the recommendation system. No one will know about it. The algorithms will not find it and AI will not fix that at all, right?”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Yeah, well, the companies. I mean, so first of all, full disclosure. I'm doing a day a week at Amazon because I kind of want to learn more about how they do things. So, you know, I'm not speaking for Amazon in any way, but I did go there because I actually believe they get a little bit of this or trying to create these markets.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “than they might have thought and that they're probably heading that direction. But Silicon Valley has been dominated by the Google Facebook kind of mentality and the subscription and advertising. And that's the core problem, right? The fake news actually rides on top of that because it means that you're monetizing with click-through rate. And that is the core problem. You got to remove that.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “As an odd subscription, it's that I'm going to pay that person in that moment. Company's going to take 5% of that. And that person has now got it. It's a gig economy, if you will. But, you know, done for thinking about a little bit behind YouTube, there was actually people who could make more of those things if they were connected to a market. They would make more of those things independently. You don't have to tell them what to do. You don't have to incentivize them any other way. And so, yeah, these companies I don't think have thought long or heard about that. I do distinguish on Facebook on the one side who's just not thought about these things at all. I think thinking that AI will fix everything. And Amazon who thinks about them all the time because they were already out in the real world. They were delivering packages to people's doors. They were worried about a market. They were worried about sellers. And they worry and some things they do are great. Some things maybe not so great. But they're in that business model. And then I'd say Google sort of hovers somewhere in between. I don't think for a long, long time they got it. I think they probably see that YouTube is more pregnant with possibilities.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Micro, but even after being micro. So I like the example. Suppose I'm going next week, I'm going to India. Never been to India before, right? I have a couple days in Mumbai. I have no idea what to do there, right? And I could go on the web right now and search. It's going to be kind of hopeless. I'm not going to find. I have lots of advertisers in my face, right? What I really want to do is broadcast to the world that I am going to Mumbai and have someone on the other side of a market look at me and there's a recommendation system there. So they're not looking at all possible people coming to Mumbai. They're looking at the people who are relevant to them. So someone, my age group, someone who kind of knows me in some level, I give up a little privacy by that, but I'm happy because what I'm going to get back is this person's going to make a little video for me. Or they're going to write a little two-page paper on here's the cool things that you want to do and move by this week especially, right? I'm going to look at that. I'm not going to pay a micropayment. I'm going to pay $100 or whatever for that. It's real value. It's like journalism.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Right, and figure out what are bad clicks, though, maybe shouldn't be click through rated, should be something. I find that pretty much hopeless. It does get into all the complaints of human life. And you can try to fix it. You should. But you could also fix the whole business model. And the business model is that really, are there some human producers and consumers out there? Is there some economic value to be liberated by connecting them directly? Is it such that it's so valuable that people will be willing to pay for it? All right.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “Thing and all these clicks just is feeding the advertising. It's all connected up to the advertising. So you want more people to click on certain things because that money flows to you, Facebook. You're very much incentivized to do that. And we start to find it's breaking. People are telling you, well, we're getting into some troubles. You try to adjust it with your smart AI algorithms.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “No other choice. The TV market was going away and billboards and so on. So they got it. And I think that sadly that Google just was doing so well with that and making so much money. They didn't think much more about how, wait a minute, is there a producer consumer relationship to be set up here, not just between us and the advertisers market to be created? Is there an actual market between the producer and consumer? They're the producers, the person who created that video clip, the person that made that website, the person who could make more such things, the person who could adjust it as a function of demand. The person on the other side who's asking for a different kinds of things. So you see glimmers of that now. There's influencers and there's kind of a little glimmering of a market. But it should have been done 20 years ago. It should have been thought about. It should have been created in parallel with the advertising ecosystem. And then Facebook inherited that. And I think they also didn't think very much about that. So fast forward and they are making huge amounts of money off of advertising and the new”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So, I don't even think about it at that level. I think that what's broken with some of these companies, it's all monetization by advertising. They're not, at least Facebook, I want to critique them. They didn't really try to connect a producer and a consumer in an economic way. No one wants to pay for anything. And so they all, you know, starting with Google and then Facebook, they went back to the playbook of the television companies back in the day. No one wanted to pay for this signal. They will pay for the TV box, but not for the signal, at least back in the day. And so advertising kind of filled that gap. And advertising was new and interesting. And it somehow didn't take over our lives quite. Right. Fast forward, Google provides a service that people don't want to pay for. And so somewhat surprisingly 90s, they end up making huge amounts. They corner the advertising market. It didn't seem like that was going to happen, at least to me. These little things on the right-hand side of the screen just did not seem all that economically interesting, but companies hadn't maybe.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Find out what's in the data. It doesn't work so well for other kinds of entities, but that's just the complexity of human life, like shirts. I'm not going to get a recommendations on shirts. But that's interesting. If you try to recommend restaurants, it's hard. It's hard to do it at scale. But a blend of recommendation systems with other economic ideas matching and so on is really, really still very open research-wise. And there's new companies that emerge that do that well.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “Well, just historically, I was one of the, you know, when I first went to Amazon, you know, I first didn't like Amazon because they put the book People Out of Business, the library, you know, the local booksellers went out of business. I've come to accept that there probably are more books being sold now and more people reading them than ever before. And then local stores are coming back. So, you know, that's how economics sometimes works. You go up and you go down. But anyway, when I finally started going there and I bought a few books, I was really pleased to see another few books being recommended to me that I never would have thought of. And I bought a bunch of them. So they obviously had a good business model. But I learned things. And I still to this day kind of browse using that service. And I think lots of people get a lot, you know, that is a good aspect of a recommendation system. I'm learning from my peers in an indirect way. And their algorithms are not meant to have them impose what we learn. It really is trying to.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Yeah, it's a great question. I think pretty high. There's no magic in the algorithms, but a good recommender system is way better than a bad recommender system. And recommender systems is a bill and dollar industry back even 10, 20 years ago. And it continues to be extremely important going forward”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “And so, but anyway, you know, not to denigrate. These companies are all trying and they should, and I'm sure they're asking these questions and some of them are even making an effort. But it is partly a respect the culture as a technology person. You got to blend your technology with cultural meaning.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Right. And so with movies, you can kind of go a large sum of money to somebody graduating from the USC Film School. It's a whole thing of its own, but it's kind of like rich white people's thing to do, you know, and, you know, American culture has not been so much about rich white people. It's been about all the immigrants, all the Africans who came and brought that culture and those rhythms to this world and created this whole new thing, American culture. So companies can't artificially create that. They can't just say, hey, we're here. We're going to buy it up. You got to partner.”

    2020-02-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #74 – Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source