YouSaid · the spoken record
Rohit Prasad
- lines on the record
- 120
- first
- 2019-12-14
- most recent
- 2019-12-14
- sittings or episodes
- 1
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- podcast
Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections
“It's more than keywords, a little more in terms of, of course, there's keyword base too, but there's more in terms of these words can be very contextual, as you can see, and also the topic can be something that you don't want a conversation to happen because this is a communal device as well. A lot of people use these devices. So we have put a lot of guardrails for the conversation to be more useful for advancing AI and not so much of these other issues you attributed what's happening in the AI field as well.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But up that apart, the real goal was essentially what was happening is with a lot of AI research moving to industry, we felt that academia has the risk of not being able to have the same resources at disposal that we have, which is lots of data, massive computing power, and a clear ways to test these AI advances with real customer benefits. So we brought all these three together in the Alexa Prize. That's why it's one of my favorite projects in Amazon. And with that, the secondary effect is, yes, it has become engaging for our customers as well. We're not there in terms of where we want it to be, right? But it's a huge progress. But coming back to your question on how do the conversations evolve, yes, there is some natural attributes of what you said in terms of argument.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, let me just back up a bit in terms of why we are doing this, right? So you said it's fun. I think fun is more part of the engaging part for customers. It is one of the most used skills as well in our skill store.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I change the conversation? So you're starting to notice these elements as well, and that's coming from partly by the nature of the 20 minute challenge that people are getting quite clever on how to really converse and essentially mask some of the understanding defects if they exist.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're talking about ultimate. I think humor is a very high bar in terms of what it takes to create humor. And I don't mean just being goofy. I really mean good sense of humor is also a sign of intelligence in my mind and something very hard to do. So these social bots are now exploring not only what we think of natural language abilities, but also personality attributes and aspects of when to inject an appropriate joke, when to when you don't know the domain, how you come back with something more intelligible so that you can continue the conversation. If you and I are talking about AI and we are domain experts, we can speak to it. But if you suddenly switch a topic to that I don't know of.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Challenges come a long way to the extent that we're definitely not close to the 20 minute barrier being with coherence and engaging conversation. I think we are still five to ten years away in that horizon to complete that. But the progress is immense. What you're finding is the accuracy in what kind of responses these social bots generate is getting better and better. What's even amazing to see that now there's humor coming in. The bots are quite awesome.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's where we are not testing for a 20 minute boundary crossed because you do want it to be very much like a clear-cut winner be chosen and it's an absolute bar. So did you really break that 20 minute barrier is why we have to test it in a more control setting with actors, essentially interactors, and see how the conversation goes. So this is why it's a subtle... Difference between how it's being tested in the field with real customers versus in the lab to award the prize. So on the latter one, what it means is that essentially there are three judges and two of them have to say this conversation has stalled essentially”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Awesome question. So there are one, first of all, I forgot to mention one more detail. It's not just 20 minutes, but the quality of the conversation too that matters. And the beauty of this competition before I answer that question on what failure means is first that you actually converse with millions and millions of customers as the social bots. So during the judging phases, there are multiple phases. Before we get to the finals, which is a very controlled judging in a situation where we bring in judges and we have interactors who interact with the Is a much more controlled setting, but till the point we get to the finals, all the judging is essentially by the customers of Alexa. And there you basically rate on a simple question how good your experience was.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are seeing a constant evolution. First year was definitely a learning. It was a lot of things to be put together. We had to build a lot of infrastructure to enable these universities to be able to build magical experiences and do high quality research.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, it's a very exciting competition like surprise is essentially a grand challenge and conversational artificial intelligence where we threw the gauntlet to the universities who do active research in the field to say, can you build what we call a social bot that can converse with you coherently and engagingly for 20 minutes? That is an extremely hard challenge talking to someone who you're meeting for the first time or even if you've met them quite often to speak at 20 minutes on any topic and evolving nature of topics is super hard. We have completed two successful years of the competition. The first was one with the University of Washington, second University of California. We are in our third instance. We have an extremely strong team of 10 cohorts and the third instance of the Alexa Prizes underway.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a scientific standpoint, natural language is a great test, but I would go beyond, I don't want to limit it to as natural language as simply understanding an intent or parsing for entities and so forth. We are really talking about dialogue. Dialogue. So I would say human-machine dialogue is definitely one of the best tests of intelligence.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In those settings, the key differences that the end goal is not defined, unlike game playing, you also do not know exactly what state you are in, in a particular goal completion scenario. In certain sense, sometimes you can if it is a simple goal, but if you're even certain examples like planning a weekend or you can imagine how many things change along the way, you look for weather, you may change your mind and you change the destination or you want to catch a particular event and then you decide, no, I want this other event I want to go to. So these dimensions of how many different steps are possible when you're conversing as a human with a machine makes it an extremely daunting problem. And I think it is the ultimate test for intelligence.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, well, we think of it as AGI and human intelligence all together, right? So, in some sense. And I think we are quite far from that. I think an unbiased view I have. Is that the Alexis intelligence capability is a great test. I think of it as there are many other proof points like self-driving cars, game playing like go or chess. Let's take those two as an example. Clearly requires a lot of data driven learning and intelligence, but it's not as hard a problem as conversing with As an AI is with humans to accomplish certain tasks or open domain chat, as you mentioned, like surprise.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It again on a philosophical level I do subscribe to the fact that to be able to converse and as part of that to be able to reason based on the world knowledge you've acquired and the sensory knowledge that is there is definitely very much the essence of intelligence. But intelligence can go beyond human level intelligence based on what machines are getting capable of.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do think the ability to converse is a sign of an ultimate intelligence. I think that is no question about it. So if you think about all aspects of humans, there are sensors we have. And those are basically a data collection mechanism. And based on that, we make some decisions with our sensory brains. And from that perspective, I think there are elements we have to talk about how we sense the world and then how we act based on what we sense. Those elements clearly machines have. But then there's the other aspects of computation that is way better. I also mentioned about memory again in terms of being near infinite depending on the storage capacity you have. And the retrieval can be extremely fast and pure in terms of like there's no ambiguity of who did I see when, right? I mean machines can remember that quite well.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you have to think about the roles the AI plays, right? And it differs from different customer to customer, different situation to situation. Especially I can speak from Alexa's perspective. It is a companion, a friend at times, an assistant, and an advisor down the line. So I think most AIs will have this kind of attributes and it will be very situational in nature. So where is the boundary? I think the boundary depends on exact context in which you're interacting with the AI.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in the certain interactions, I think we'll be very much where it does feel like a human because it has a persona of its own In certain ones, it wouldn't be. So I think a simple example to think of it is if you're walking through the house and you just want to turn on your lights on and off and you're issuing a command, that's not very much like a human-like interaction. And that's where the AI shouldn't come back and have a conversation with you. It should simply complete that command. So I think the blend of we have to think about this is not human-human alone. It is a human machine interaction and certain aspects of humans are needed and certain aspects and situations demand it to be like a machine.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thus, as humans we have certain attributes we are very good at, very good at reasoning. AI assistance not yet there, but in the realm of AI assistance, what they're great at is computation, memory, it's infinite and pure. These are the attributes you have to start respecting. So I think the comparison with human like versus the other aspect, which is also superhuman, has to be taken into consideration. So I think we need to elevate the discussion to not just human-like.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been a while since I saw her, but I would say in terms of interactions which are both human-like and in these AI assistants, you have to value what is also superhuman. We as humans can be in only one place, AI assistants can be in multiple places at the same time. One with you on your mobile device, one at your home, one at work. So you have to respect these superhuman capabilities too.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The mov Within I think not specifically about her, but I think what we are seeing is a massive increase in adoption of AI assistance or AI in all parts of our social fabric. I think it's what I do believe is that the utility these AIs provide Some of the functionalities that are shown are absolutely within reach.”
2019-12-14 · Lex Fridman Podcast · Rohit Prasad: Amazon Alexa and Conversational AI · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source