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How Are Tech Companies Hiring Neuroscientists to Build AI?

On Decrypted, Sarah McBride tells Brad Stone that neuroscience is starting to shape how companies design AI, so it is a good moment to be a neuroscientist. People who had spent a career in universities were getting offers in Silicon Valley. Google, Apple, and Amazon were hiring them, including the zebra-finch researchers this episode follows. Intel will not say how many people it has in AI. McBride says it is a lot, and that many of them come from this animal-neuroscience background. The pitch she describes is machines that behave in smarter, more human ways. A self-driving car that has to decide quickly was already one of the jobs.

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Why Silicon Valley Is Hiring Bird Experts ·

Decrypted

More from this episode

  1. What Is a Zebra Finch"The zebra finch is the most common estrildid finch of Central Australia and ranges over most of the continent, avoiding only the cool moist south and some…
  2. What Question Prompted Tim, Boston University Professor, With Exploring the Correlation Between Avian Minds and Human MindsAt the core of his exploration, he wanted to explore why a task seemed so easy for a child, but was difficult for a robot.
  3. What Is One of the Key Focuses of Tim's StudiesHe has honed in on why zebra finches learn to sing.
  4. Why Do Researchers Study How Zebra Finches Learn to Sing?The old title of this note says birds learn to "sign." On Decrypted, Sarah McBride and Brad Stone are talking about singing.
  5. Why Does Silicon Valley Want Bird Brain Research?Scientists working on animals studies have a lot of interesting data, and tech companies love access to data.
  6. Why Are Researchers Studying Animal and Not Human BrainsHuman brains are too complicated to study, nevermind the ethical implications of doing it, while animal brains a lot simpler and we have set principles and…
  7. Why Does Amir Khosrowshahi Study Brains So Much?Amir Khosrowshahi is a computational neuroscientist by training, and he says that a lot of AI technologies can benefit from learning how humans perform tasks…
  8. Do Researchers Already Know What Matters About Birds?Decrypted puts the question to Intel.
  9. When Does Zebra-finch Research Pay Off, According to Decrypted?On Bloomberg's Decrypted, Sarah McBride and Brad Stone ask when zebra-finch research shows up in products.
  10. What Is Elon Musk Hoping to Get From NeuralinkNeuralink could enable people to have a superhuman cognition, where's one could download an entire library into their brain, or learn a language in an instant.
  11. Can You Already See Bird-brain Research in Siri, Alexa, and Google?Brad Stone asks Sarah McBride, at the end of Bloomberg's Decrypted, whether it is too early to hear a zebra finch inside Alexa, Siri, or Google's voice…

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