Languages and Machine Learning with Richard Stebbing
Vietnamese, GPTs, and 3d dolphins (oh my!)
Today I’m joined by Richard Stebbing who earned his PhD in engineering science with a focus on computer vision from Oxford. We originally met years ago at a private salon of roboticists and ML/AI practitioners who gather in San Francisco to learn about frontier technologies from academic/industry experts.
This episode is all about language and technology — specifically Richard's study of Vietnamese, his interest in large language models, his prior projects in recovering 2D and 3D structures from images and videos, his most recent work on transformer-based models at Impira, and their recent acquisition by Figma and the new areas he's excited to contribute to.
It was a joy to explore these topics with Richard since he is the rare combination of an expert who approaches the world with a beginner's curiosity. I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation.
0:00 - intro
1:07 - learning Vietnamese language
11:11 - learning new programming languages
14:31 - tokenizers
24:19 - hands on with AI programming
28:53 - headwinds and tailwinds in machine learning/AI
45:56 - rooting large language models in factual truth
1:02:53 - Richard's work on 2d/3d computer vision
1:12:27 - Microsoft Research - Trueskill for player matching on Xbox Live
1:24:43 - open source software and the closed/control points in generative AI/ML
1:33:24 - ChatGPT - reopened the conversation of search
1:52:12 - large language models in verticals
1:55:45 - Richard's future work/interests
1:57:42 - Impira - geometric language models
2:11:22 - Figma acquisition of Impira and future of Richard's work at Figma