Invest with AI
00:01:23 · Robert Yang
[00:01:23] S0: Yeah, thanks. Uh thanks, Brett, for having me. Um yeah, so for me, it kind of began when I was in high school. I kind of it was 2007. Um I was trying to figure out what I should do with my life, and uh I thought uh if we can achieve AI, that'd be the biggest thing ever, right? So uh but AI back then is still like a taboo word, uh like in 2007. Um so but I always like to do things that are contrarian, uh psychic in some way, so like a troubling, like a like a cause trouble, you know, the kind of student that caused trouble to the teachers. Um, so um so I thought, okay, this is gonna be uh super important, but I I had no idea how to get there, right? Uh so I read some AI books. There was this book by uh this Berkeley professor called Artificial Intelligence, and it was there were nothing about neural networks, everything is like rule-based expert system, and I just thought that's not right, right? It has to be neural networks. Um, so at that time I already knew that like the brain is made of neural networks, and I was like, this is the right thing. Um, so then I just entered um um, but there I think I made maybe a bit of a mistake, right? So so I think a lot of people, like the AI pioneers, uh, felt the same way. I was like, oh, it should be neural network, and the brain is neural network. But then they at some point they realized, okay, you should uh there's a difference between studying the brain and trying to like build a neural network that is inspired by the brain. So I kind of just went in very hard in like just studying the brain, right? Um, so fast forward like like 15 years, uh, I was a faculty at MIT doing computational neuroscience, um, which is still like I was, I guess, part of the early wave of using neural network to model the brain. Uh, even though the brain is a neural network, uh, actually, people weren't really using artificial neural network to model it. And when I first started doing it, and again, it was very controversial. In fact, I'll share with you this story. Um, someone on my thesis committee uh in grad school, a very senior professor, uh, when I was presenting the first time uh I was doing work uh using neural network to model the brain, using artificial neural nets. Uh, these were like recurrent neural networks back in 2015. Uh, he just looked at me, and this is in front of my PhD advisor.
00:03:59 · Robert Yang
He just looked at me and said, Um, you are building upon trash, right? So so I was building upon uh this author, David Sussillo, who I later actually did an internship with. He's a great scientist. Um so I was built, uh he's actually a book author and wrote a wrote a book as well. But uh I was building upon his work, and uh and this professor didn't want to call my work trash. He called David Sussillo's work trash and was like, I'm making it a little bit nicer, but it's still trash. Uh he didn't say it's still trash, he's just saying you're building upon trash and making it a little bit nicer, right? Um, but within two years, uh, I think essentially the approach that I was doing and David Sussillo was doing became mainstream very, very quickly. Uh, everyone was using these artificial neural networks, like deep neural networks, to model the brain. Uh, and I actually kind of had a had a like uh existential crisis at the point. I I was having a crisis at MIT because so we realize that the neural networks that um these AI people are putting out, right? The language models, etc., etc., are actually much better models of the brain than uh than the neuroscientists have been building. You know? So so it turns out these people are just out there trying to solve intelligence, and as a result, we're building actually better descriptions of how our human brain works than anyone else did.
00:05:32 · Brett Caughran, Robert Yang
[00:05:32] S1: So that was a real just backing up, is this what inspired you to like it was it sounds like a childhood interest in in artificial intelligence that drove you into computational neuroscience? Is that yeah, yes? [00:05:46] S0: Yes, sorry, I skipped that. So essentially my thinking process was pretty naive. Um I was like, I want to but I want to do AI, right? AI is I think the right form of AI would be a neural network. [00:06:00] S1: And the only working initial inspiration, like what what was it? Did you read was it reading sci-fi? Like what reading, like what you remember, what what sort of got you interested at such a such a young? I can't I can't recall what was on my mind in 2007, but it's it certainly was an AI.
00:06:16 · Robert Yang
[00:06:16] S0: Yeah, yeah. Uh I guess so I was thinking about the I had always wanted to do something important. It's like profound. Um, and I felt like there are not that many profound things out there left to do, right? Like Newton and Einstein already did a lot on physics, we already under we know there's gene, right? So but AI just felt like an obvious, like if we can do this, then this is gonna be extremely important, right? Maybe the most important thing in the in like after Newton, right? This is my my opinion. Um, is I think after I think it's like Newton, Darwin, and AI, right? Um so yeah, I thought I just thought that's what I want to do. Um and I'm naive in the sense that I wasn't really thinking about, oh, like, is the timing gonna be ready, right? Maybe it's not gonna be ready for another 30 years, right? Then uh and and then I also didn't think, am I the right person to do this, right? So uh I didn't really think about these things. Uh in fact, I went to um I went to physics department. Uh I actually considered going to biology, but I went to biology and I was like, what do you study? They're like, we're studying like plants, right? And animals, and that's boring. So so I went into physics because I thought, okay, physics is how you understand the world through mathematics, right? And um essentially you want to understand the intelligence through mathematics. Uh so I went to physics and we we were introducing ourselves, and everyone is like, oh, like I really love physics, blah blah blah. And I was like, I love AI, and if you're interested in AI, please come tell me. Um people were very confused because most people have not even heard of AI, right? It's not, it's like um for people who have heard of it, it's like a sci-fi thing. It's the people didn't think it's a real thing. That was 2008.
00:08:17 · Brett Caughran, Robert Yang
[00:08:17] S1: This was what this was what year? [00:08:19] S0: 2008. [00:08:21] S1: 2008, okay. [00:08:22] S0: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so that's some so that's how I got into computational neuroscience. Um, so something that a lot of people don't realize is is um really some of the uh AI uh pioneers, uh like for example, Dario at um Anthropic, right, the co-founder CEO, uh he actually did uh computational neuroscience in his PhD. Uh I actually know some of his co-authors. Um and uh and the DeepMind co-founder and CEO, um uh Demis Hassabis also did uh neuroscience. He just did straight up neuroscience in his PhD and then did computational neuroscience in his postdoc. Uh, and DeepMind was kind of spun out of um his postdoc. Uh it's um my I guess what I did is you can call it a mistake, at least from my career standpoint. It's like I spent a little too long uh doing it, right? Um kind of probably the right thing would be at 2017, maybe just pivot to go all the way to like building intelligence, right? Because that that was always my goal, right? Um, but I was I think a bit more like risk averse back then. I was like, I already did PhD, I think I can get a faculty job. [00:09:36] S1: And um uh so yeah, so it's uh but but what does it what does a faculty MIT PhD do in in computational neuroscience do? Like what were what were your responsibilities in that in that seat?
00:09:52 · Robert Yang
[00:09:52] S0: Yeah, so um uh yeah, absolutely. So so uh a faculty is like is essentially these like professors, right? I mean, there's rank, there's like assistant professor, associate professor, right? But we can just call them all professors. And so these these professors they do essentially two things. One is they uh teach uh they they teach undergrads, right? Uh teach undergrads and teach grad students. And for a lot of like people uh right who after the graduate college, this is their main understanding of what these professors do, right? But at a lots of research institutes like MIT and like Stanford, Harvard, um, you can say the main responsibility of the professors are actually to conduct research, right? Typically you you run a research lab that has um somewhere between like five to maybe like 30, 40 people, and uh you kind of just guide them to do research, right? Um so so this is what I was doing. Uh I was at MIT for uh a few years um before I essentially um resigned. And uh I had a pretty good lab, but we actually had uh we had I I didn't have any student who's like I wasn't there long enough to have a student graduate PhD, but I had postdocs. These are people who already have PhDs. I had postdocs who did really well. I had one postdoc who went to CMU to be uh assistant professor in the machine learning department, another one went to Brown uh in the applied mass, and I think I mentored like five, six students who ended up going to like MIT, Berkeley, all these good schools. Uh so I was really, I think, proud of our team. Uh I am proud of our team we had at MIT. Um, but during almost the whole time at MIT, I was like suffering from this existential crisis. Uh to be fair, our our apartment, um I would say I was in part of two apartments. One is uh brain cognitive science, another is uh EECS, electroengineering and computer science. Uh and I would say uh these two apartments, uh departments are are really like the best, right? Maybe like uh the MIT department is definitely among like the top three, four departments in the world in computer science. And the brain cognitive science department I was in, I would argue it's like the number one department in the world to do it.