François Chollet: Keras, Deep Learning, and the Progress of AI

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with François Chollet. He's the creator of Keras, which is an open source deep learning library that is designed to enable fast, user-friendly experimentation with deep neural networks. It serves as an interface to several deep learning libraries, most popular of which is TensorFlow, and it was integrated into the TensorFlow main code base a while ago. Meaning, if you want to create, train and use neural networks, probably the easiest and most popular option is to use Keras inside TensorFlow. Aside from creating an exceptionally useful and popular library, François is also a world-class AI researcher and software engineer at Google, and he's definitely an outspoken if not controversial personality in the AI world, especially in the realm of ideas around the future of artificial intelligence. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, give us five stars on iTunes, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter at Lex Friedman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. Now, here's my conversation with François Chollet.
You're known for not sugar-coating your opinions and speaking your mind about ideas and AI, especially on Twitter. It's one of my favorite Twitter accounts. So what's one of the more controversial ideas you've expressed online and gotten some heat for? How do you pick?

**SPEAKER_2** (1:50)
How do I pick? Yeah, no, I think if you go through the trouble of maintaining a Twitter account, you might as well speak your mind, you know? Otherwise, what's even the point of doing a Twitter account? It's like having a nice car and just leave it in the garage. Yeah, so what's one thing for which I got a lot of pushback? Perhaps, you know, that time I wrote something about the idea of intelligence explosion, and I was questioning the idea and the reasoning behind this idea. And I got a lot of pushback on that. I got a lot of flak for it. So yeah, so intelligence explosion, I'm sure you're familiar with the idea, but it's the idea that if you were to build general AI problem-solving algorithms, well, the problem of building such an AI, that itself is a problem that could be solved by your AI, and maybe it could be solved better than what humans can do. So your AI could start tweaking its own algorithm, could start making a better version of itself, and so on iteratively in a recursive fashion, and so you would end up with an AI with exponentially increasing intelligence.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:07)
That's right.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:08)
And I was basically questioning this idea. First of all, because the notion of intelligence explosion uses an implicit definition of intelligence that doesn't sound quite right to me. It considers intelligence as a property of a brain that you can consider in isolation, like the height of a building, for instance. But that's not really what intelligence is. Intelligence emerges from the interaction between a brain, a body, like embodied intelligence, and an environment. And if you're missing one of these pieces, then you cannot really define intelligence anymore. So just tweaking a brain to make it smaller and smaller doesn't actually make any sense to me.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:56)
So first of all, you're crushing the dreams of many people, right? So there's a, let's look at like Sam Harris, actually a lot of physicists, Max Tegmark, people who think the universe is an information processing system. Our brain is kind of an information processing system. So what's the theoretical limit? Like it doesn't make sense that there should be some, it seems naive to think that our own brain is somehow the limit of the capabilities and disinformation. I'm playing devil's advocate here. This information processing system. And then if you just scale it, if you're able to build something that's on par with the brain, you just, the process that builds it just continues and it'll improve exponentially. So that, that's the logic that's used actually by almost everybody that is worried about superhuman intelligence.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:54)
Yeah.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:54)
So you're, you're trying to make, so most people who are skeptical of that are kind of like, this doesn't, their thought process, this doesn't feel right. Like that's for me as well. So I'm more like it doesn't, the whole thing is shrouded in mystery where you, you can't really say anything concrete, but you could say this doesn't feel right. This doesn't feel like that's how the brain works. And you're trying to with your blog post and now making a little more explicit. So one idea is that the brain isn't exist alone, it exists within the environment. So you can't exponentially, you would have to somehow exponentially improve the environment and the brain together, almost yet in order to create something that's much smarter in some kind of, of course we don't have a definition of intelligence.