Demba Ba: The AI Neurosurgeon

About this episode

Demba Ba discusses the importance of AI explainability and its implications for understanding both AI and human behavior.

"I want to give people the map ... what you do with it is up to you." Demba Ba has a 5-year ambition to cut open the AI Black Box and explain what makes LLMs work.  Demba Ba, the Harvard Professor described as an "AI Neurosurgeon", shows why explainability lies at the heart of humans taking control of AI's alien intelligence. And if we get this right then we will also gain huge insight - "a neurosurgeon's dream" - in to not only how AI but also humans think.  The conversartion ranges from the immediate opportunities from healthcare roll-out and AI audit (why did the AI make that decision?) to the potential power this could give the state to manipulate people. And if we can understand and predict AI behaviour, and do the same with people, what does this tell us about free will, or are we all just products of our training data? If we can create individual human knowledge graphs - building the human model - then does this mean we can predict an individual's actions? What are the implications for AI tweaking - does lobotomy (or AI dissection and editing) have a wider impact? We also discussed the huge AI opportunity for Africa - potentially one of the biggest winners…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tim Gordon, Theos Evgeniou

Guest: Demba Ba

Topics covered

• AI explainability
• healthcare
• human behavior
• free will
• AI opportunities in Africa

Keywords

• AI Black Box
• LLMs
• neurosurgeon
• AI audit
• human knowledge graphs
• free will
• Africa

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Harvard, AI

Places: Africa

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