Bay Area AI: Darryl McAdams Interview
Recording: Bay Area AI: Darryl McAdams Interview
hello everybody I'm Alexa crab Roe the organizer of x ray I'm it up and we evolved over the last year actually used to be called SF text and did all the final p and then we develop honoring and then we realize that basically everybody does the same thing for all kind of different things and now it's all called the I however we love to go to our NOP roots and so today we have Daryl Mikado spots here who is doing Gustavo anguish hello hello how's it going alright thanks for coming we're looking forward to a talk and they can you tell us a little bit about the things you do with language yes so basically right now I'm working on a project called language engine and what it lets you do is at a high level you have some natural language input and it transforms that into a logical representation of the meeting that you can use for basically anything you want so for instance you could use it to perform database queries or you could fly a drone with it or whatever you want so you measure that your you know your linguist your type theorist how do type systems figure out this ah well so traditionally you might represent the meaning of a sentence or something like this as proposition first-order logic or something and one extension to first order logic is to something called dependent types which actually makes the the proofs of parts of the proposition available to later parts of the proposition which turns out to be really useful for all sorts of things like pronouns and and presuppositions and stuff so the same dependent diocese in Idris yep this is interesting so so basically so they are more applicable to MLP than other types yeah yeah and that's something that probably most people don't really know about yeah I've lost heard about this I mean now that you mention it it seems obvious but well you know propositions are types right uh-huh so why then we didn't see at least I didn't see a little p system rican interest yet ah well so if you wanted to write something in a dress you would have to actually like dig around in the address compiler and make some changes to customize it and you know I guess you could do that mm-hmm but uh that's that's very difficult the then you have to like learn how the address compiler works yes it's much easier to just you know build it from scratch yes so what what I use in for them right now so language engine is implemented entirely in haskell okay which you know so is idris yeah but what I've done basically is I've used Haskell to implement a custom programming language that is that is geared towards natural language stuff ok so I saw the name it's called golem ok not that not that you could search for it on google and find a ok but uh yeah so it has some special modifications to the type system to account for things like the distinction between the distinction between stuff that you want to exist at the language meaning level and stuff that you want to exist at the level of programming language meanings mm-hmm so there's like a special type distinction between those two levels and also there are just some extra facilities that are special to natural language like delimited continuations and these sorts of things interesting so how much of this is open source oh how much of it is you would you plan to be open source kinda gone be an open source layer for nokia no language for for costco so technically language engine is not open source but the major components of it are so there are two main components there's there's the implementation of the programming language and then there is a parser and both of those are actually open source on my github ok and the only stuff that's not open source is like the nasty API stuff look you know that the server stuff that hits the data in all this you know it's ugly I don't want people to see that good okay and so so what are the plans for this project I will be able to you it should be a storm tops should be at the research area kind of what are your kind of long term agenda Oh long term I want it to be bigger than Google all right yeah so the long term idea is to actually have a company that provides all of the real AI stuff of the future mm-hmm not not just not just a I for doing data analysis but the AI that you build your robots out of AI that you have your intelligent agents built out of that kind of AI and so language is an important part of that and so this is the first step towards that so is it conversationally I is it basically yeah that's what understand humans in the universe yeah exactly that's the goal I don't want to claim that that's what it does yes but that's the goal so I mean this is great to hear right because in my mind right we see this tremendous hyper chatbots and a lot to check both basically you know kind of rule-based Eliza like systems and and so I think that you just connect between the enthusiasm for BOTS and understanding that you need multiple wives of an opp she is encoded in the Shabbat probably at least but that's what I kind of think you know from my key circle context but so do you think you know that so you can do the chat bot right like I know a few people who you know I can trust they if they build a chat but it will probably be very intricate you know it very well crafted chat wat right so but a lot of people you know who get to do this don't even cold they get IP is like what some and they think they can build a shed but so so are you gonna give them an API to do this are you gonna build custom checkbox how do you thing is this is good neighbor what does it take to build the chat BOTS can can can it become mass-produced or you know do you have to essentially give people this chat bot and then you will operate your company will appear you have the high priests of Gollum who will you know update it and so forth yeah that's a good question so the way it is right now you can go in and you can write whatever could you want and Gollum mm-hmm and it over on it hmm though it does sort of require that you know what you're doing or you know how to program in it and probably needle drop down to high school no no no you don't need to drop down to haskell to program this stuff that's that's why I make go home so that everything can be done in golem and it's specific to this task can the power user extend golem berglund Hosko like would anticipate the needs like somebody will be able to do this or do you want are completely isolate them wrong from it should be completely isolated I mean you shouldn't have to you shouldnt have to learn Haskell on top of Gollum in or it is but you know so in order to do this you do have to have knowledge golem and you also have to have some knowledge of things like a little bit of natural language syntax and semantics and ideally these are things that could be abstracted away so that the user doesn't have to learn this but the the real goal is that there would be a number of standard packages mm-hmm so if you're building like a you know a drone application or whatever there would just be a drone package and you would load that up and ideally it should have everything that you need and then its own the only thing you would have to code is actually how you implement the functionality that you want to implement on your side you wouldn't have to at all you would have to touch the natural language stuff at all interesting so so basically you would you give people a building block little blog some tools to build the chat BOTS yeah if you wanted to build the chat BOTS I mean you know chat BOTS have like a number of different flavors and so it's hard to comment on building specific like Billy analyze a chat bot you don't really need to know anything about anything today you just didn't build out more about Jake and of keep the recession going yes it's but I mean as we know from like some of the as we know from some of the things that have gone through the what is the fake Turing test it's not actually a Turing test it's a it's the Loebner prize right as we know from some of the bots that go through the Loebner prize and fool people you don't have to do really anything because it turns out that people are really easy to fool so I don't know it's hard to comment on chat BOTS because there's a huge variety of things that that count as chat BOTS these days and that's right i just read somewhere that you know there was a google chat pod which basically learned that not to be penalized for mistakes the best register to everything to answer i love you and so basically because it will be why not write it will bring people into good mood and so right so like stuff like this can work it does not have any intelligence yeah right yeah so so this is interesting right so but probably you will target some applications where people will need to kind of exchange information about real-world knowledge how do you basically plugin know let's say you know I want to build a chat bot which will you know be customer service right on sorry you know you also contain all say like where is my stuff right is I paid you the money where's my order and so forth so how do you connect you know customer database from amazon and kind of purchase order and payment like facts about into your system could do is it a good use case go for this I think for some chatbot things there could be some chat bought things you might want to use language engine but I think for the most part a lot of these a lot of these customer service applications or you know shopping applications what you really need is not the kind of precision that language engine gives you you don't need to know the the formal meeting of an input right of a sentence you need gists right you need the gist of it right but not the exact detail whereas if you're flying a drone you know you want your drone to do exactly what you want it to do all right there's a very precise thing that you're aiming to have it do and if it goes and flies off you know into a tree or something that's the guy in the white hood not they look like that yeah and so there are definitely different requirements for different domains and for things like customer service you can you can probably do a lot without getting very sophisticated yes that's what they do because it just have like selection of up possible types of yes so so okay then what is the new ideal use case let's say you have a customer in mind what is the application what kind of dialogues are they going to have a chat bot so one possible application is you could imagine a company that that provides business information visualizations mm-hmm wear what you want it you want to query let's say the the CEO of Starbucks wants to know you know what the most popular drinks are by state yes you know sorted by popularity or whatever yes during the month of februari who knows right something like that where there's a lot of information and the way it relates to other information in the sentence is very important mm-hmm you could totally do that with language engine interesting i'm i gonna do it i'm not going to them with that I am I one of the reasons that I keep mentioning the drone idea is actually I am working on a demo controlling a drone uh-huh unfortunately controlling a drone in this context is sort of tricky because what you would really really like is good sensors on the drone and most drones don't have good sensors hmm you would like to be able to say what is what is around me oh there is you know there's a tree over there and there's a chair over there it was you know this is where the drone is in relation to the stuff and getting that to work is much harder than just controlling the drone so you the rhombus is to run some deploring kind of image recognition and formal and give you the scene like ensured low here are the chairs here are the things fortunately that's a that's a problem that drone companies are actually working on so i don't have to solve that right right you'll just get kind of normalized yes okay yeah oh this is so awesome I mean I I'd like to continue this conversation I mean we have to wrap up because you know this is like a pre talk and I will have your men talk we're looking forward to but you know you're welcome to come back anytime and you know show us how this work progresses cool thanks