#045 Microsoft's Platform for Reinforcement Learning (Bonsai)

Microsoft has an interesting strategy with their new “autonomous systems” technology also known as Project Bonsai. They want to create an interface to abstract away the complexity and esoterica of deep reinforcement learning. They want to fuse together expert knowledge and artificial intelligence all on one platform, so that complex problems can be decomposed into simpler ones. They want to take machine learning Ph.Ds out of the equation and make autonomous systems engineering look more like a traditional software engineering process. It is an ambitious undertaking, but interesting. Reinforcement learning is extremely difficult (as I cover in the video), and if you don’t have a team of RL Ph.Ds with tech industry experience, you shouldn’t even consider doing it yourself. This is our take on it!

There are 3 chapters in this video;

Chapter 1: Tim's intro and take on RL being hard, intro to Bonsai and machine teaching

Chapter 2: Interview with Scott Stanfield [recorded Jan 2020] 00:56:41

Chapter 3: Traditional street talk episode [recorded Dec 2020] 01:38:13

This is *not* an official communication from Microsoft, all personal opinions. There is no MS-confidential information in this video.

With:

Scott Stanfield

https://twitter.com/seesharp

Megan Bloemsma

https://twitter.com/BloemsmaMegan

Gurdeep Pall (he has not validated anything we have said in this video or been involved in the creation of it)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurdeep-pall-0aa639bb/

Panel:

Dr. Keith Duggar

Dr. Tim Scarfe

Yannic Kilcher