Tom chats with John Laird, who has spent the past 40 years trying to build an AI agent that accomplishes the full range of human cognitive abilities, beginning with his 1980s PhD research on the SOAR model of human cognition with Allen Newell and Paul Rosenbloom.

John E. Laird received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1985, and is John L. Tishman Emeritus Professor of Engineering at the University of Michigan. He is one of the original developers of the SOAR architecture and leads its continued development and evolution. He was a founder of Soar Technology. He is a AAAI, ACM, AAAS, and Cognitive Science Society Fellow. In 2018, he was co-winner of the Herbert A. Simon Prize for Advances in Cognitive Systems.

Tom meets with Kai-Fu Lee, a pioneer in using machine learning to significantly advance speech recognition.

Kai-Fu, former president of Google China and now Chairman of Sinovation Ventures and CEO of 01.AI, has led speech, machine learning and AI efforts at several top firms, and is now one of the top AI venture capitalists in China.

What is the relationship between neural network approaches in machine learning, and real neural networks in the brain? Today's guest Jay McClelland is a cognitive scientist who has spent decades studying this question.

Jay is Lucie Stern Professor of Psychology and (by Courtesy) of Linguistics and Computer Science and Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at Stanford University. He discusses his 50 year journey modeling cognition in the brain with artificial neural networks, and his role in the 1980s emergence of neural networks in machine learning.