328 - Guest: Ruchir Puri, IBM Chief Scientist, part 1

About this episode

This and all episodes at: https://aiandyou.net/ . In all the news about and focus on startups like OpenAI and Anthropic, there’s a long-established player that doesn’t get as many soundbites but which deserves our attention: IBM. It’s important to understand what their current strategy and thinking is. And I have just the person to do that: Ruchir Puri, the Chief Scientist of IBM Research, and Vice-President of IBM Corporate Technology and Technical Community. He led IBM Watson as its CTO and Chief Architect from 2016-19 and is a Fellow of the IEEE, and has been an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, and was honored with John Von-Neumann Chair at Institute of Discrete Mathematics at Bonn University, Germany. Notably from our point of view, he is an inventor of over 70 US patents and has authored over 120 scientific papers, which lands him squarely in the technical perspective that we value so much on this show.  We talk about the continuing importance of the foundation of computer science, which is algorithms, the tension between the deterministic nature of algorithms and the more touchy-feely variability of generative AI interfaces, what that means