#248 Pedro Domingos: How Connectionism Is Reshaping the Future of Machine Learning

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In this episode, renowned AI researcher Pedro Domingos, author of The Master Algorithm, takes us deep into the world of Connectionism—the AI tribe behind neural networks and the deep learning revolution.

From the birth of neural networks in the 1940s to the explosive rise of transformers and ChatGPT, Pedro unpacks the history, breakthroughs, and limitations of connectionist AI. Along the way, he explores how supervised learning continues to quietly power today’s most impressive AI systems—and why reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning are still lagging behind.

We also dive into:

The tribal war between Connectionists and Symbolists

The surprising origins of Backpropagation

How transformers redefined machine translation

Why GANs and generative models exploded (and then faded)

The myth of modern reinforcement learning (DeepSeek, RLHF, etc.)

The danger of AI research narrowing too soon around one dominant approach

Whether you're an AI enthusiast, a machine learning practitioner, or just curious about where intelligence is headed, this episode offers a rare deep dive into the ideological foundations of AI—and what’s coming next.

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(00:00) What Are Generative Models?

(03:02) AI Progress and the Local Optimum Trap

(06:30) The Five Tribes of AI and Why They Matter

(09:07) The Rise of Connectionism

(11:14) Rosenblatt’s Perceptron and the First AI Hype Cycle

(13:35) Backpropagation: The Algorithm That Changed Everything

(19:39) How Backpropagation Actually Works

(21:22) AlexNet and the Deep Learning Boom

(23:22) Why the Vision Community Resisted Neural Nets

(25:39) The Expansion of Deep Learning

(28:48) NetTalk and the Baby Steps of Neural Speech

(31:24) How Transformers (and Attention) Transformed AI

(34:36) Why Attention Solved the Bottleneck in Translation

(35:24) The Untold Story of Transformer Invention

(38:35) LSTMs vs. Attention: Solving the Vanishing Gradient Problem

(42:29) GANs: The Evolutionary Arms Race in AI

(48:53) Reinforcement Learning Explained

(52:46) Why RL Is Mostly Just Supervised Learning in Disguise

(54:35) Where AI Research Should Go Next