{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Future of Life Institute Podcast","title":"The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mhamdi","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3005,"description":"Three generals are voting on whether to attack or retreat from their siege of a castle. One of the generals is corrupt and two of them are not. What happens when the corrupted general sends different answers to the other two generals? A Byzantine fault is \"a condition of a computer system, particularly distributed computing systems, where components may fail and there is imperfect information on whether a component has failed. The term takes its name from an allegory, the \"Byzantine Generals' Problem\", developed to describe this condition, where actors must agree on a concerted strategy to avoid catastrophic system failure, but some of the actors are unreliable.\" The Byzantine Generals' Problem and associated issues in maintaining reliable distributed computing networks is illuminating for both AI alignment and modern networks we interact with like Youtube, Facebook, or Google. By exploring this space, we are shown the limits of reliable distributed computing, the safety concerns and threats in this space, and the tradeoffs we will have to make for varying degrees of efficiency or safety. The Byzantine Generals' Problem, Poisoning, and Distributed Machine Learning with El Mahdi El Mahmdi is the ninth podcast in the AI Alignment Podcast series, hosted by Lucas Perry. El Mahdi pioneered Byzantine resilient machine learning devising a series of provably safe algorithms he recently presented at NeurIPS and ICML. Interested in theoretical biology, his work also includes the analysis of error propagation and networks applied to both neural and biomolecular networks. This particular episode was recorded at the Beneficial AGI 2019 conference in Puerto Rico. We hope that you will join in the conversations by following us or subscribing to our podcasts on Youtube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast site/application. You can find all the AI Alignment Podcasts here. If you're interested in exploring the interdisciplinary nature of AI...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/fFhIC-s2qSlHXzmJI7qMGts2WuLwImi4tWmRLH9EdPg/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS81MmU5/MDZjZGQ5OTI0MDc5/YTk2ZTAxYTgwYTNk/M2VlOC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}