IDDO MAYBLUM: What is your name and where are you from?

IGAL DVIR: My name is Igal Dvir and I am from Israel.

IM: What is your occupation?

ID: I am the VP of Products & Technology at a company called BriefCam. It is an AI company

that takes videos and live streams that are unstructured, analyzes it using AI tools and deep
neural networks and extracts all the data that can be extracted from the video. For example,
where there are people or cars, what they are wearing or what kind of car it is. These objects are
tracked and the information is stored in a searchable database.

IM: What is AI’s purpose?

ID: AI has 3 main domains. Supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement
learning.

IM: I am familiar with both supervised and unsupervised learning, what is reinforcement
learning?

ID: Reinforcement learning is usually used in real time systems, which need to act in the
moment. Often these are control systems if you want to decide, for example, the right balance to
calibrate a car’s engine. Like finding the right mix between gasoline and air. If rewards can be
measured, like how economical it is or its horsepower, then an algorithm can be developed to
optimize the mix for the engine to get the best results.

IM: In the future, how do you think AI will affect people’s jobs and the work environment?

ID: I think that many tasks that don’t require deep considerations and could be trained will be
replaced by AI algorithms. Driving is something you already see today. I think that many tasks of
doctors can be replaced by AI like looking at images and being able to detect what some
anomaly is. Of course a doctor has much more to do but AI can help alleviate some
responsibilities. I am just talking about the recognition and things that are more technical. I think
the big difference between AI and traditional algorithms is that for traditional algorithms the
developer needs to understand the physics and equations behind a certain problem to build up
rules. This becomes very complicated when there are problems with a lot of parameters because
a human cannot understand problems like that. AI is very efficient at solving problems with a lot
of parameters where it is hard to find the rules of the problem.

IM: In the future, do you think regulation should be placed on what AI is allowed to do?
ID: I think that the answer is yes but the power of AI is to become some kind of superhuman that
can make decisions that humans cannot make. They can analyze way more data than any human
can. It might cause people to trust AI decisions more than they would people’s decisions. Like
today, Google is used when an answer is needed. Google is assumed to be the truth. People
become dependent on AI and the algorithms used. Google can determine people’s opinions on
many things because of this. So this technology can be used to manipulate people’s minds and
opinions which could be dangerous.

IM: Is there anything else I should have asked you to help me understand the topic better?

ID: One question is how much data is required to train a specific algorithm? The answer to that
would be dependent on how easy it is to generalize a solution. If the decision is more obvious,
less data is needed. But if the decision is more complicated, much more data is needed and the
neural network would be larger. Typical neural networks today consist of something like 50
million parameters which need to be trained. It is like finding an answer with 50 million
variables to consider, it is impossible for a human.