Balancing research and consulting
AA: Speaking of research more broadly, you’re an active researcher in this field and you’re a consultant, and I find it amazing that you can juggle the two. I’m keen to understand some of the current projects that you’re working on and what excites you the most. What areas of your expertise do you love to dabble in and produce actual products and solutions to?
CM: Well, the main thing I’ve been working on is something I call the WeightWatcher project, which is an AI model monitoring system. What we’re able to do is use techniques from theoretical physics and chemistry to analyze the performance of an AI model – such as a deep neural network – without looking at any of the data. I can take a model that’s been trained by somebody and feed it into my theory. I can look at some pretty pictures and some metrics, and tell you whether certain layers are overtrained and certain layers are undertrained...