42. Will Grathwohl - Energy-based models and the future of generative algorithms

Machine learning in grad school and machine learning in industry are very different beasts. In industry, deployment and data collection become key, and the only thing that matters is whether you can deliver a product that real customers want, fast enough to meet internal deadlines. In grad school, there’s a different kind of pressure, focused on algorithm development and novelty. It’s often difficult to know which path you might be best suited for, but that’s why it can be so useful to speak with people who’ve done both — and bonus points if their academic research experience comes from one of the top universities in the world.

For today’s episode of the Towards Data Science podcast, I sat down with Will Grathwohl, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, student researcher at Google AI, and alum of MIT and OpenAI. Will has seen cutting edge machine learning research in industry and academic settings, and has some great insights to share about the differences between the two environments. He’s also recently published an article on the fascinating topic of energy models in which he and his co-authors propose a unique way of thinking about generative models that achieves state-of-the-art performance in computer vision tasks.