Applied science

And so perhaps it is wise to look at spiritual traditions that affirm the ways the animate and inanimate are connected.

What religious tradition can teach us about the souls of animals? The idea that animals are not equal to humans is rooted in a dominant refrain in Christian theology, which David Claw, Chair in Theology and Applied Sciences at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, has done great disservice to animals.

Significant church figures like Thomas Aquinas and the philosopher René Descartes have argued that animals don't have an immortal soul.

Other doctrines, like predestination, where some people are chosen for salvation and others are damned, have further broken the world into separate spheres.

Uh, it's a pleasure to have John Platt, you know, with us today.

John is a Google fellow and head of Applied Science at Google Research.

He has really a fun, like, background.

He-- I guess you described yourself when we were talking a few minutes ago as a mega nerd.

Right.

So whatever we do has to be very constrained by, uh, what we know, but it's just very diff-- I'm just telling you sort of the horns, the dilemma people are on.

So people make these-- In fact, people in applied science in general, I would say climate is the most extreme, make these things called process models, where what you do, and I've seen the code, uh, oh, well, you know, I'm gonna be reductionist, and I'm gonna sort of take the horrible, complicated climate thing and sort of boil it down to a thousand pieces, and then I'm going to, you know, go find the expert who wrote a paper about, you know, piece number seven sixty-three, and he fit a cubic to some data.

Like it has-- Like, for example, one thing that's very mysterious, which is related to contrails, is how does ice behave in clouds? It turns out, you might-- Again, everything is complicated once you dig into it.

A Microsoft scientist called AI training the largest theft of labor.

Dr. Brent Hecht, Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, has described the training of AI models as the largest theft of labor in human history.

This statement, revealed in a legal brief, highlights concerns over how AI models use vast amounts of data, often without explicit consent from the original creators.

The debate centers on the ethical implications of AI training practices, with critics arguing that it exploits the work of countless individuals.

Anyway, this suit, originally filed back in December of 2023, alleged that OpenAI and Microsoft scrape paywall materials from The New York Times' website.

The filing contains several internal documents in which Microsoft's Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, decrees the process of scraping information from unwilling publishers, calling it a doom loop that will ultimately hurt the performance of the models and the web all at once.

We've all been kind of caught in a doom loop for a while, haven't we?

[laughs]

This one's from Ars Technica.

Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science, Brent Hecht, repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions, calling it perhaps the largest theft of labor in human history, Newsorg said.

Brent Hecht wasn't a plaintiff's expert.

He was Microsoft's director of applied science.

His internal warnings show Microsoft people saw the news scraping plan as far outside any ordinary fair use argument.

And somebody marked those documents confidential, then kept shipping ChatGPT and Copilot.

I'm Chad Main, the founder of legal services company Percipient, and on today's show, I'm talking to Aaron Amadio.

He's the vice president of applied science at Relativity.

We're talking about evaluating the quality of AI outputs and the impact it's going to have on electronic discovery and legal document review generally.

So let me take you back to 1994.

Fast forward to today, and that same person is helping architect the future of AI for one of the biggest legal tech companies in the world.

My guest today is Dr. Aaron Amadea.

He's the vice president of applied science and relativity.

Like many people on the show, he had a background that wasn't necessarily legal before he ended up in the legal industry.

I did notice, though, that I would never tell my employers what my program was.

I would tell everybody that I have a Bachelor's of Applied Science, which is true, but I didn't share that it was in child youth and family relations.

And-

Did you feel like that would have, that would have held you back or that would have prevented them from considering your candidacy?