The following is a conversation with Christel Skodro, vice president of engineering at Google

and head of search and discovery at YouTube, also known as the YouTube algorithm.

YouTube has approximately 1.9 billion users and every day people watch over 1 billion hours of

YouTube video. It is the second most popular search engine behind Google itself. For many people,

it is not only a source of entertainment, but also how we learn new ideas from math and physics

videos to podcasts, to debates, opinions, ideas from out of the box thinkers and activists are some

of the most tense, challenging and impactful topics in the world today. YouTube and other content

platforms receive criticism from both viewers and creators as they should, because the engineering

task before them is hard and they don't always succeed and the impact of their work is truly

world-changing. To me, YouTube has been an incredible wellspring of knowledge. I've watched hundreds,

if not thousands of lectures, that change the way I see many fundamentals, ideas, and math,

science, engineering, and philosophy. But it does put a merit to ourselves and keeps the

responsibility of the steps we take in each of our online educational journeys into the hands of

each of us. The YouTube algorithm has an important role in that journey of helping us find new

exciting ideas to learn about. That's a difficult and an exciting problem for an artificial intelligence

system. As I've said in lectures and other forums, recommendation systems will be one of the most

impactful areas of AI in the 21st century, and YouTube is one of the biggest recommendation systems

in the world. This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube,

give it five stars and apple podcasts, follow on Spotify, support it on Patreon, or simply connect

with me on Twitter. Alex Friedman spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. I recently started doing ads at the end of the

introduction. I'll do one or two minutes after introducing the episode and never any ads in the

middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the

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