Risto Miikkulainen

Professor of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, director of the UTCS Neural Networks Research Group, and VP of AI Research at Cognizant AI Lab. His work focuses on neuroevolution, evolutionary computation, neural networks, and AI systems that learn and adapt.

Neuroevolution Offers AI a Path Beyond Bigger Models

Risto Miikkulainen, a UT Austin professor and vice-president of AI research at Cognizant AI Labs, argues that neuroevolution offers a different path for AI than simply scaling larger models. In a conversation with Craig Smith, he says gradient descent is well suited to optimizing toward known targets, but population-based evolutionary search is better for problems where the goal is uncertain, the landscape is irregular, and useful solutions may require diversity, novelty and recombination.

Eye on AIJun 2, 202619 min read