Lex Fridman

Lex Fridman is a Russian-born American computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and podcast host working and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Outside of academia, Fridman is more popularly known for his podcast and YouTube video series where he interviews a wide variety of guests including scientists, mathematicians, political commentators, authors, historians, philosophers, economists and artists.

Fridman's career began at Google, working on machine learning. Fridman is a research scientist and lecturer at MIT. His work at MIT involves research into human-centered artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicle research, deep learning, and personal robotics. In 2017, Fridman worked on computer vision, deep learning, and planning algorithms for semi-autonomous vehicles. Fridman's work has been published in peer-reviewed journals.

Started in 2018, the Lex Fridman Podcast (originally titled Artificial Intelligence Podcast)[ discusses "AI, science, technology, history, philosophy and the nature of intelligence, consciousness, love, and power." The Artificial Intelligence Podcast was part of the MIT course 6.S099 of 2018 called Artificial general intelligence. The name was later changed to the Lex Fridman Podcast to give more freedom as to which subjects to discuss. Guests have included Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Jack Dorsey, Ray Dalio, and Mark Zuckerberg. Fridman's third interview with Elon Musk discussed Musk's opinions on space exploration and cryptocurrency.