Computers will understand sarcasm before Americans do.

Irony is going to be hard to get. You have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don't get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.

Early AI was mainly based on logic. You're trying to make computers that reason like people. The second route is from biology: You're trying to make computers that can perceive and act and adapt like animals.

Humans are still much better than computers at recognizing speech.

Everybody right now, they look at the current technology, and they think, 'OK, that's what artificial neural nets are.' And they don't realize how arbitrary it is. We just made it up! And there's no reason why we shouldn't make up something else.

Any new technology, if it's used by evil people, bad things can happen. But that's more a question of the politics of the technology.

I am scared that if you make the technology work better, you help the NSA misuse it more. I'd be more worried about that than about autonomous killer robots.

The paradigm for intelligence was logical reasoning, and the idea of what an internal representation would look like was it would be some kind of symbolic structure. That has completely changed with these big neural nets.

I have always been convinced that the only way to get artificial intelligence to work is to do the computation in a way similar to the human brain. That is the goal I have been pursuing. We are making progress, though we still have lots to learn about how the brain actually works.

In the brain, you have connections between the neurons called synapses, and they can change. All your knowledge is stored in those synapses.

Deep learning is already working in Google search and in image search; it allows you to image-search a term like 'hug.' It's used to getting you Smart Replies to your Gmail. It's in speech and vision. It will soon be used in machine translation, I believe.