Learning the Machine
Postscript No. 3 | Rhea Madhogarhia on machine learning and AI interns
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Rhea Madhogarhia and Tessa Augsberger, founding editor of The New Critic. Rhea is a 21-year-old Computer Science and Cognitive Science student at the University of Chicago. Tessa is a 22-year-old writer from Los Angeles studying History at Dartmouth College.
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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.*
*Discussions over AI seemed to follow one around at every intergenerational gathering this summer. Having realized my perspective on the matter lacked technical fluency, I consulted the expertise of my friend Rhea Madhogarhia, who interned as a machine learning engineer at Reddit in New York this summer. I enlisted Rhea to unveil the many names and faces of AI, its powers of seduction, the shelter digital literacy can provide against the information storm, and the meaning of “intelligence” in the first place.*
TESSA AUGSBERGER Tell me a little bit about your job.
RHEA MADHOGARHIA I [was] a machine learning engineering intern at Reddit…[working on] the search recommendation and relevance team. So when you go to Reddit and you look at that little magnifying glass in the corner and tap it, you’re using our product.
AUGSBERGER Did you have any hesitations coming into the job before you accepted?
MADHOGARHIA Well, I’m not going to lie, I was just really happy to get the job. But I do remember [that] a few weeks before I started, I was crazily listening to so many AI podcasts, and reading a bunch of opinion pieces on AI. I was looking at my notes from previous classes that I’d taken and trying to get my morality straight. Because even though I am somebody who wants to study machine learning, I am very cautious of its impact. I think being a cognitive science major definitely exposed me, initially, to the study of AI and LLMs and machine learning and [the need to] look at this bias, or look at its impact on human behavior. What does [AI] tell us about human behavior, rather than it just being computation? So I definitely came in with that mindset, and I was very scared. I was like, “This is my first corporate job. Am I going to be making AI for, like, hoorah capitalism? They just went public as a company. What am I getting myself into? [Am I] going to be forced to build something that I personally find evil?”