On AI and "Jagged Intelligence"
I’ve been working on a few pieces for this newsletter and hope to post them soon.
AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans
I write about interesting new developments in AI.
Latest episodes
On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI
Today I had the bittersweet pleasure of participating in a symposium honoring the late philosopher Brian Cantwell Smith, a good friend whom I’d known for over 30 years.
On Evaluating Cognitive Capabilities in Machines (and Other "Alien" Intelligences)
(Apologies for the length of this post, which means it gets cut off in the email version.
Do AI Reasoning Models Abstract and Reason Like Humans?
Going beyond simple accuracy for evaluating abstraction abilities
Magical Thinking on AI
A Response to Thomas Friedman's Recent AI Columns in the New York Times
Lying, gaslighting, & blackmailing — what's going on with AI chatbots?
In my final column for Science’s “Expert Voices” series, I wrote about why AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are misbehaving in all kinds of ways.
David Cope: Composer, computer scientist, and pioneer of computer generated music
Today I learned that the composer David Cope died on May 4, at the age of 83.
AI learns to reason (or does it?)
I have a gig writing four columns a year about artificial intelligence for Science Magazine’s “Expert Voices” project.
LLMs and World Models, Part 2
Evidence For (and Against) Emergent World Models in LLMs
LLMs and World Models, Part 1
How do Large Language Models Make Sense of Their “Worlds”?
Did OpenAI Just Solve Abstract Reasoning?
OpenAI’s o3 model aces the "Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus" — but what does it mean?
The LLM Reasoning Debate Heats Up
Three recent papers examine the robustness of reasoning and problem-solving in large language models
Podcast on "The Nature of Intelligence"
I never thought I would be a podcast host, but…Abha Eli Phoboo, the director of communications at the Santa Fe Institute, recently relaunched SFI’s official podcast, Complexity, and proposed that each season, an SFI faculty member co-host the podcast with her for six episodes on a topic of their choice.
The Turing Test and Our Shifting Conceptions of Intelligence
Has the famous Turing Test been passed?
On the “ARC-AGI” $1 Million Reasoning Challenge
In this post I’m going to go into the weeds, describing how some people are trying to win a big $$$ prize for solving a still-wide-open AI challenge, the “Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus,” and what it all means.
Stress-Testing Large Language Models’ Analogical Reasoning Abilities
Hello all.
Evaluating Large Language Models Using “Counterfactual Tasks”
“[O]ne thing is clear: LLMs are not human.
"AI now beats humans at basic tasks": Really?
Two weeks ago, Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious journals, had this jarring headline:
An “AI Breakthrough” on Systematic Generalization in Language?
A Fun Puzzle Here’s a fun puzzle for you. I’ll give you six words in an alien language: saa, guu, ree, fii, hoo, and muo. Figure 1 gives a diagram showing how either single words or combinations of words result in combinations of colored circles. Given the example sentences, what combination of colored circles should result from the query sentence
Can Large Language Models Reason?
What should we believe about the reasoning abilities of today’s large language models? As the headlines above illustrate, there’s a debate raging over whether these enormous pre-trained neural networks have achieved humanlike reasoning abilities, or whether their skills are in fact “a mirage.”