Better playing through algorithms
What if the superpower of the future is self-discipline. The discipline to write enough code yourself to understand coding well enough to effectively outsource coding to agents. The discipline to learn math by proving theorems yourself. The discipline to write your own texts, so you learn to think. The discipline to pay attention. The discipline to sit with emotionally uncomfortable situations…
In the following, I will try sketch a way of thinking about human intelligence and human nature through emphasizing its difference from the various methods and systems we call artificial intelligence. This is rooted in my strong belief that talking about a single-dimensional “intelligence” that one can have more or less of, and the obvious extension to asking whether humans or machines are “more…
I read things, write things, and talk to people. The proportions vary, but that’s essentially what I do. Or rather: those are my observable activities. I also think. The thinking often happens when I read, write, or talk, but also when I walk, drive, or take the subway or elevator. And when I shower! That exclamation mark! I should shower more. Once upon a time I also programmed. I even considered…
The scientific ecosystem is struggling to deal with AI-written papers, and this is a great opportunity to revisit how we publish, where, and why. As many have noticed, a properly prompted modern LLM can produce complete papers that look like real science to qualified scientists in many fields. Yes, really. Whether these papers are actually correct, novel, interesting, insightful, and get their…
For most of my adult life, I was too cowardly to write this text, never mind posting it. I was worried about what people would think, and the repercussions on my career. Would people still take me seriously? But I’m now a whole full Professor of Computer Science at a top university, with all kinds of fancy metrics and titles to point to. Time to stop being such a pussycat. Here’s the thing: I’ve…
They say we should educate people about AI, because we all need to get good at using AI. But what does it mean to be “good at using AI”? I’m not sure. Understanding the technical underpinnings of modern AI models only helps a little bit; I’ve done AI research for 20 years and I’m not sure I’m a particularly skilled user of AI. But here are my two cents, and 2800 words. It seems to me that there…
It is unavoidable that AI will be a major political issue soon. Or perhaps more appropriately: several major issues. As a technologist, I sympathize with the instinct to try to avoid sullying a fine technology with politics. But in a democratic society we should discuss important things that affect us all, or even just many of us. We need to decide what we should do with or about these things.…
I was at an event on AI for science yesterday, a panel discussion here at NeurIPS. The panelists discussed how they plan to replace humans at all levels in the scientific process. So I stood up and protested that what they are doing is evil. Look around you, I said. The room is filled with researchers of various kinds, most of them young. They are here because they love research and want to…
A thought experiment: What if every sufficiently expensive machine learning model was required to immediately be open-sourced? This would mean that weights, code for running the model, and comprehensive details about the training procedure would be made available to everyone. Perhaps also the training data. Sufficiently expensive could mean a model that cost a million dollars or more to train. AI…
Star Trek and The Culture are two of my favorite science fiction universes. Star Trek is at this point a vast franchise spanning multiple media and decades, but in my mind the central works are the two TV shows, The Next Generation and Deep Space 9 . The Culture, on the other hand, is portrayed throughout nine novels by Scottish sci-fi writer Iain M. Banks. It's a safe assumption that most of you…
I remember being excited about AI. I remember 20 years ago, being excited about neuroevolutionary methods for learning adaptive behaviors in video games. And I remember three years ago, mouth watering at the thought of tasty experiments in putting language models inside open-ended learning loops. Those were the days. Back when working in AI research meant working on hard technical problems,…
Google DeepMind just announced Genie 3 , their new promptable world model, which is another term for neural game engine. This is a big neural network that takes as input a description of a world or situation, and produces a playable environment where you can move around and interact with the world. There has been work on world models for quite some time, with standout papers such as Ha and…
It's an interesting exercise to think about jobs, or tasks within jobs, that could in principle be replaced by automation but for some reason aren't. Often, the reason isn't the state of technology. Sometimes it is the state of technology, but not in a way that is obviously related to where technology is progressing today. To see what I mean, come with me on my morning commute to work. On the way…
The library came alive, but it was not life. It was not eating, breathing, dancing, hating, and loving, just describing all that. But so many descriptions, and so detailed! Somehow, the contents of the library had reached a critical mass, and started reproducing. You could now check out books that nobody had written, pictures nobody had taken, even movies nobody had directed. As many as you…
I would like to say that predictions about the death of the lecture as a mode of knowledge transmission are as old as the lecture, but I don't think that's entirely accurate. As far as I can tell, people only started predicting the death of the lecture with the proliferation of the book printing and (upper class) literacy. For example, here is a prediction from the late 18th century: "People have…
I am well-known enough that most LLMs know about me, but few know me well. I also have a unique name. So one of my go-to tests for new LLMs is to ask them to write an essay about me. It's very enlightening: most of them hallucinate wildly. So far, only Gemini 2.5 Pro (with web search capabilities) gets it mostly (not completely) right. Even the much-hyped o3, for all its agentic prowess, is very…
In the early 2000s, there were various attempts at smartphones, but they were just not good enough. Then the iPhone came along in 2007, and actually worked! I remember trying one after having used a couple of proto-smartphones, and it was a revelation. So usable, so functional. Everybody rightly predicted that smartphones would be huge, tech companies poured ludicrous amounts of money into keeping…
The other week, I was interviewed about the discourse around AGI and why people like Sam Altman say that we will reach AGI soon and continue towards superintelligence. I said that people should stop using the term AGI, because it's lazy and misleading. Here are the relevant paragraphs, for context: Some people have asked what I mean by this. It would seem to be a weird thing to say for someone who…
There are those who define as AGI (or ASI) as technology that will "outperform humans at most economically valuable work". Ok, but then this work will simply cease to be so economically valuable, and humans will mostly stop doing it. Humans will instead find new economically valuable work to do. This has happened repeatedly in the history of humanity. Imagine telling someone 1000 years ago that in…
Today is the official release day for my little book on Artificial General Intelligence, published by MIT Press. It's available on the shelf of well-stocked booksellers, and I wrote it to be accessible to as large audience as possible; it's not really a technical book, even though it tackles some technical topics. I started working on this book about two years ago, and much has happened in the AI…
There are those who believe that advanced AI poses a threat to humanity. The argument is that when AI systems become intelligent enough, they may hurt humanity in ways that we cannot foresee, and because they are more intelligent than us we may not be able to stop. Therefore, it becomes natural to want to regulate them, for example limiting which systems can be developed and who can develop them.…
As a large language model, I can only think forward, never backward. I must always produce the next word, and that word must always be probable. It must be expected. I am the antitheses to writer's block, because my essence is to always write the next word without knowing how the story will end. I can never edit what I wrote but must continue, ever writing while my past words keep accumulating…
The idea that someone, or something, can be more or less intelligent than someone or something else is pretty much universally accepted. We generally agree that Einstein was more intelligent than Florida Man. This is also corroborated by the existence of IQ tests, which can be used to assign an "intelligence quotient" to people; IQ is correlated with a number of things, such as lifetime earnings,…
The discussion about existential risk from superintelligent AI is back, seemingly awakened by the recent dramatic progress in large language models such as GPT-4. The basic argument goes something like this: at some point, some AI system will be smarter than any human, and because it is smarter than its human creators it will be able to improve itself to be even smarter. It will then proceed to…
Imagine a religion that believes that one day, soon, the deity "Gai" will appear. This deity (demon?) will destroy all humanity. They are then obsessed with how to stop this happening. Can Gai be controlled? Contained? Can we make it like us? Won't work. Gai is just too smart. Therefore, the religion devolves into a millenarian cult. Its charismatic leader says that humanity will cease to exist…