Support us

Abstract: I will survey a current, heated debate in the AI research community on whether large pre-trained language models can be said to "understand" language—and the physical and social situations language encodes—in any important sense. I will describe arguments that have been made for and against such understanding, and, more generally, will discuss what methods can be used to fairly evaluate understanding and intelligence in AI systems. I will conclude with key questions for the broader sciences of intelligence that have arisen in light of these discussions.

Short Bio: Melanie Mitchell is Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her current research focuses on conceptual abstraction and analogy-making in artificial intelligence systems. Melanie is the author or editor of six books and numerous scholarly papers in the fields of artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her 2009 book Complexity: A Guided Tour (Oxford University Press) won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and her 2019 book Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) was shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize for Scientific Writing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5SLGAWSXMw

With their ability to generate human-like language and complete a variety of tasks, generative AI has the potential to revolutionise the way we communicate, learn and work. But what other doors will this technology open for us, and how can we harness it to make great leaps in technology innovation? Have we finally done it? Have we cracked AI?
Join Professor Michael Wooldridge for a fascinating discussion on the possibilities and challenges of generative AI models, and their potential impact on societies of the future.
Michael Wooldridge is Director of Foundational AI Research and Turing AI World-Leading Researcher Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. His work focuses on multi-agent systems and developing techniques for understanding the dynamics of multi-agent systems. His research draws on ideas from game theory, logic, computational complexity, and agent-based modelling. He has been an AI researcher for more than 30 years and has published over 400 scientific articles on the subject.
This lecture is part of a series of events - How AI broke the internet - that explores the various angles of large-language models and generative AI in the public eye.
This series of Turing Lectures is organised in collaboration with The Royal Institution of Great Britain.

Professor Melanie Mitchell gives the Margaret Boden Lecture for 2023 at the University of Cambridge. The Margaret Boden lectures are held annually by the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at Cambridge.

Abstract: While AI has made dramatic progress over the last decade in areas such as vision, language processing, and robotics, current AI systems still lack key aspects of human intelligence. In this lecture Professor Melanie Mitchell argues that the inability to form conceptual abstractions—and to make abstraction-driven analogies—is a primary source of brittleness and unreliability in state-of-the-art AI systems. She reflects on the role played by abstraction at all levels of intelligence, and on the prospects for developing AI systems with humanlike abilities for abstract reasoning and analogy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEN_rOxKkag

Mar 15, 2024
UC Davis College of Engineering Dean's Distinguished Speaker Melanie Mitchell, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, presents "The Future of Artificial Intelligence"

Melanie Mitchell Santa Fe Institute AI is all around us recognizing our faces in photos, transcribing our speech, constructing our news feeds, navigating our driving routes, answering our search queries, and much more. But rapidly improving AI is poised to play a much bigger role in all of our lives. In this lecture, AI expert Melanie Mitchell will demystify how current-day AI works, how "intelligent" it really is, and what our expectations---and concerns---about its near-term and long-term prospects should be.

The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) delivers innovative training and conducts research on knowledge systems to increase the capacity of beneficiaries to respond to global and constantly evolving challenges.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDGsaRJ-eqA

Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI, testified Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law as the panel examines potential rules for the use of artificial intelligence. New York University professor emeritus Gary Marcus and Christina Montgomery, IBM’s chief privacy and trust officer, also testified at the hearing.

Are we facing a golden digital age or will robots soon run the world? We need to establish ethical standards in dealing with artificial intelligence - and to answer the question: What still makes us as human beings unique?

Mankind is still decades away from self-learning machines that are as intelligent as humans. But already today, chatbots, robots, digital assistants and other artificially intelligent entities exist that can emulate certain human abilities. Scientists and AI experts agree that we are in a race against time: we need to establish ethical guidelines before technology catches up with us. While AI Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber predicts artificial intelligence will be able to control robotic factories in space, the Swedish-American physicist Max Tegmark warns against a totalitarian AI surveillance state, and the philosopher Thomas Metzinger predicts a deadly AI arms race. But Metzinger also believes that Europe in particular can play a pioneering role on the threshold of this new era: creating a binding international code of ethics.

Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin discuss how existing A.I. capabilities already pose catastrophic risks to a functional society, how A.I. companies are caught in a race to deploy as quickly as possible without adequate safety measures, and what it would mean to upgrade our institutions to a post-A.I. world.

This presentation is from a private gathering in San Francisco on March 9th, 2023 with leading technologists and decision-makers with the ability to influence the future of large-language model A.I.s. This presentation was given before the launch of GPT-4.

We encourage viewers to consider calling their political representatives to advocate for holding hearings on AI risk and creating adequate guardrails.

Hybrid Intelligence (HI) is the combination of human intelligence with artificial intelligence, enabling humans and AI to mutally grow together.

Catholijn Jonker is full professor of Interactive Intelligence at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science of the Delft University of Technology. Catholijn studied computer science and did her PhD studies at Utrecht University. Catholijn served as the president of the Dutch Network of Women Professors (LNVH) from 2013 to 2016. Her publications address cognitive processes and concepts such as negotiation, teamwork and the dynamics of individual agents and organizations. In all her research lines Catholijn has adopted a value-sensitive approach.