The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

The life of a scientist, like the life of an immigrant—the life of an adventurer—is one in which “home” is never a clear concept. The best work always happens on the borders, where ideas are forever trapped between coming and going, explored by strangers in strange lands, insiders and outsiders at the same time. But that’s what makes us so powerful

My father delighted in subtle acts of contrarianism, a tradition that began with the genes we share—

The puzzle of vision is about much more than understanding how we see. It isn’t simply a question of colors or shapes, or even of number crunching at ever-larger scales. It’s an investigation into a phenomenon at the very core of our cognition, from which so much of who and what we are springs forth, biologically, interpersonally, and culturally. I

Admittedly, my mother and her two sisters were my grandparents’ only children—three uniformly headstrong daughters and not a son in sight—so opportunities for chauvinism were limited long before I showed up. But their affection endured with the birth of my cousin—a boy, at last—and I never second-guessed it. It was only as I grew up that I realized

The history of science is often circuitous, ironic, and harsh. Ideas are discovered, lost, and rediscovered. Paradigms treated as bedrock for generations are overturned, sometimes overnight, often by observations of such apparent simplicity that they’re overlooked by even a field’s most thoughtful luminaries—setting the stage for an outsider to cha

If I ever needed a reminder that the default position of any scientist should be one of absolute humility—an understanding that no one’s intellect is half as powerful as serendipity—this was it.

It was as if he wanted to catalog the world—not by any formal means, and not even for any particular reason, but simply because he found joy in the process.

For all our limitations, human perception is the antithesis of this. We see the world holistically, not just identifying but understanding its contents—their relationships, their meanings, their pasts, and their futures. The gist. We aren’t merely witnesses, but storytellers. It felt like it was time for algorithms to learn how to do the same.

Such slim competitive margins are the playground of evolutionary pressures, iterating with abandon through mutation after mutation and producing a near-immediate impact on the ecosystem in the process.

After all, what are thoughts if not reactions to stimuli, whether direct or otherwise? Aren’t even our most abstract deliberations—even something as ephemeral as mental arithmetic—built on a foundation of reasoning acquired through years of experience navigating physical spaces? No matter how sophisticated our minds may be, there’s little going on