AI

“Intelligence is the new transistor,” concluded Schiffmann. “It’s a fundamental primitive that you’ll build things on, [and it] will enable all kinds of good things and all kinds of bad things... The goal is just to enable the good over the bad.”

The community remains puzzled about whether these models genuinely generalize to unseen tasks, or seemingly succeed by memorizing the training data. This paper makes important strides in addressing this question. It constructs a suite of carefully designed counterfactual evaluations, providing fresh insights into the capabilities of... See more

If an AI companion becomes someone’s most consistent emotional presence, the right question isn’t “how do we stop this?” It’s “what does that say about the world around them?” Technological relationships are not new. What’s new is how effective they’ve become; and how clearly they mirror the gaps we’ve refused to address.

We’ve tried prohibition... See more

This is particularly important because there are already indications that many people who often interact with chatbots attribute consciousness to these systems. At the same time, the consensus among experts is that current AI systems are not conscious.

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .

Enter Large Language Models (LLMs). The first tranche of products and startups leveraging LLMs has kept within the mental model of selling software to achieve step-function improvements in end-user productivity. The "Copilot for [x]" trend reflects this mental model. While there are fantastic startups innovating to improve employee productivity,... See more

Most AI researchers roll their eyes if you bring up the idea of consciousness. That’s for philosophers, not engineers, they say. Since no one has been able to define it, what’s the point in talking about it? I get this frustration. Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of a subjective experience. Despite the definitional... See more