AI

Quanta interviewed 19 current and former NLP researchers to tell that story. From experts to students, tenured academics to startup founders, they describe a series of moments — dawning realizations, elated encounters and at least one “existential crisis” — that changed their world. And ours.

We’ve regulated many things online, right? The amount of fraud and criminal activity online is minimal. We’ve done a pretty good job with spam. You know, in general, [the problem of] revenge porn has got better, even though that was in a bad place three to five years ago. It’s pretty difficult to find radicalization content or terrorist material... See more

We, as humans, sometimes receive streams of tokens and produce tokens in response, forming words, sentences, lines of code ... but always with the ability to peek outside the stream and check in with ground-floor reality. We pause and consider: does this word really stand for the thing I intend it to stand for? Does this sentence capture the real... See more

Unlike humans, AI can’t flexibly navigate changing environments yet because it does not have a notion of its “self” and what it can do with it.

The present findings also show that it is possible to develop systems that can instantly interpret emotional cues to provide immediate and intuitive feedback in a wide range of situations. This could lead to scalable, cost-efficient applications in various domains where understanding emotional context is crucial, such as therapy and interpersonal... See more

Social media platforms face a structural contradiction that current valuations do not adequately price. Their business model requires maximizing engagement. The research demonstrates that engagement-optimized content degrades both the AI systems trained on it and the humans consuming it.