Artificial Intelligence and You

At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year. 

Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.

In this conclusion of the interview we talk about AI2’s scientific assistance project called Aristo, Oren’s views on the concerns about AI and how to address them, and his Hippocratic Oath for AI practitioners.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

At the intersection of scientific research and artificial intelligence lies our guest Oren Etzioni, professor emeritus of Computer Science at the University of Washington and most notably the founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, founded by the late Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. His awards include AAAI Fellow and Seattle’s Geek of the Year. 

Oren grew the institute to a team of over 200 researchers and created singularly important tools such as the Semantic Scholar, search engine that can understand scientific literature, and Mosaic, a knowledge base formed by extracting scientific knowledge from text. This is hugely important because of just how much the rate of research paper creation now outstrips the ability of researchers to read it. AI could transform the productivity of scientific research by unprecedented measures.

In part 1 we talk about parallels between AI and the human brain, the Semantic Scholar, and the potential for AI accelerating research through understanding scientific literature. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.

Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.

In the conclusion of the interview they describe how the AI teachers work, and their definitions of Teaching and Learning 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

There is a global teacher shortage, and Pauldy Otermans and Dev Aditya, founders of the Otermans Institute, are addressing that with #AI through creating a digital human AI teacher, called Beatrice. Their mission is to upskill 750- million underserved students globally by 2030. Beatrice appears as an on-screen avatar that converses with students.

Pauldy is a neuroscientist and psychologist with a PhD in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience from Brunel University. She was named one of the “22 most influential women in the UK of 2022” by Start-Up Magazine UK. Dev is a Young Global Innovator and under 30 Social Entrepreneur, recognized by Innovate UK with research experience at the Alan Turing Institute and Brunel University, London.

In this first half of the interview we talk about the teacher shortage and the socioeconomic consequences of addressing it via an AI teacher.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

We're talking with Jaan Tallinn, who has changed the way the world responds to the impact of #AI. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the conclusion of the interview, we talk about value alignment and how that does or doesn’t intersect with large language models, FLI and their world building project, and the instability of the world’s future. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

The attention of the world to the potential impact of AI owes a huge debt to my guest Jaan Tallinn. He was one of the founding developers of Skype and the file sharing application Kazaa, and that alone makes him noteworthy to most of the world. But he leveraged his billionaire status conferred by that success to pursue a goal uncommon among technology entrepreneurs: reducing existential risk. In other words, saving the human race from possible extinction through our own foolhardiness or fate. He has co-founded and funded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, in Cambridge, England, and the Future of Life Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He's also a member of the board of sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a key funder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

In this first part, we talk about the problems with current #AI frontier models, Jaan's reaction to GPT-4, the letter causing for a pause in AI training, Jaan's motivations in starting CSER and FLI, how individuals and governments should react to AI risk, and Jaan's idea for how to enforce constraints on AI development.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Giving us a long perspective on the impact of today's large language models and #ChatGPT on society is Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He’s been helping people understand the potential and limitations of AI for several decades, commenting on computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons among other technologies. He has co-authored over 100 papers, receiving a National Science Foundation career award and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a contributing scientist at the two Asilomar conferences on responsible AI development.

In the conclusion of our interview we talk about self-driving cars, the capability of large language models to synthesize knowledge across many human domains, Richard Feynman, our understanding of language, Bertrand Russell, AIs as co-authors on research papers, and where Bart places us on a scale of artificial general intelligence ability. 

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.

Giving us a long perspective on the impact of today's large language models and #ChatGPT on society is Bart Selman, professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He’s been helping people understand the potential and limitations of AI for several decades, commenting on computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and autonomous weapons among other technologies. He has co-authored over 100 papers, receiving a National Science Foundation career award and an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship. He is a member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In the first part of the interview we talk about common sense, artificial general intelligence, computer vision, #LLM and their impact on computer programming, and how much they might really be understanding. Bart will also give his take on how good they are, how to understand how they’re working, and his experiments in getting ChatGPT to understand geometry.

All this plus our usual look at today's AI headlines.

Transcript and URLs referenced at HumanCusp Blog.