How will they impact us all? As a longtime researcher in AI, I'm excited about the ways in
which these new AI systems can improve our healthcare, education, climate and more. At the same
time, we need to think carefully about how to use them and how to prevent their misuse.
I oppose recent suggestions that we simply ban their development, but I support and participate in
efforts to anticipate their possible uses and impacts, and to help our leaders think through how
governments should react.
It will be useful to regulate AI, but primarily at the application level. For example, AI
applications to medical diagnosis should be regulated very differently from AI applications to
self-driving cars.
U.S. National Academies report
on AI and the Future of
Work, study co-chairs Tom Mitchell and Erik Brynjolfsson, November 2024.
A short fireside chat I had
with Reid Hoffman, moderated by Ryan Heath about what is next for Generative AI,
from the SCSP Global Emerging Technology Summit, Washington D.C., September 21, 2023.
I currently chair
a task
force for the non-partisan, non-profit SCSP, to make recommendations to the
U.S. government on the technology of Large Language Models, their impact on society, and
actions the government might want to take in response.
Current Research
How can AI improve education? Watch my 2025 UCL Peter Kirstein lecture: Where Can AI Take Education by
2030?. My thesis: this is the decade when AI will truly revolutionize online education. Why?
Because (1) for the first time we have finally have online education sites that have taught
millions of students, providing more training data showing how students learn, than a human
teacher could ever see in a 100-year teaching career, and (2) recent AI advances in machine
learning, large natural language models, and reasoning give us the right tools to build AI agents
that tutor online students. ...
Here are some problems I've been working on with my collaborators:
Using Large Language Models like GPT-4 to build new online education systems.
Learning which teaching actions produce best learning outcomes. In January 2023 we deployed
our trained model on the CK12.org platform, and it has
now been used well over a million times to choose the right hint for students struggling to
answer specific questions.
How does the brain represent language meaning? We collect images of brain activity while
human subjects read text, then use machine learning to analyze how observed brain activity
represents language meaning.
...
