After eleven exciting years at FAIR. I joined the Flatiron Institute at the Simons Foundation.

What is the most important letter in “AI”?

Much of the agitation these days is on letter “A” of “Artificial”. Because an artificial intelligence is one that he can own or sell, the Schumpeterian entrepreneur sees a chance to rewire our society, to “found a private kingdom”, “the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man”, to “prove oneself superior to others”, and also to experience the “joy of creating” and of “exercising one’s energy and ingenuity.” (Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, 1934). We read this in the news every day.

However, the real prize is with letter “I” of “Intelligence”. We cannot overstate the role of intelligence in the development of mankind over many millennia. Yet we remain unable to precisely describe how intelligence works, or even define it without loopy concepts. However, we now have machines that display some level of intelligence. We do not understand precisely how they work, but we know much more about the operation of these machines than we know about our cognitive processes. We can use them as models. Any salient discussion of the nature of artificial intelligence is also a discussion of the nature of intelligence, and eventually a discussion that impacts all forms of human activity or knowledge. Such an outcome has a much bigger impact and lasts much longer than any business venture

My conclusion was that understanding AI is more important than just building it.

The Flatiron Institute focuses on computational methods for both mathematics and empirical sciences/ Therefore it provides a double opportunity to better understand AI, first because AI is an instance of computational mathematics, second because we can observe how AI will transform computational method for empirical sciences and maybe draw useful conclusions.