Date
Mar 28, 2025, 2:00 pm3:30 pm

Details

Event Description

Join us for a fascinating lecture by Been Kim, Senior Staff Research Scientist, Google DeepMind on Friday, March 28 from 2:00-3:00 PM ET on “Why We Can't Understand AI Using Our Existing Vocabulary”. A reception will follow the lecture. 

As AI capabilities leap beyond human understanding, human vocabulary is no longer sufficient to understand how AI works. We argue that we need neologisms: new words that represent precise human concepts that we want to teach machines, or machine concepts that we need to learn. Inventing new words is not new; this happens naturally throughout human history in order to meet the need (e.g., Gen Alpha has invented many words like skibidi, a complex yet rich concept). Successful neologisms achieve a useful amount of abstraction: not too detailed, so they’re reusable in many contexts, and not too high-level, so they convey precise information. By expanding what we know, we will ensure the future includes humans by evolving ourselves and not be left behind.

Been Kim’s research focuses on helping humans to communicate with complex machine learning models: not only by building tools to generate explanations and tools to show how explanations fail, but also studying machine's nature compared to humans.

For questions about this event, please contact Athina Fontenot at [email protected].

Sponsor
Organized by the AI Lab