July 2026
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Why we expand information to compress it later. Many years ago I read a book called Hitchcock on Hitchcock, and one small passage in it has stayed with me longer than almost anything else I have read about films, which is one of my passions. Surprisingly, I have come to think that the ideas expressed…
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On teaching the history of the field not as a chronology of methods but as a record of the bets we made, and lost. In January of 2023 I was in Doha, at the IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop, sitting on a panel with several other people who had been in the field long enough…
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Is working on machines built by others AI research? It can be. Usually it is not… A few weeks ago I was at one of the many AI gatherings that seem to happen in New York on any given evening now. The discussion was lively and well informed: the current state of the models, the…
THE VOICE IN THE MACHINE 