philosophy

  • Is the History of AI a Technical Subject?

    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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  • Prompting Is Not AI Research

    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…

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  • From Spark to System (Part III)

    Where Does the Bridge Get Built? This is the third essay in the From Spark to System series. Part I: “Why the Real AI Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet.” Part II: “The Bridge That Was Never Built.” The previous two posts in this series built a framework. The first argued that the AI revolution most people…

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  • From Spark to System (Part II)

    The Bridge That Was Never Built. This is the second of three posts on innovation: what it actually is, how it differs from invention, and how technologies evolve through the construction of domains, translation into products, and the specific kind of leadership each phase requires. In my previous post I argued that the AI revolution…

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  • Transactional and Relational Intelligence

    Over the years, I’ve come to see that useful AI needs more than accurate execution. It needs the ability to engage with humans over time, cope with uncertainty, and build shared understanding. This post reflects on why balancing transactional reliability with relational intelligence matters.

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