Institute Output

Human Language and Machine Language
Community Essay Christopher Lord Community Essay Christopher Lord

Human Language and Machine Language

The explosion of large language models means that we are all suddenly awash in machine-generated language, spoken, written and even sung. There are many advantages to the artificial intelligence produced like this, and many disadvantages too: it remains to be seen what the eventual outcome will be. But there is one particular idea that keeps bubbling up to the surface: that AI is going to decide to kill us all. This, I suggest, is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of language.

Read More
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram Computational Essay Stephen Wolfram

What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?

Stephen Wolfram

That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. But how does it do it? And why does it work? My purpose here is to give a rough outline of what’s going on inside ChatGPT—and then to explore why it is that it can do so well in producing what we might consider to be meaningful text.

Read More