Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Computational Complexity
Comic Book Alignment
Talk about AI "alignment" makes me think of a time in the 1950s that a group of companies decided tocreate an industry organization to self-govern their work to...
From Computational Complexity
Health Tech
On Tuesday, at the behest of an alumnus, I spent the afternoon at HIMSS, a large health tech conference being held at the big convention center in Chicago. When...
From Computational Complexity
My Week at Simons
This week finds me at the Simons Institute for Theoretical Computer Science in Berkeley California. Simons started about the same time I joined the administrative...
From Computational Complexity
Complexity and Explainable AI
About six years ago, I posted on why it was important to understand machine learning, mentioning trust, fairness, security and causality. But I then I brought in...
From Computational Complexity
Neil Jones (1941-2023)
Eric Allender graciously agreed to write this remembrance of Neil Jones.Neil Jones passed away on March 27.Neil's work had a profound impact on the field of computational...
From Computational Complexity
Who's on April First
Carlos May waving to the crowd on April 1, 1972Instead of the usual April Fools’ Day post, I present one of the best April Fools Day stunts ever. Here’s the text...
From Computational Complexity
Alan Turing, The Opera
Last Thursday I attended the world premier of The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing, a new production from Chicago Opera Theater composed by Justine Chen with the...
From Computational Complexity
A Strange Hiring Season
In my fall jobs post, I had trouble predicting this season's CS faculty job market but I didn't expect this: strong supply and strong demand, something we haven't...
From Computational Complexity
Identities in Computational Complexity
Guest post by Josh Grochow On the birdsite, Jay Cummings tweeted: TOP 5 IDENTITIES OF ALL TIME5. You4. Can't 3. Rank2. Identities 1. eiπ + 1 = 0— Jay Cummings...
From Computational Complexity
Peer Review
I ran into a partner of a computer scientist at a social event who asked me "Is the publication system in CS screwed up or really screwed up?" If you don't know...
From Computational Complexity
Goodbye Dilbert
Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, had a racist rant in a video he posted last week. As a result most newspapers that carried the comic strip are dropping Dilbert...
From Computational Complexity
The Virtual Grad Student
Martin Haug, who is working on a LaTeX alternative Typst, asked me if I had updates on a LaTeX rant from 2011. I haven't seen any new serious backward compatibility...
From Computational Complexity
Blurry JPEG or Frozen Concentrate
Ted Chiang in a recent New Yorker article likened ChatGPT to a blurry JPEG, i.e. a "lossy compression" of the web. It's a good article but the analogy isn'tKolmogorov...
From Computational Complexity
Why Can't Little Chatty Do Math?
Despite OpenAI's claim that ChatGPT has improved mathematical capabilities, we don't get far multiplying large numbers.Typical for ChatGPT, the answer passes the...
From Computational Complexity
Responsibility
Nature laid out their ground rules for large language models like ChatGPT includingNo LLM tool will be accepted as a credited author on a research paper. That is...
From Computational Complexity
Back to the 90's
The current state of computer science reminds me of the early excitement of the Internet in the mid-90's. By the beginning of the 90's, computers landed in many...
From Computational Complexity
Meta-Complexity
I'm sure many of you long-time readers are asking, "Why all this big focus on machine learning in your posts and tweets? You are the 'Computational Complexity'research...
From Computational Complexity
Semantic Search for the Blog
As Google started to limit academic storage, I started looking at Google Takeout and started wondering what I could do with all that data. I downloaded all the...
From Computational Complexity
Positional Encoding
Given the excitement over ChatGPT, I spent part of the winter recess trying to understand the underlying technology of Transformers. After trying various tutorials...
From Computational Complexity