Nick Haber | Motivation, Representation, and Autonomous Agents
The past decade’s series of dramatic AI successes has brought us closer to realizing the dream of the autonomous agent—an artificial system that can learn about its world, make decisions, and set and achieve goals, all with minimal human intervention.
Nature has given us an incredible motif for the autonomous agent. Humans are born with core motivations that drive behavior, and as they gain experience, they develop increasingly sophisticated representations of their worlds, which in turn facilitate increasingly complex behaviors.
How should we attempt to realize this motif for intelligence to create autonomous agents? In this seminar, the speakers will cover a number of efforts aimed at assembling pieces of it—starting with their own research into intrinsic motivation and adaptive “world model” representations, including work inspired by biology and, in particular, human development. They will also describe some of the opportunities language models provide for us to make increasingly autonomous systems.
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Arvind Narayanan | Adapting to the Transformation of Knowledge Work
The possibility that AI will automate most cognitive labor is worth taking seriously. How should we adapt to this transformation? I start from the perspective, articulated in the essay “AI as normal technology”, that the true bottlenecks lie downstream of capabilities and that AI’s impacts will unfold gradually over decades. If this is true, there are major gaps in our current evidence infrastructure, because it over-emphasizes the capability layer.
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The possibility that AI will automate most cognitive labor is worth taking seriously. How should we adapt to this transformation? I start from the perspective, articulated in the essay “AI as normal technology”, that the true bottlenecks lie downstream of capabilities and that AI’s impacts will unfold gradually over decades. If this is true, there are major gaps in our current evidence infrastructure, because it over-emphasizes the capability layer.
Inside the 2026 AI Index Report | Stanford HAI
The AI Index, currently in its ninth year, tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence.
The AI Index, currently in its ninth year, tracks, collates, distills, and visualizes data relating to artificial intelligence.