The back-and-forth here between Ketan Ramakrishnan and Arvind Narayanan regarding legal liability of AI use (or misuse) is this platform at its best. Thoughtful, respectful, and nuanced disagreement, with knowledge advanced via dialogue. Three cheers.

'Of course, AI can be a useful tool for scientists. The key word is tool. AI is not a revolution. It is not a replacement for human understanding — to think so is to miss the point of science.'

Our minds are more than machines!

This is a helpful overview of live controversies in LLM research. One key claim: 'The improved performance [of LLMs] likely results from the fact that we are supplying more knowledge, and not just more scale/computation, and it is bounded by availability of such knowledge.'

What's interesting is Turing award winner Leslie Valient has written an entire book that (in my view) accords with this definition, tellingly titled 'The Importance of Being Educable.' Efficient learning is what makes humans unique.