Last week, Lux convened about 300 AI engineers, scientists, researchers and founders in New York City to discuss the frontiers of the field under the banner of “the AI canvas.” The idea was to move the conversation away from what can be built, to what should be built and why. AI tools have made extraordinary progress since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, and we are still just figuring out all of the ways we can use these miraculous correlation machines.Even so, there remains prodigious work on the research frontiers of artificial intelligence to identify ways of improving model performance, merging models together, and ensuring that training and inference costs are as efficient as possible. To that end, we brought together two stars of the science world to talk more about the future of AI.Kyunghyun Cho is a computer science professor at New York University and executive director of frontier research at the Prescient Design team within Genentech Research & Early Development (gRED). Shirley Ho is Group Leader of Cosmology X Data Science at the Flatiron Institute of the Simons Foundation as well as Research Professor in Physics at New York University.Together with hosts Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner, we talk about the state of the art in AI today, how scientific discovery can potentially be automated with AI, whether PhDs are a thing of the past, and what the future of universities is in a time of funding cuts and endowment taxes.
