The Journey of AI Development

Dr. Margaret Mitchell shares her experiences as a pioneer in AI research, particularly in developing language models that convert images into descriptions. During her work at Microsoft around 2013, she encountered an alarming phenomenon where her AI system, when shown a tragic sequence of images from an explosion, deemed the view 'awesome.' This led to a realization about the unexpected and often inappropriate responses from AI, which she termed the 'everything is awesome problem.' Such errors highlighted the crucial necessity of scrutinizing the training data for AI systems, as biases in this data can produce dangerously inaccurate interpretations.