Sub-title: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI
This was a wonderful read that sheds a bright light on the early innovations in AI and one of its fascinating developers. Dr Li weaves the story of her immigration and experiences in the US with the evolution of the technology. She beautifully illustrates the power of family, mentors, and self-determination on realizing the intellect of a brilliant woman. Highly recommended.
Quotes/Notes:
[on her mentor helping her and learning about her culture]..he read Chinese classics like Dream of the Red Chamber, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Journey to the West.
"But the failures are not in vain. Mistakes trigger corrective signals, rippling across the network's tens of millions of constituent parts, each assessed for its contribution to the results and pushed, proportionately, to behave differently next time. It's the simplest form of learning--to do less of whatever failed, and more of whatever didn't."
[on psychologist Eleanor Rosch and categorization and creating a vocabulary for understanding hierarchy - made me think of looking at DNA this way] "..superordinates and subordinate categories ..when taken as a whole, such hierarchies look like trees. Moving toward the root means less specificity and differentiation, while moving toward the leaves, the farthest ends of each branch means more. "
[Anatol Holt] "AI was a technology that can make the perfect chess move while the room is on fire".
[on Jeremy Wolfe, cognitive scientist - made me think of doing a study on how blind and deaf perceive the world] "...concept of 'gist' ...directly confronted the question of what, exactly, humans perceive when they glance at the real world"
"adversarial attacks" - feeding information to directly confuse the AI
"explainability" or "explainable AI" - reducing neural networks' almost magical deliberations into a form humans can understand.
Published: 2023 Read: January 2024 Genre: Science