MACHINA SAPIENS: ARE COMPUTERS READY TO THINK?

Nello Cristianini, professor of Artificial Intelligence University of Bath

Can machines think? This unsettling question, posed by Alan Turing in 1950, may finally have an answer: today, you can have a conversation with a computer and be unable to tell it apart from a human. New intelligent agents like ChatGPT have proven capable of performing tasks far beyond the original intentions of their creators, and we still don’t fully understand why. While they were trained for specific skills, others emerged spontaneously as they "read" thousands of books and millions of web pages. Is this the secret of knowledge, now in the hands of our creations? What else might emerge as we continue down this path?