Computers are learning to read our minds
The home team chats with Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about his research into how LLMs—and humans—learn to speak. Plus: how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to talk, concern over models that pass the Turing test, and what’s going on with whale brains.
Gašper’s work combines machine learning, statistical modeling, neuroimaging, and behavioral experiments “to better understand how neural networks learn internal representations in speech and how humans learn to speak.”
One thing that surprised him about generative adversarial networks (GANs)? How innovative they are, capable of generating English words they’ve never heard before based on words they have.
Read about how AI is restoring a stroke survivor’s ability to speak.
Universal grammar proposes a hypothetical structure in the brain responsible for humans’ innate language abilities. The concept is credited to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky; read his take on GenAI.
AI expert Yoshua Bengio recently signed an open letter asking AI labs to pause the training of AI systems powerful enough to pass the Turing test. Read about his reasoning.
Find the Berkeley Speech and Communication Network here.
Find Gašper on his website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Or dive into his research.
Congratulations to Lifeboat badge winner and self-proclaimed data nerd John Rotenstein, who saved How can I delete files older than seven days in Amazon S3? from the ignominy of ignorance.