Changing the Nature of AI Research

In many ways, we are living in quite a wondrous time for artificial intelligence (AI), with every week bringing some awe-inspiring feat in yet another tacit knowledge (https://bit.ly/3qYrAOY) Of particular recent interest are the large learned systems based on transformer architectures that are trained with billions of parameters over massive Web-scale multimodal corpora. Prominent examples include large language models (https://bit.ly/3iGdekA) The emergence of these large learned models is also changing the nature of AI research in fundamental ways. Just the other day, some researchers were playing with DALL-E and thought that it seems to have developed a secret language of its own (https://bit.ly/3ahH1Py)