Who's Who of AI

Alison Gopnik

236 trust researcher @alisongopnik.bsky.social · 41,006 followers
AI research
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Researcher with public evidence across AI research.

AI signals
7
past 30d
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past 30d
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3d ago
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Cognitive scientist, philosopher, and psychologist at Berkeley, author of The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby and The Gardener and the Carpenter and grandmother of six.
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Articles & links

Two new preprints from the lab, First up, causal exploration in humans and LLM's. arxiv.org Human Adults and LLMs as Scientists: Who Benefits from Active Exploration?

arXiv.org e-Print archive arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • arXiv is a free, open-access archive holding nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles across nine major fields.
  • None of the materials on arXiv are peer-reviewed by the archive itself, a structural fact affecting how preprints should be read.
  • The archive runs as a nonprofit through Cornell University, backed by the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and contributors.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 7 from the directory shared this · 101d ago

In the Times this morning- Henry Farrell James Evans and I on why we desperately need the social sciences to understand AI and its impact , just at the moment when the admin is trying to destroy them. www.nytimes.com/2026/09/06/o...

nytimes.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 37 ↻ 6 ↩ 1 · 8 from the directory shared this · 21d ago
↻ Alison Gopnik reposted
@birdsnfrogs.bsky.social

Do yourself a favor and please read @himself.bsky.social @alisongopnik.bsky.social and collaborators’ works on LLMs as cultural and social technologies www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org View on Bluesky →

A very interesting and clear (and reassuring?) piece relating the Farrell et al (www.science.org/doi/full/10....) idea of LLM's as cultural technology to the recent developments in AI Mathematics. terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/13/h...

science.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 22 ↻ 7 ↩ 1 · 3 from the directory shared this · 13d ago

Good piece on why kids beat AI at learning, with Mike Frank and me. Behind a paywall but available elsewhere. www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/24/1...

Kids outlearn AI—and we still don’t know why technologyreview.com
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A pre-teen has heard about 100 million words; Meta's Llama 3.1 trained on 15 trillion tokens, roughly 150,000 times more.
  • The 2024 BabyLM champion, GPT-BERT, beat Meta's Llama 2 70B on some benchmarks despite training on 15,000 times less data.
  • Princeton's Brenden Lake trained a model on 61 hours of SAYCam egocentric video and got object recognition without innate biases.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 35 ↻ 9 ↩ 3 · 3 from the directory shared this · 34d ago
↻ Alison Gopnik reposted
Charley Wu @thecharleywu.bsky.social

🚨New preprint with Fei Dai, @hanqizhou.bsky.social and @alisongopnik.bsky.social We extend empowerment (control over external states) by turning it inward. *Representational empowerment* asks which representations a learner should acquire and curate to solve future problems ar…

What Is Worth Representing? Representational Empowerment for Continual Model Construction arxiv.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • A new paper proposes Representational Empowerment (RepEmp), scoring candidate representational elements by how much they expand an agent's future capacity to model and plan.
  • In a closed-vocabulary causal-learning task, human participants built causal models to maximize goal reachability rather than fidelity to the world.
  • An LLM-augmented Curator using RepEmp built more compact symbolic libraries that generalized better than baselines; ablating RepEmp eliminated the gains.
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 View on Bluesky →

An excellent thoughtful and clear review of the state of AI. yalereview.org/article/mela...

Melanie Mitchell: The Dangerous Unknowns at the Heart of LLMs yalereview.org
AI Weekly's analysis →
  • AI systems excel on some tasks while failing surprisingly on similar ones, a pattern Mitchell calls 'jagged intelligence.'
  • Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI cofounder, is quoted saying LLMs 'generalize dramatically worse than people' in a way that is 'very fundamental.'
  • Mitchell says AI researchers, herself included, are still struggling to design effective evaluation methods for LLMs' uneven capabilities.
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View on Bluesky · ♥ 28 ↻ 5 ↩ 0 · 5 from the directory shared this · 109d ago

So pleased that our paper on empowerment and causal models is out and freely available as part of this impressive special issue on world models and AI, with Melanie Mitchell, Josh Tenenbaum, Tom Griffiths and many other stars. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article...

royalsocietypublishing.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 105 ↻ 34 ↩ 0 · 5 from the directory shared this · 133d ago
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