Alison Gopnik

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Researcher with public evidence across AI research.

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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.

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.
Read full analysis →
View on Bluesky · ♥ 14 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 7 from the directory shared this · 81d 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 · 6 from the directory shared this · 1d 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 · 14d ago

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 · 89d 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 · 3 from the directory shared this · 113d ago

Here is the specific link to our paper with Eunice Yiu, Shiry Ginosar and Kelsey Allen, how to construct causal models through intrinsically motivated action, something kids do and LLMs don't. The whole issue on world models is very much worth reading. royalsocietypublishing.o…

royalsocietypublishing.org
View on Bluesky · ♥ 33 ↻ 10 ↩ 0 · 2 from the directory shared this · 113d ago

My piece in this impressive and fascinating compilation of distinguished social scientists, artists and humanists thinking about AI. Stone soup, the Golem and and the intelligences of exploration and care. humanistreview.ai

Home humanistreview.ai
View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 1 ↩ 0 · 52d ago

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