With the November 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the rate of advance in AI has seemingly gone from meteoric to meteoric on steroids. But many commentators have expressed doubts that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT are truly intelligent.
What do advanced AI systems need in order to be able to think rationally? Not just give the impression that they are doing so (to a lay and impressionable observer), but for real…?
Consider the following: If all cats are crazy, and Jonathan is a cat, then Jonathan is crazy.
This is an example of deduction, one of the three primary modes of reasoning (along with induction and abduction) underlying critical thought and general problem solving. Any advanced AI system currently on the drawing board with ambitions of becoming a general problem solver, or AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), will unavoidably need to perform reliable deduction somehow, either as an explicit high-level function or as an emergent property of its low-level behaviour, and every AI researcher with an interest in AGI – or AI company with ambitions to become an AGI company – needs to know about deduction.
The art of getting a mindless automaton (a.k.a. computer) to perform deduction is called Automated Theorem Proving (ATP), and Professor Paulson has been a recognised world leader in ATP for over 40 years. Who better than Professor Paulson to deliver the inaugural CAIS talk at the Bradfield Centre, Cambridge, on Wednesday 8 March? No one, that’s who!
Tickets are £11.80 + VAT from https://www.cambridgewireless.co.uk/events/automated-theorem-proving/.
About the speaker
Paulson graduated from the California Institute of Technology with a BS in Mathematics in 1977, and obtained a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. After a brief spell as a research assistant at Edinburgh University, Paulson moved to Cambridge University in 1983, where he has been ever since. Elevated to Professor of Computational Logic in 2002, a position he held for 20 years, Paulson has been Director of Research at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory since 2022. Paulson was elected Fellow of the ACM (Association of Computing Machinery) in 2008, and Fellow of the Royal Society in 2017. He has been an editor of the Journal of Automated Reasoning for many years, and a trustee of the Conference on Automated Deduction (CADE) since 2010.
About CAIS
Cambridge AI Social (CAIS) seeks to deliver a series of in-person “AI + pizza” events in Cambridge (one of Europe’s hottest AI hubs) throughout 2023 (and beyond!)
Fundamental to the CAIS vision are:
- speakers must be a recognised world leader in their field
- events are non-profit, with minimal cost to attendees
- each event comprises a roughly one-hour talk followed by socialisation (with pizza!)
Sponsors
CAIS would not be possible without the support of its sponsors:
- one-man AGI non-profit BigMother.AI
- AI-driven forecasting startup Dimension Technologies
- (for this event) membership organisation and technology community CW (Cambridge Wireless).
