Events
Colloquium
AI's Models of the World, and Ours
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Speaker: Jon Kleinberg (Cornell) Tisch University Professor of Computer Science and Information Science Cornell University Wednesday, April 29, 2026 12:00PM - 1:00PM Lunch 11:30am-12:00pm
Talk 12:00pm-1:00pm |
Abstract: Recent work on generative AI and large language models (LLMs) has addressed the simultaneous challenge of evaluating an AI system’s explicit behavior at one level and its implicit representations of the world at another. Such distinctions become crucial as people interact with powerful AI systems, where a mismatch between the system’s model of the world and our human models of the world can lead to situations in which the system has inadvertently `set us up to fail’ through our interaction with it. We explore these questions through the lens of generative AI, drawing on examples from game-playing, geographic navigation, and other complex tasks: When we train a model to win chess games, what happens when we pair it with a weaker partner who makes some of the moves? When we train a model to find shortest paths, what happens when it has to deal with unexpected detours? The picture we construct is further complicated by theoretical results indicating that successful generation can be achieved even by agents that are provably incapable of identifying the model they’re generating from. The talk will include joint work with Ashton Anderson, Karim Hamade, Reid McIlroy-Young, Siddhartha Sen, Justin Chen, Sendhil Mullainathan, Ashesh Rambachan, and Keyon Vafa.
Speaker Bio: Jon Kleinberg is a professor in both computer science and information science. His research focuses on issues at the interface of networks and information, with an emphasis on the social and information networks that underpin the Web and other online media. His work has been supported by an NSF Career Award, an ONR Young Investigator Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and grants from Google, Yahoo!, and the NSF. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
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- Colloquium
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