Daniel Kahneman

Israeli-American psychologist, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and later Princeton University, who with his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky mapped the predictable ways human reasoning departs from the rational ideal, work that reshaped economics and now lends AI researchers a vocabulary for machine reasoning. In 1974 the pair showed that people estimate likelihoods through mental shortcuts, such as how easily examples come to mind (availability) or how typical a case looks (representativeness), and that these shortcuts produce systematic errors; their prospect theory (1979) described how people actually choose under risk, including loss aversion. Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, Tversky having died in 1996. 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' (2011) popularized the contrast between fast, intuitive System 1System 1 and System 2, phr.: A popular way of describing two modes of thinking: fast, automatic and intuitive (System 1) versus slow, effortful and deliberate (System 2). AI researchers borrow it to contrast instant answers with step-by-step reasoning. and slow, deliberate System 2 thinking, which AI researchers borrow to contrast a model's immediate answers with the step-by-step reasoningchain of thought, n.: Getting an AI to write out its reasoning step by step before giving an answer, the way a student shows their working. This often makes answers to math and logic problems more accurate. of reasoning modelsreasoning model, n.: An AI model trained to work through a problem step by step in hidden 'thinking' text before it answers. Letting it think longer generally makes it better at math, coding and planning.. Prospect theory inspired Kahneman–Tversky optimizationKahneman–Tversky optimization, n.: A way to tune an AI's behavior that needs only a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on single answers, rather than side-by-side comparisons, borrowing ideas from the psychology of how people weigh gains and losses. for aligning language models, and 'Noise' (2021, with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein) argued that simple rules often beat inconsistent human judgment.