Peter Norvig
In plain wordsAn American computer scientist who co-wrote the standard AI textbook, led research at Google, and helped show that simple methods trained on huge amounts of data often beat clever hand-built ones.
American computer scientist known both as an author and teacher of AI and as an engineering leader at Google. 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach' (1995; 4th ed. 2020), which he wrote with Stuart RussellStuart Russell, prop. n.: A British computer scientist who co-wrote the standard AI textbook and argues that AI must be redesigned to stay uncertain about what humans want, so that it remains under human control., became the standard AI textbook, and his 'Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming' (1992) taught classic AI through LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades.. After heading the computational sciences division at NASA's Ames Research Center, he joined Google in 2001, directing search quality and then research, and he is also a Distinguished Education Fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI. A proponent of data-driven methods, he co-wrote 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data' (2009), defended statistical language modelslanguage model, n.: A system that has learned how likely different sequences of words are, so it can predict the next word in a text and, by doing that repeatedly, write text of its own. against Noam Chomsky's criticism (2011), and with Blaise Agüera y Arcas argued in 2023 that frontier language modelslarge language model, n.: A computer program trained on enormous amounts of text to predict the words that come next. At vast scale, that simple skill lets it chat, answer questions, translate, summarize and write code. already show artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive. in an early form. In 2011 he and Sebastian Thrun taught an online AI course to some 160,000 students, one of the first massive open online courses.
Related
- Stuart RussellStuart Russell, prop. n.: A British computer scientist who co-wrote the standard AI textbook and argues that AI must be redesigned to stay uncertain about what humans want, so that it remains under human control.
- intelligent agentintelligent agent, n.: In AI theory, a decision-maker, such as a robot, a self-driving car, a chess program or a helpful piece of software, that notices what is going on around it and responds in ways that serve its goals.
- artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive.
- language modellanguage model, n.: A system that has learned how likely different sequences of words are, so it can predict the next word in a text and, by doing that repeatedly, write text of its own.
- LispLisp, prop. n.: A programming language invented in 1958 for AI research, in which programs and data are written the same way, as nested lists in parentheses. It was the main language of AI for decades.
- scaling hypothesisscaling hypothesis, n.: The bet that today's AI methods, simply made bigger with more computing power and data, will keep getting smarter — possibly all the way to human-level intelligence and beyond — without needing fundamentally new ideas.
Sources
- Halevy, A., Norvig, P. & Pereira, F. (2009). The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data. IEEE Intelligent Systems 24(2): 8–12.
- Agüera y Arcas, B. & Norvig, P. (2023). Artificial General Intelligence Is Already Here. Noema.
Mentioned in
Noam ChomskyNoam Chomsky, prop. n.: An American linguist whose theories of grammar reshaped linguistics and cognitive science, and who argues that chatbots like ChatGPT imitate language without understanding it., Stuart RussellStuart Russell, prop. n.: A British computer scientist who co-wrote the standard AI textbook and argues that AI must be redesigned to stay uncertain about what humans want, so that it remains under human control., neats and scruffiesneats and scruffies, phr.: A joking split of AI researchers into 'neats', who want clean mathematical theories that can be proved correct, and 'scruffies', who build messy collections of tricks that simply work., Sebastian ThrunSebastian Thrun, prop. n.: A German-American roboticist who led the Stanford team that won the 2005 desert race for self-driving cars, started Google's self-driving car project, and founded the online-learning company Udacity.