Spring 2025: Humans of AI: Understanding the People Behind the Machines

Update: Lots of people are coming to the realization that generative AI has been oversold and is massively under-delivering. So, I’m going to double-down on the anthropological angle for my new book.

  • Who are some of the people working on AI technologies, from AI chips to Large Language Models?
  • What are the cultural norms that structure the AI community?
  • What are the rituals that give meaning to their work?
  • What are the strategies of communication used to get this technology built?
  • What kind of language is used in this world?

So, a new name for the book: Humans of AI: Understanding the People Behind the Machines.

Remember: it’s not magic; it’s people that make AI function.

LLM Reads with the Human Feedback Foundation

In our quest to understand the current wave of activity in Natural Language Processing (NLP), and in particular Large Language Models (LLM), we are happy to launch our second season of talks.

We invite the first authors from some seminal LLM papers to talk through their paper, explore any common misconceptions they’ve encountered, and lead a discussion on how things have changed since the paper came out.

LLM Reading Group (March 5, 19; April 2, 16, 30; May 14)

ALTERNATE TUESDAYS STARTING MARCH 5, 12:00-1:00 PM EST on Zoom

Join us on Discord for recordings of past sessions, discussions and future session ideas: https://discord.gg/a8auUyKAgB

In partnership with the Human Feedback Foundation: https://humanfeedback.io/

Introducing Aya

I am proud to be one of 3,000 humans who built Aya – a new massively multilingual, generative LLM that outperforms existing open-source models and covers 101 different languages. Check out Aya here, including the dataset, model, two new papers on arXiv and a nice documentary on the entire process.

https://cohere.com/research/aya

 

The paper here details exactly how we put together the dataset and relied on communities of speakers in 101 different languages around the world. Submitted to Association of Computational Linguistics, 2024.