Author: Ambuj Tewari, Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan

Understanding intelligence and creating intelligent machines are grand scientific challenges of our times. The ability to learn from experience is a cornerstone of intelligence for machines and living beings alike. In a remarkably prescient 1948 report, Alan Turing – the father of modern computer science – proposed the construction of machines that display intelligent behavior. He also discussed the “education” of such machines “by means of rewards and punishments.” Turing’s ideas ultimately led to the development of reinforcement learning, a branch of artificial intelligence. Reinforcement learning designs intelligent agents by training them to maximize rewards as they interact with their…

State-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude have captured the public imagination by producing fluent text in multiple languages in response to user prompts. Those companies have also captured headlines with the huge sums they’ve invested to build ever more powerful models. An AI startup from China, DeepSeek, has upset expectations about how much money is needed to build the latest and greatest AIs. In the process, they’ve cast doubt on the billions of dollars of investment by the big AI players. I study machine learning. DeepSeek’s disruptive debut comes down not to any stunning…

If your jaw dropped as you watched the latest AI-generated video, your bank balance was saved from criminals by a fraud detection system, or your day was made a little easier because you were able to dictate a text message on the run, you have many scientists, mathematicians and engineers to thank. But two names stand out for foundational contributions to the deep learning technology that makes those experiences possible: Princeton University physicist John Hopfield and University of Toronto computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton. The two researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on Oct. 8, 2024, for their pioneering…