Artificial Intelligence

The Institute’s School of Social Science turned its focus for the 2025–26 academic year to the theme of Digital (In)Equality. The parentheses in the title gesture to what Alondra Nelson, Harold F. Linder Professor in the School and the theme year’s organizer, refers to as the “double-edged-ness” of the contemporary digital ecosystem. Nelson’s convening insight challenges the dominant narratives around technology: both techno-optimism and techno-pessimism miss the point.

Motivated by the growing interest in using artificial intelligence for teaching purposes, IAS scholars from the Schools of Mathematics and Natural Sciences have conducted an innovative study to assess the correctness and helpfulness of large language models in STEM education. Their research yielded surprising results, including highlighting the importance of training models on conversations rather than textbooks.

Marc Aidinoff, Research Associate in the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Social Science (2023–25), discusses how interdisciplinary scholarship stretching across academia, industry, and civil society can work in practice.

Weishun Zhong, Member in the School of Natural Sciences, uses tools from statistical physics to study the brain and AI. "Although these two might appear very different at first glance," he states, "when zoomed out and abstracted away, they are both just networks of basic units called neurons."

I spent part of my childhood living with my grandma just off Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles. My school was on the same street as our house, but I still spent many a day trying to coax kids on my block to “play school” with me on my grandma’s huge...

On May 4, 2019, Demis Hassabis, Co-founder and CEO of DeepMind, discussed the capabilities and power of self-learning systems in a public lecture at the Institute for Advanced Study. He illustrated his talk with reference to some of DeepMind's...

Published here are three slightly edited excerpts from "Mathematics and Computation," a new book by Avi Wigderson, Herbert H. Maass Professor in the School of Mathematics, soon to be published by Princeton University Press (online draft available he...

Deep learning, which is the reemergence of artificial neural networks, has recently succeeded as an approach towards artificial intelligence. In many fields, including computational linguistics, deep learning approaches have largely displaced...

In this public lecture held at the Institute on October 27, 2017, Sanjeev Arora, Visiting Professor in the School of Mathematics, and Richard Zemel, Visitor in the School of Mathematics, gave brief talks about the field of machine learning and its...

All of us who have watched as a friend or relative has disappeared into the fog of Alzheimer’s arrive at the same truth. Although we recognize people by their visual appearance, what we really are as individual humans is determined by how our brains...