Princeton NJ Events

Meeting, 55 Plus Club

Thursday May 7, 2026
10:00 AM

Tom Griffiths, Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness, and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University; Director of the AI Lab, will speak on "Mapping the complexity of artificial intelligence using the tools of cognitive science"

Rapid progress in artificial intelligence research has led many to predict that we will soon have superhuman artificial general intelligences. I will argue that a more realistic outcome is that we will create systems that are heterogeneously superintelligent, outperforming humans in a wide range of settings but also systematically underperforming in others. I will also argue that the tools we need for understanding this heterogeneity can be found in cognitive science, where researchers have spent decades developing theoretical and empirical methods for making sense of the capabilities of intelligent systems. I will illustrate this argument by discussing some surprising cases where large language models perform poorly in predictable ways and recent results showing that both the classic phenomenon of neural networks being insufficiently discrete and the classic phenomenon of thought being overly discrete result in deficits in the performance of AI systems.

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