Why AI Feels Smart (and Why That's Dangerous) with Steve James

AI systems are increasingly embedded in user-facing products, from chat interfaces and search to recommendations and code completion. Yet these systems do not "understand" in the way users often assume. In this talk, we'll provide a non-hyped explanation of what modern AI systems actually are and how they work. Starting from basic machine learning concepts, we build up to an intuitive understanding of why these systems can appear intelligent, why they fail in subtle ways, and why confident-sounding output is not the same as correctness.

🗣️ The speaker
Steve James is a senior lecturer in Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was the first Africa-based recipient of a Google PhD Fellowship in machine learning. He is co-director of the RAIL Lab, a Fellow of the Wits MIND Institute, and a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research's Next Generation initiative. His research focuses on autonomous decision-making systems and how machines learn to plan and act in complex environments.

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