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BYU Artificial Intelligence Association hosts Campus AI Day

The BYU Artificial Intelligence Association hosted a Campus AI Day on Tuesday, Nov. 5 to help students network with AI professionals and learn about progress in the field of AI.

During the day, several businesses based on applications of AI were invited to network with students and professors.

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Students network with developers of AI tools. This was part of the BYU Artificial Intelligence Association's Campus AI day. (Lillian Ercanbrack)

Some of these new tools included DonkeyChats, an AI tool originally developed to facilitate political debates that has now become a way to help couples communicate with one another better. Passive Logic, another AI tool that uses predictive models for heating and cooling a building, and Tarriflo that helps to automate trade across global borders, were also featured at the event.

A panel discussion made of industry professionals Andrew Carr, Jeremy Fillingim and David Wingate gave students the opportunity to ask questions about the progress and future of artificial intelligence.

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AI professionals discuss the future and progress of AI tools. This was part of the BYU Artificial Intelligence Association's Campus AI day. Left to right, David Wingate, Jeremy Fillingim and Andrew Carr. (Lillian Ercanbrack)

The panel was moderated by Jeffrey Olmo, vice president of the Artificial Intelligence Association, who started the conversation by asking the panelists how surprising it is to them that language models work as well as they do.

Fillingim, founder of Passive Logic, recalled the shock that was felt by many when AI finally took off.

“I’ve been really pleasantly surprised at what it’s good at and still surprised at what it’s not very good at,” Fillingim said.

The next question to the panelists asked whether society is emerging into an era of diminishing returns to training AI on more data or whether scaling will continue to bring more capability to AI models.

Carr, co-founder of Cartwheel, answered by explaining that the issue in scaling is not whether there will be diminishing returns, but whether there will be enough data, power and computers to reach that point. The other point brought up by Carr was that this scalability may not be important for the practical application of AI.

Wingate, a BYU professor studying language models, answered the next question on whether AI will reach a bottleneck by explaining that each time an AI is developed, it starts out with poor performance that is slowly improved until it exponentially improves in a very short time period. He shared that he expects this trend to continue with other applications for AI.

Olmo asked the panelists for their thoughts on the future of education in conjunction with AI, given its capabilities.

“Blocking and tackling still matters … having an engineering mindset, the ability to debut a problem, that’s a skill that transfers regardless of the set of tools that you have available to you,” Fillingim said.

Carr encouraged students to “just do stuff," meaning that the more things that a student does outside of the classroom, the more skills they will develop to influence the world around them.

Wingate shared his perspective as an educator at BYU, explaining that it will be up to students to be active and mature in their pursuit of educational experiences, as AI makes it easier to cheat.

To close, Olso asked the panelists for their most contrarian take on AI.

“Are we thinking enough about AI for the poor? Are we thinking about the homeless population? How about our prison populations? What about single moms and orphans? Is AI gonna bless them or is it only going to make rich people richer?” Wingate asked.

Wingate emphasized that it is the responsibility of people who understand AI to choose how they will use it to benefit the world.