Some of you have asked about the innovations in the Chinese DeepSeek models; see this writeup and the linked paper for an overview.
The due date for the final paper has been pushed back to 5/9 from 5/2.
You may be interested to review (and if/when relevant, to comment or give feedback on) some early New York State bills on AI: AI Consumer Protection Act, a bill on training and use of frontier models, a bill regulating generative AI, the AI Training Data Transparency Act.
Possibly of interest, this Columbia Data Science Institute talk on April 10 on why domain specialization is important in AI, by the Chief Scientist of the tech company Datadog.
You should consider attending Columbia Data Science Day on Wednesday, April 2, which among other things will include panel discussions that will touch on topics like AI and climate as well as AI and cybersecurity.
If you are interested in AI and labor, I strongly recommend attending this event with Susan Athey (whose works you have read); the presenters are among the most senior in this area.
Two of the teams for the case studies have been pushed from April 8 to April 15 to accommodate rescheduling a guest lecture.
The groups and assignments for case studies have been posted in this page below. These presentations will begin after spring break and there is no need to start working on them now; this is purely for planning and scheduling purposes.
The Columbia AI Summit is Tuesday, March 4 (there are sessions both before and after class); you should at least browse the program and may want to consider attending.
The Columbia AI Alignment Club has a policy reading group that requires submitting an application by January 31 to join; many of these topics are ones that we will not focus on in this class, so if you are interested this could be a good option.
Film Forum is doing a film festival around AI through January 30; many of these films touch on themes that will come up in the class. I would encourage you to check them out.
The class has been moved to IAB 405 going forward, which has more room and should comfortably fit everyone who attended the first lecture and may want to sit in.
The course TA is Amiya Kumar ([email protected]). Please contact her for all questions about course logistics.
The first lecture will be Tuesday, January 21, 2:10-4 PM in IAB 501A.
Welcome to INAF U6545, Spring 2025 at Columbia’s School of International & Public Affairs.