From the editor: One of our most credentialed AI experts shared some essential perspectives for companies betting on AI. This speaker has a PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and has been working on machine learning models for over 15 years. As always, ON_Discourse operates under the Chatham House Rule—no attribution of perspectives without explicit consent.

AI is not magical. It is not new. And the recent surge in attention is not the result of an unexpected advancement in generative software.

The dominant media story about AI is that OpenAI achieved a major technological breakthrough sometime in 2022. This breakthrough unlocked new ways consumers can prompt with models to receive shockingly relevant generative output. In other words, before 2022, the generative systems were still largely theoretical. Nope.

The ability to prompt with generative models has been around for more than a decade. Prior to 2022, researchers in cognitive and brain sciences (not computer science, by the way) were interacting with models as seen on ChatGPT. They did not call this functionality artificial intelligence – it had always been called machine learning, a more accurate representation of the underlying tech.