‘Weird new things are happening in software,’ says Stanford AI professor Chris Re
"But where these models still fall down, and also where I think the most interesting work is going on, is in what I call the tail, the fine-grained work."
The battleground, as Re put it, "are the subtle interactions, subtle disambiguations of terms," what Re proposed could be called "fine-grained reasoning and quality."
That change in emphasis is a change in software broadly speaking, said Re, and he cited Tesla AI scientist Andrej Karpathy, who has claimed AI is "Software 2.0." In fact, Re's talk was titled "machine learning is changing software."
Re speaks with real-world authority over and above his academic legacy. He is a four-time startup entrepreneur, having sold two companies to Apple, Lattice, and Inductiv, and having co-founded one of the many fascinating AI computer companies, SambaNova Systems. He is also a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient. (More on Re's faculty home page.)
To handle the subtleties of which he spoke, Software 2.0, Re suggested, is laying out a path to turn AI into an engineering discipline, as he put it, one where there is a new systems approach, different from how software systems were built before, and an attention to new "failure modes" of AI, different from how software traditionally fails.
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