Alison Gopnik
@AlisonGopnik
Cognitive scientist, psychologist, philosopher, author of Scientist in the Crib, Philosophical Baby, The Gardener & The Carpenter, WSJ Mind And Matter columnist
My Rumelhart Prize presentation, IMHO I think one of the best talks I've ever given, very much inspired by the audience. "3 ages and 3 intelligences: explore, exploit, empower" AI, life history, the significance of children, elders and caregiving. underline.io/events/465/ses…
I'll be speaking at the first ever groundbreaking symposium on the cognitive science of caregiving , with terrific fellow speakers, at the Cognitive Science Society Meeting July 31
A fascinating podcast with Sheina Lew-Levy and Dorsa Amir about childhood across cultures, very insightful ideas about how contemporary Western parents could learn from forager childhoods, especially the importance of peer culture (read the Opies!). podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/var…
It’s like ARC, but: 1. Grounded in cognitive science 2. Decomposed by difficulty level 3. Directly comparable to human development 🏆 Prizes: 🥇 $1,000 to the top model 🥈 $500 × 2 for runners-up 🗓️ Deadline: October 6, 2025 (Validation Phase starts now!)
🧠 How “old” is your model? Put it to the test with the KiVA Challenge: an abstract visual reasoning benchmark grounded in real developmental data from children (3–12) & adults. Join here: eval.ai/web/challenges… @AlisonGopnik @shiryginosar @kate_saenko_ @anisanmajhi @mqraitem
Held @ICCVConference in conjunction with GoogleDeepMind 3rd Perception Test Challenge: perception-test-challenge.github.io. Amazing speakers: Ali Farhadi, @AlisonGopnik, @phillip_isola, Philipp Krähenbühl. Fantastically organized by @eunice_yiu_ and co.!
Tommorow morning, July 9 ,at 9 AM Pacific on KQED a rerun of this great conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter on caregiving kqed.org/forum/20101019…
Interesting column by John Naughton at the Observer on AI as cultural technology. Claude agrees with us! Farrell et al (2025) Science, 387(6739), 1153-1156. Or rather the summary of information on intelligence the Claude system provides is pretty accurate. observer.co.uk/news/columnist…
New paper with @eunice_yiu_ both a theoretical account of how empowerment in RL could lead to causal learning and some lovely experiments showing that children do just that.
Children & adults don't just explore—they seek empowerment: controllable and variable interventions. This intrinsic drive supports causal learning & generalization. 📄 Forthcoming in Phil. Trans. A (2026) osf.io/ept4n/download @AlisonGopnik @KelseyRAllen @shiryginosar
Children & adults don't just explore—they seek empowerment: controllable and variable interventions. This intrinsic drive supports causal learning & generalization. 📄 Forthcoming in Phil. Trans. A (2026) osf.io/ept4n/download @AlisonGopnik @KelseyRAllen @shiryginosar
My Oxford Schmidt AI keynote lecture: How current AI works (its a cultural technology like writing and print), and how it could work to be genuinely intelligent like kids (with intrinsic rewards like empowerment, causal model-building, and care). youtube.com/watch?v=bSlqS4…
This is an excellent and very clear piece from Sergey Levine about the strengths and limitations of Large Language models. sergeylevine.substack.com/p/language-mod…
New paper from Laura Lewis and Jan Engelmann et al. (including me) with a clever new method. Chimps and kids will forgo reward to get a chance to look at social interactions royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.10…
About to begin at @JohnsHopkins in Baltimore - happening right on the harbor: naturalphilosophyhopkins.org/natural-philos… @davidchalmers42 @AlisonGopnik @anilkseth @seanmcarroll
Very much looking forward to this!
Next Thursday 5/29, 7:00pm at Johns Hopkins: Alison Gopnik @AlisonGopnik gives the Distinguished Lecture in Natural Philosophy on "The Evolution of Human Intelligences: Exploit, Explore, Empower." Open to all! naturalphilosophyhopkins.org/event/third-an…
Next Thursday 5/29, 7:00pm at Johns Hopkins: Alison Gopnik @AlisonGopnik gives the Distinguished Lecture in Natural Philosophy on "The Evolution of Human Intelligences: Exploit, Explore, Empower." Open to all! naturalphilosophyhopkins.org/event/third-an…
New ep of Inner Cosmos drops at now o'clock: Join me this week with cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik (@AlisonGopnik) to ask whether AI is actually an intelligent agent, or instead whether it should be viewed as a piece of cultural technology. What in the world is a piece of…
Thank you for the shoutout Alison :) We actually just arXiv-ed the paper. Attaching the tweet-print below which has the arXiv link! x.com/AntChen_/statu…
Language model (LM) agents are all the rage now—but they may have cognitive biases when inferring causal relationships! We eval LMs on psych task to find: - LMs struggle with certain simple causal relationships - They show biases similar to human adults (but not children) 🧵⬇️
Fascinating preprint with our "blicket detector" paradigm from Chen et al at NYU&Mila. LLM's make the same causal inference mistakes that adults make but 4 year olds don't! Models are trained on adult data, kids figure it out for themselves. im-ant.github.io/publications/g…