Switzerland aspires to build ‘human’ artificial intelligence

Swiss developers have entered the global race to build artificial intelligence (AI) that is capable of “thinking” like humans. Some of them claim to be on the verge of a breakthrough. Is this really the case? Since the public launch of ChatGPT in 2022, millions of people have become used to interacting with AI as if it were a person. But so far, no AI tool has proven to be intelligent in the “human” sense of the term. The most popular public-facing AI platforms are Large Language Models (LLMs) that make predictions based on recurrent patterns learned from massive amounts of data. Most are unable to learn in real time and adapt to new information the way the human mind does. “They give us the illusion that they are as intelligent as we are, but this is just statistical imitation, not true understanding,” says Torsten Hoefler, a professor in the department of computer science at the federal technology institute ETH Zurich. To bridge the gap between humans and machines, companies and ...