ChatGPT is catalyzing a paradigm shift in artificial and natural intelligence. How does it work and why is it surprising experts? And what are the implications for the future? As a world leader in artificial intelligence with a history of challenging convention, UC Berkeley is shaping the future of this burgeoning field while exploring the larger implications of AI on society.
The Berkeley lectures on the status and future of AI
The primary architect of ChatGPT and leading Berkeley AI faculty will present insights and viewpoints in a series of seven public lectures presented by the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute, Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR), Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), the Academic Senate and UC Berkeley.
Each event is being held in person (locations are in the event descriptions) and most will be available virtually (links provided below). All lectures are scheduled for one hour.
Read more about the AI lecture series on Berkeley News.
The Sensorimotor Road to Artificial Intelligence
Date: 03/20/2023 04:00pm
Speaker: Jitendra Malik, Arthur J. Chick Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences
Sponsor: Martin Meyerson Berkeley Faculty Research Lectures
Link to view: Watch Malik's lecture
Speaker Biography
Jitendra Malik is the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, is on the faculty of the Department of Bioengineering, and is a member of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. Malik's research group has worked on many topics in computer vision, human visual perception, robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence, generating several well-known concepts and algorithms. Over his 37 years at UC Berkeley, he has mentored more than 70 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral fellows. His honors include the 2013 IEEE PAMI-TC Distinguished Researcher in Computer Vision Award, the 2014 K.S. Fu Prize from the International Association of Pattern Recognition, the 2016 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, the 2018 IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in AI, and the 2019 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award. Malik is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Location: Chevron Auditorium, International House, 2299 Piedmont Avenue
How Not to Destroy the World With AI
Date: 04/05/2023 12:00pm
Speaker: Stuart Russell, Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: CITRIS Research Exchange and BAIR
Link to view: Watch Russell's lecture
It is reasonable to expect that artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities will eventually exceed those of humans across a range of real-world decision-making scenarios. Should this be a cause for concern, as Alan Turing and others have suggested? Will we lose control over our future? Or will AI complement and augment human intelligence in beneficial ways? It turns out that both views are correct, but they are talking about completely different forms of AI. To achieve the positive outcome, a fundamental reorientation of the field is required. Instead of building systems that optimize arbitrary objectives, we need to learn how to build systems that will, in fact, be beneficial for us. Russell will argue that this is possible as well as necessary. The new approach to AI opens up many avenues for research and brings into sharp focus several questions at the foundations of moral philosophy.
Speaker Biography:,
Stuart Russell, OBE, is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and an honorary fellow of Wadham College at the University of Oxford. He is a leading researcher in artificial intelligence and the author, with Peter Norvig, of “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,” the standard text in the field. He has been active in arms control for nuclear and autonomous weapons. His latest book, “Human Compatible,” addresses the long-term impact of AI on humanity.
Location: Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall 2594 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA
Imitation and Innovation in AI: What Four-year-olds Can Do and AI Can’t (Yet)
Date: 04/12/2023 12:00pm
Speaker: Alison Gopnik, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: CITRIS Research Exchange and BAIR
Link to view: Watch Gopnik's lecture
Young children's learning may be an important model for artificial intelligence (AI). Comparing children and artificial agents in the same tasks and environments can help us understand the abilities of existing systems and create new ones. In particular, many current large data-supervised systems, such as large language models (LLMs), provide new ways to access information collected by past agents. However, they lack the kinds of exploration and innovation that are characteristic of children. New techniques may help to instantiate child-like curiosity, exploration and play in AI systems.
Speaker Biography:
Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology, affiliate professor of philosophy and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Group at the University of California, Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the cognitive science of learning and development and the author of the bestselling and critically acclaimed books “The Scientist in the Crib,” “The Philosophical Baby” and “The Gardener and the Carpenter.” She is a Guggenheim, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Cognitive Science Society fellow, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and president of the Association for Psychological Science. She writes the Mind and Matter science column for The Wall Street Journal and has appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show,” “The Colbert Report,” “The Ezra Klein Show” and “Radio Lab.”
Location: Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall 2594 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA
How AI Fails Us, and How Economics Can Help
Date: 04/19/2023 12:00pm
Speaker: Mike Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: CITRIS Research Exchange and BAIR
Link to view: Watch Jordan's lecture
Artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on a paradigm in which intelligence inheres in a single agent, and in which agents should be autonomous so they can exhibit intelligence independent of human intelligence. Thus, when AI systems are deployed in social contexts, the overall design is often naive. Such a paradigm need not be dominant. In a broader framing, agents are active and cooperative, and they wish to obtain value from participation in learning-based systems. Agents may supply data and resources to the system, only if it is in their interest. Critically, intelligence inheres as much in the system as it does in individual agents. This perspective is familiar to economics researchers, and a first goal in this work is to bring economics into contact with computer science and statistics. The long-term goal is to provide a broader conceptual foundation for emerging real-world AI systems, and to upend received wisdom in the computational, economic and inferential disciplines.
Speaker Biography:
Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the departments of electrical engineering and computer science and of statistics at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society. He was a plenary lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018. He received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2021, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2020, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009.
Location: Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall 2594 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA
ChatGPT and OpenAI
Date: 04/19/2023 05:00pm
Speaker: John Schulman, Research Scientist and cofounder of OpenAI
Sponsor: EECS and BAIR
Speaker Biography:
John Schulman is a research scientist and cofounder of OpenAI. He leads the reinforcement learning (RL) team, where they are working on using RL algorithms (trial-and-error learning) to improve language models like GPT. Previously, Schulman received his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he had the good fortune of being advised by Pieter Abbeel.
Prior to his recent work in RL, Schulman spent some time working on robotics, enabling robots to tie knots and plan movement using trajectory optimization. Before that, he did a brief stint in neuroscience at Berkeley before switching to machine learning, as well as studying physics at Caltech.
Location: TBD
Generative AI Meets Copyright Law
Date: 04/26/2023 12:00pm
Speaker: Pam Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: CITRIS Research Exchange and BAIR
Link to view: Watch Samuelson's lecture
Speaker Biography:
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the UC Berkeley. She is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment at Berkeley Law School and UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Samuelson is a director of the internationally-renowned Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She is co-founder and chair of the board of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes the public interest in access to knowledge. She also serves on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as on the advisory boards for the Electronic Privacy Information Center , the Center for Democracy & Technology, Public Knowledge, and the Berkeley Center for New Media.
Location: Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall 2594 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA
Exploration vs Exploitation: Different Ways of Pushing AI and Robotics Forward
Date: 04/28/2023 12:00pm
Speaker: Rod Brooks, MIT Professor Emeritus and Robust.AI
Sponsor: BAIR Robotics Symposium
Speaker Biography:
Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, a robotics entrepreneur, and currently the CTO and co-founder of Robust AI. Before that he was Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics and Founder, former Board Member and former CTO of iRobot Corp. Dr. Brooks is the former Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life.
Available via livestream only
Related AI lectures and webinars
First Contact
Date: 03/17/2023 11:00am
Speaker: Sebastien Bubeck, Sr. Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research
Sponsor: CLIMB and FODSI
The new wave of AI systems, ChatGPT and its more powerful successors, exhibit extraordinary capabilities across a broad swath of domains. In light of this, we will discuss whether artificial INTELLIGENCE has arrived.
Speaker Biography
Sebastien Bubeck is a Senior Principal Research Manager in the Machine Learning Foundations group at Microsoft Research (MSR). He joined the Theory Group at MSR in 2014, after three years as an assistant professor at Princeton University. His works on convex optimization, online algorithms, and adversarial robustness in machine learning received several best paper awards (NeurIPS 2018 and 2021 best paper, ALT 2018 and 2023 best student paper in joint work with MSR interns, COLT 2016 best paper, and COLT 2009 best student paper). Recently he has been focused on exploring a physics-like theory of neural network learning.
Location: Banatao Auditorium, 310 Sutardja Dai Hall 2594 Hearst Avenue, Berkeley, CA
This event is in person only.
NIST’s AI risk management framework & trustworthy AI
Date: 03/14/2023 04:00pm
Speaker: Multiple
Sponsor: Berkeley Law
Event details: AI risk management webinar
Link to view: Online
AI technologies in practice

- Berkeley Technology Law Journal Podcast: The Capabilities and Limitations of ChatGPT
- Farid talks AI-written journalism with Washington Post
- New Law and Technology Collaboration Seeks Paths to Responsible AI Development
- CITRIS PI discusses potential impact of AI in Russia-Ukraine war
- New program fosters next generation of climate change, AI thought leaders
- Step by step: UC Berkeley robots learn to walk on their own
- New institute brings together chemistry and machine learning to tackle climate change
- AI reveals unsuspected math underlying search for exoplanets
- The computer says no. But can I believe him? Thoughts on auditing artificial intelligence with Anni Hellman
- I School expert wins grant to develop language translation technology for high-stakes settings
- DAIR: Creating a new incentive structure for AI research
- Changing the legacy and future of artificial intelligence
- A Natural Hub for Artificial Intelligence Work, Berkeley Law Helps Streamline Contract Review
- Student Summer Series: Chris Gronseth ’22 Finds Real Meaning in Artificial Intelligence
- Artificial intelligence gives stethoscopes a much-needed upgrade
U.S. News & World Report rankings
Academics and research
AI is a significant focus for many areas around campus. Below are some examples of labs, programs, previous lectures, and more.
- Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab (BAIR) | The BAIR Lab brings together UC Berkeley researchers across the areas of computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, planning, control, and robotics.
- Berkeley Law AI Institute | A multi-day, online executive academy to help lawyers understand AI technology and how companies use it, as well as the risks and ethical issues raised by autonomous systems.
- Berkeley AI Policy Hub | A collaboration between the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity (CLTC) and its AI Security Initiative and the CITRIS Policy Lab, the AI Policy Hub is a multidisciplinary initiative training forward-thinking graduate student researchers to develop effective governance and policy frameworks to guide artificial intelligence, today and into the future.
- Berkeley [Emergent Space Tensegrities | Energy and Sustainable Technologies | Expert Systems Technologies ] (BEST) Lab | The BEST Lab conducts research at the intersection of cutting-edge frontiers in design research, computational design, sustainability, gender equity, human-machine cognition, supervisory control, soft robotics, sensor fusion, design research and intelligent learning systems.
- The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) | CITRIS and the Banatao Institute is a University of California research center focused on creating IT solutions that generate societal and economic benefits for everyone.
- Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) | CDSS leverages Berkeley’s preeminence in research and excellence across disciplines to propel data science discovery, education, and impact.
- Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) | EECS offers one of the strongest research and instructional programs anywhere in the world with an array of cross-disciplinary, team-driven projects.
- Haas ExecEd: AI Strategies and Applications | Participants in this program learn about AI’s current capabilities and gain an understanding into the variety of ways AI can benefit different business functions.
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Tech Policy Fellows | Offers scholars and practitioners the opportunity to spend six months to a year as a non-residential fellow at UC Berkeley to conduct research, share expertise and experiences with faculty, staff, and students and develop technical or policy interventions that support responsible technology development and use.
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Our Better Web | An independent interdisciplinary initiative at Berkeley that brings together leadership from the Schools of Information; Journalism; Law; and Public Policy; the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society; and the CITRIS Policy Lab. Our Better Web researches and provides guidance on technical and policy strategies to mitigate harms from algorithmic amplification and algorithmic bias online.

AI and the arts
Cal Performances: Illuminations – “Human and Machine”
Generative Art and Deep Learning AI
Emerging AI technology has the potential to replicate some of the processes used by artists when creating their work. Dr. Nettrice Gaskins uses AI-driven software such as deep learning to train machines to identify and process images. Her approach puts the learning bias of race to the forefront by using AI to render her artwork using different source images and image styles.
Speaker Biography
Dr. Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. In her work she explores "techno-vernacular creativity" and Afrofuturism.
Dr. Gaskins teaches, writes, "fabs”, and makes art using algorithms and machine learning. She has taught multimedia, visual art, and computer science with high school students. She earned a BFA in Computer Graphics with Honors from Pratt Institute in 1992 and an MFA in Art and Technology from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994. She received a doctorate in Digital Media from Georgia Tech in 2014. Currently, Dr. Gaskins is a 2021 Ford Global Fellow and the assistant director of the Lesley STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University. She is an advisory board member for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Her first full-length book, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation is available through The MIT Press. Gaskins' AI-generated artworks can be viewed in journals, magazines, museums, and on the Web. Her series of 'featured futurist' portraits are on view at the Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building through early July 2022.
Gaskins served as Board President of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture (The Alliance) and was on the board of the Community Technology Centers Network (CTCNet). She is currently on the board of Artisan’s Asylum.
CITRIS Tech Museum
Artwork on this page
The image above, “Cloud Computing,” was created in Midjourney. The prompt specified that the image include “a supercomputer floating in the sky surrounded by cumulonimbus clouds.” To achieve a wide-angle format, the background of the image was extended in Dall-E-2 using the “outpainting” feature.
The below image is a UC Berkeley-inspired collage constructed from images generated in Dall-E-2. The prompts used to generate the imagery included specific campus landmarks, such as “the Campanile,” “Sproul Hall,” “Doe Library,” and “Memorial Stadium.”
