Overview
Social AI: A New Frontier
Social AI blends principles and insights from various domains to create advanced AI systems. Social AI systems are built to interact intelligently and naturally with humans, understanding social cues and emotions, and responding appropriately within any given social context. They go beyond traditional AI capabilities, operating in a way that feels intuitive and facilitating better human-AI interactions.
Emergent Decision-Making
As AI systems begin operating in real-life social settings, they will exhibit novel decision-making behaviors. We believe that a solid scientific understanding of these behaviors can have two significant implications:
1. Alignment with Evolving Societal Values: This understanding allows us to create feedback mechanisms that align the AI's decisions with desirable societal values. Without this alignment, or the capability to utilize it effectively, even the most advanced Social AI can struggle when introduced into complex social scenarios.
2. Social and Economic Impacts: Systematic research on these behaviors can help us more accurately gauge the social and economic implications of AI advancements. As AI becomes more complex, it creates intricate social and economic entanglements that traditional research methods may struggle to comprehend.
Social AI Research
Panalogy Lab pioneers research on aligning AI systems with evolving human intentions and values in complex social contexts. Our research centers on three main themes:
1. Studying Complex Decision-Making: We're examining how AI systems can make complex decisions akin to human-like choices in a variety of social scenarios, with a special interest in decisions that lack clear 'right' or 'wrong' outcomes. Our current focus is on studying Augmented Language Models (ALMs) through a combination of prompt engineering, multi-modality, and reinforcement learning.
2. Understanding Behavioral Complexity: We're not only interested in the decisions made but also in the process that led to those decisions, comparing how humans and AI approach decision-making. Given the critical role of human decision-making models (e.g. rationality) in shaping social and economic policies, we see the exploration of Social AI systems' complex decision-making processes as a new frontier in alignment research. We also study the intricate behaviors stemming from human-AI interactions during these decision processes.
3. Training AI for Research: Our ultimate vision is to create AI systems capable of conducting their own complex research in the field of Social AI, based on our insights into behavioral complexity. We believe AI systems will soon operate in environments that surpass human comprehension. It’s best to focus our effort on designing AI systems and evaluating their performance while delegating the cognitive load of doing research to these AI systems.
Interested in advancing Social AI with us?
Dive deeper into our tailored Solutions & Services to see how we can collaborate for a better AI future.
Social AI Design
Our design and development process is informed by our research and aims to tackle key challenges posed by complex social environments.
Social Decision-Making: Our designs target AI systems capable of complex decision-making in dynamic social contexts. These decisions fuel emergent behaviors, the subject of our Social AI alignment research. We see this complex social decision-making as a key milestone towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Behavioral Uncertainty: In complex social environments, our designs consider behavioral uncertainty as an inherent and ever-present challenge. Unpredicted situations arising from evolving contexts and emergent behaviors demand AI systems with generalized decision-making skills to adapt effectively and respond reliably.
Here's a sneak peek into some of our ongoing projects:
"her": This is our voice-based conversational AI agent. "her" is designed to foster natural human interactions and support in complex decision-making tasks, embodying qualities of patience, knowledge, helpfulness, empathy, and multilingualism. By effectively integrating state-of-the-art voice-to-text, GPTs, and text-to-speech models, "her" is capable of having meaningful voice-based interactions, adapted to user preferences. We are continuously working on improving "her", with plans to incorporate curiosity-driven reinforcement learning algorithms to further augment the adaptability and intelligence of this versatile Social AI that is revolutionizing education, research, and beyond.
"SurveyLM": An innovative platform designed to analyze emergent alignment behaviors of Augmented Language Models (ALMs) in complex social contexts. By applying traditional social behavior survey and experimental methodologies, we systematically evaluate the ALMs’ attitudes and values as they evolve. This process enables us to gain unprecedented insights into their alignment dynamics and emergent behaviors. Furthermore, SurveyLM enhances survey and experiment designs by incorporating feedback directly from ALMs, effectively accelerating the development and testing of high-quality survey frameworks. By presenting ALMs with complex, contextualized questions and decision-making scenarios, we can study how these AI systems negotiate ethical dilemmas and balance diverse values, ensuring a range of needs are met across various cultures, languages, and domains. Dive into our white paper for more details.
"Plug-n-Learn IoT": In collaboration with EoH.io, we are developing a one-of-a-kind plug-n-learn IoT development platform. Our AI solutions integrate machine intelligence into EoH's platform automation process, leading to increased productivity and efficiency for developers, and facilitating rapid deployment of IoT devices. We have recently finished an LLM-based solution that autonomously extracts IoT device configurations from pdfs, transforming them into a universally compatible firmware-ready JSON format for a variety of manufacturers' IoT device setup/installation reports and instructions. This is a breakthrough for EoH as the solution solves a hard and resource-consuming problem that all IoT developers commonly deal with. Our next milestone for this project is to delve into the intersection of AI and IoT. This progression will allow us to create more dynamic, efficient, and responsive systems, ushering in a new era of AI-enhanced IoT devices that are not just connected, but also intelligent and adaptable to ever-changing human needs.
"Expert Recommender": This project employs cutting-edge ALMs-at-scale to assist organizations in rapidly and cost-effectively assembling, marketing, and recommending optimal expert teams for complex, large-scale projects. Seamlessly integrated with an advanced plug-in API, our solution combines state-of-the-art prompt engineering, function calls, and access to external knowledge bases, leading to enhanced search and retrieval mechanisms. This breakthrough has the potential to revolutionize how users receive personalized recommendations while making the search and procurement process more interactive and intuitive.
"Sociomimetic AI": This project employs reinforcement learning agents to navigate and make complex decisions in realistic, dynamic social environments. Central to these models is the incorporation of Large Learning Models (LLMs) within the learning process. Our primary focus is on designing applications that enable users to better understand the agent's decision-making capabilities, and integrate this understanding into their workflow to increase knowledge and efficiency at scale. Although initially demonstrated in auction evaluation settings, the potential applications of Sociomimetic AI span across varied complex social domains such as healthcare for personalized, socially-aware care planning; education for dynamic, inclusive and socially interactive learning environments; public policy for socially predictive analysis and enhanced citizen engagement; human resources for informed recruitment and enriched workplace dynamics; sports/athletic administration for strategic player management and team building; and social matchmaking platforms for more nuanced compatibility analysis.
To learn more about Panalogy Lab's people and mission, please continue reading.
For more information, beta access to our products, or to discuss the implications of our research and development (R&D) for you and your business/workplace or personal needs or interests, please contact us.