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| "The Thinker," by Auguste Rodin (National Gallery of Art) |
Robots, rather than the software that runs them, are what first appealed to Soham Batra.
“My interest in technology didn’t start with AI,” said the 17-year old high school senior. “It started with robotics. When I was a lot younger, around elementary school, I was very involved with Lego robotics. That sparked my interest. I was thrown into a class where we expected to make them move. We’re just a bunch of 6-year-olds and I was [thinking]: ‘How do I even do that?’ Then I started looking into it and found programming, coding. As I moved to high school the entire AI bubble started expanding, and got to everyone.”
High school for Batra being the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) in Aurora, a residential hive of some of the brightest kids in the state. There the senior distinguished himself... well, maybe we should let him explain, the way he did in his introductory email:
“You wrote last year that the AI genie is out of the bottle. I’m one of the people crawling into the bottle after it, and I’m in high school,” he began. “I do machine learning research on the side. Two of my papers were oral presentations at ICML and CVPR 2026 workshops (one on keeping a model aligned while it keeps learning, one on carrying 3D reconstruction uncertainty into physics simulations)...”
ICML is the International Conference on Machine Learning. CVPR refers to the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Conference. Before we wander too far into the weeds, I should explain why I was interested in Batra.
Most everything I see in the press about artificial intelligence is disaster-oriented. The leaders of AI, sounding the gong of doom. But kids like Batra don’t see it that way. To him, AI is just “a really cool tool.”
“The thing with AI, there’s nothing like it,” he said. “I got really lucky, to see the development of AI at a very young age. A lot of people ask if the AI bubble is going to pop... If you try to do your day-to-day tasks without AI, and with AI — you’ll really see a really big difference.”
At IMSA, students are given Wednesdays off to tend to side projects, and I could fill the column with Batra’s — such as doing research at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
The project that really impressed me, however, is a simulation he built called “Play the House,” where participants run a casino, adding new games, setting the house edge, all the way down to dangling drink specials. Young people are being seduced into gambling, particularly at colleges, which abandon their responsibility to look out for their charges by allowing betting sites to entice them. The point of Batra’s game, which he made in “an extremely basic version” before using AI to “glamour it up a bit so it was ready to put out there on a domain” is to drive home the insurmountable advantage casinos enjoy.
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“It is kinda scary how easy it is,” he said. “You can watch the alignment degrade. There’s no exceptions to it not degrading. It’s not possible to improve it. The only thing it can do is make it worse.”
ReplyDelete“The thing I did find, no matter how you fine tune, you could never get it to do something so terrible,”
It's way too early for me to be awake and functional, but aren't those 2 statements dusturbingly contradictory?
Another story that makes me glad my time is short. Great piece, Mister S.
ReplyDeleteExactly my impression!
ReplyDeleteI think AI was released to the public way too early. I do use it some in my accounting practice but I have to be extremely careful. Just slight differences in wording of a question (differences that seem irrelevant to me) will yield very different answers. What I have found most useful is not the answers to the questions I ask it, but the questions that it asks me back. This often results in me seeing more choices available to my client & more possibilities of what his outcome could be with each choice. I guess a simpler way to put it is: AI's questions trigger me to think about options I would not have thought about otherwise.
ReplyDeleteDespite our overwhelming difficulties in coming to grips with this, it’s worth participating in the AI discussion, though arguments either way tend to sag this way or that. My sloppy contribution: As a student I learned to apply a Via Negativa approach beyond religious studies, to include deep dilemmas. Boils down to “People say this, but here’s what I see.” Re: AI it’s impossible to be conclusive any more than we can conclude on this day the precise, exquisite details of our own personal beginning or ending. That’s life. AI is not a person, but created by people. Yet it can like one, so much so that people want to marry it. It changes its mind. It hedges. Like an errant child it bursts past boundaries. (This sounds like historical holy writings, doesn’t it?) It contains multitudes as do we all.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a culture of own-it-all, know-it-all, do-it-all that poses the greatest risk. It’s like fire that way - are we, as individuals, humble enough to realize the greatest power we have is to choose the way we will apply the gifts we hold in our hands?
This tool has the power to free us to be better, or to limit ourselves to bit players in the nurture and promulgation of wisdom.
For now, I’m thinking we desperately need competent governance as a start. And the humility to learn and weigh in on important matters we do not understand.
Else we face the dilemma Woody Allen described, and then ironically began (in his way )to live: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
Soham Batra seems like a remarkable young man, and the Illinois Math and Science Academy is a crown jewel in the state education system.
ReplyDeletePerhaps he should consider the University of Texas, so be can be part of the "problem" so charmingly identified by a Republican (what else) candidate for statewide office of UT having too many students of South Asian ethnicity.
It's easy to demonize AI when nobody understands it. What we need to realize is that artificial intelligence has been a part of our lives since we fired up the first computer. Do you know how much the car that you drive relies on artificial intelligence? And I'm not talking about self driving cars. Do you know why your car is so easy to start when it's 20 below zero? And your engine never knocks from cheap gas, and it never keeps running when you turn the ignition off. The computer in your car is making all the necessary adjustments in real time. And don't even get me started on adaptive cruise control.
ReplyDeleteSoham Batra is a remarkabke young man. I would hope he would not go the way of the two ISMA who quit graduate school to form $90M companies. As young Soham Batra easily explained the use of "alignments" to skew misinformation. Your interviewee has a moral core that the other two boys did not.
ReplyDeleteHow do you know the other former students lack a moral core? (Or that they're boys, for that matter?)
DeleteIn fact, one of them is female.
DeleteBest of luck to this student. Good column.
ReplyDelete