Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries1–4. Around the world, scientists and inventors are more plentiful and interconnected today than ever before4. However, although there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in new ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find5,6—contradicting recombinant growth theory7,8. Here we shed light on this apparent puzzle. Analysing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications from across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally. We further show that across all fields, periods and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their on-site counterparts. Creating a dataset that
Yahoo's Rajdeep Sarkar talks about his work as a research scientist in the areas of deep learning and natural language processing, and how one can excel in this space.
As dialogue agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, we must develop effective ways to describe their behaviour in high-level terms without falling into the trap of anthropomorphism. Here we foreground the concept of role play. Casting dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play allows us to draw on familiar folk psychological terms, without ascribing human characteristics to language models that they in fact lack. Two important cases of dialogue-agent behaviour are addressed this way, namely, (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness. By casting large-language-model-based dialogue-agent behaviour in terms of role play, it is possible to describe dialogue-agent behaviour such as (apparent) deception and (apparent) self-awareness without misleadingly ascribing human characteristics to the models.
The power of human language and thought arises from systematic compositionality—the algebraic ability to understand and produce novel combinations from known components. Fodor and Pylyshyn1 famously argued that artificial neural networks lack this capacity and are therefore not viable models of the mind. Neural networks have advanced considerably in the years since, yet the systematicity challenge persists. Here we successfully address Fodor and Pylyshyn’s challenge by providing evidence that neural networks can achieve human-like systematicity when optimized for their compositional skills. To do so, we introduce the meta-learning for compositionality (MLC) approach for guiding training through a dynamic stream of compositional tasks. To compare humans and machines, we conducted human behavioural experiments using an instruction learning paradigm. After considering seven different models, we found that, in contrast to perfectly systematic but rigid probabilistic sy