First off, a confession. I have been an enormous fan of Melanie Mitchell’s ever since I was lucky enough to slightly overlap with her as a Ph.D. student of Doug Hofstadter’s. Melanie’s work on Copycat is what made me want to work with Doug. I saw a demo at a talk Doug gave in 1987 to the budding cognitive psychology working group at the University of Virginia (at our invitation) and it was just so much better than SHRDLU that I could not believe my eyes. Then, when I was admitted to the Ph.D. program at Indiana and finagled my way into FARG, there was Melanie, leader of the pack and dispenser of wise gradual-student advice. (Melanie’s Ph.D. is from Michigan, but she made the move to Bloomington with Doug in the later days of her thesis work.). Anyway, fanboi!

Melanie is an essential Voice of Reason in AI; and during the last decade of AI bruhaha, a rare one. Her book is well worth a read.

After the mythos dustup and right around the time of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident(s), Melanie and I spoke a few times on the phone about the realities of computer security and its application to machine learning (design and control).

Yesterday, Melanie published this piece on her blog. Read it. Melanie is right.

And once you’re finished, you can listen to a Silver Bullet interview I did with Melanie in August. Subscribe to the Silver Bullet podcast series to hear directly from technical leaders in AI and Security.