Nobel prize winning AI technology creates the “Habermas machine”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Yoram Gat

Google DeepMind, whose AI product AlphaFold2 won the 2024 chemistry Nobel prize for the company’s founder, Demis Hassabis, has now applied its technology to create a tool they call the “Habermas machine”. The tool is described as working as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline areas of agreement of people making up a discussion group. An excerpt from an article in the MIT Techology review:

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

Groups using Google DeepMind’s LLMs made more progress in discussing contentious issues. But the technology won’t replace human mediators anytime soon.

Reaching a consensus in a democracy is difficult because people hold such different ideological, political, and social views.

Perhaps an AI tool could help. Researchers from Google DeepMind trained a system of large language models (LLMs) to operate as a “caucus mediator,” generating summaries that outline a group’s areas of agreement on complex but important social or political issues.

The researchers say the tool — named the Habermas machine (HM), after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas — highlights the potential of AI to help groups of people find common ground when discussing such subjects.

“The large language model was trained to identify and present areas of overlap between the ideas held among group members,” says Michael Henry Tessler, a research scientist at Google DeepMind. “It was not trained to be persuasive but to act as a mediator.” The study is being published today in the journal Science.

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