In a recent episode of High Signal, we spoke with Dr. Fei-Fei Li about what it really means to build human-centered AI, and where the field might be heading next.

Fei-Fei doesn’t describe AI as a feature or even an industry. She calls it a “civilizational technology”—a force as foundational as electricity or computing itself. This has serious implications for how we design, deploy, and govern AI systems across institutions, economies, and everyday life.

Our conversation was about more than short-term tactics. It was about how foundational assumptions are shifting, around interface, intelligence, and responsibility, and what that means for technical practitioners building real-world systems today.

Altruism, the tendency to behave in ways that benefit others even if it comes at a cost to oneself, is a valuable human quality that can facilitate cooperation with others and promote meaningful social relationships. Behavioral scientists have been studying human altruism for decades, typically using tasks or games rooted in economics.

Two researchers based at Willamette University and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research recently set out to explore the possibility that large language models (LLMs), such as the model underpinning the functioning of the conversational platform ChatGPT, can simulate the altruistic behavior observed in humans. Their findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, suggest that LLMs do in fact simulate altruism in specific social experiments, offering a possible explanation for this.

“My paper with Nick Obradovich emerged from my longstanding interest in altruism and cooperation,” Tim Johnson, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Over the course of my career, I have used computer simulation to study models in which agents in a population interact with each other and can incur a cost to benefit another party. In parallel, I have studied how people make decisions about altruism and cooperation in laboratory settings.

Julia McCoy

It’s the defining technology of an era. But just how artificial intelligence (AI) will end up shaping our future remains a controversial question.

For techno-optimists, who see the technology improving our lives, it heralds a future of material abundance.

That outcome is far from guaranteed. But even if AI’s technical promise is realised – and with it, once intractable problems are solved – how will that abundance be used?