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Transformer lead author's advisor Kevin Knight speaks in China: Humans are outsourcing "thinking" to AI

Kevin Knight, former ACL president and advisor to Ashish Vaswani, lead author of the foundational Transformer paper, spoke at the TGC 2026 conference held by Techtonic. He proposed measuring AI evolution by "long-horizon cognitive duration without human intervention," noting that models have jumped from 15-second single-turn Q&A to autonomously building software systems continuously for 10 hours. He pointed out that progress in fields relying on physical-world feedback, such as robotics and biomedicine, is constrained by trial-and-error costs, and warned that humans are outsourcing thinking itself to machines.

Part of the event: Kevin Knight speaks in China: AI long-horizon cognition and the outsourcing of thinking

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