Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (CFI)

Description

The mission at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence is to build a new interdisciplinary community of researchers, with strong links to technologists and the policy world, and a clear practical goal: to work together to ensure that humans make the best of the opportunities of artificial intelligence as it develops over coming decades.

The Centre explores the opportunities and challenges of this potentially epoch-making technology, short-term as well as long-term. The Centre is based at the University of Cambridge, with partners at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, at Imperial College London, and at the University of California, Berkeley.

Research at the Centre is mostly structured in a series of projects and research programmes. These projects are the root structure of the Centre’s community, reaching out to brilliant researchers and connecting them and their ideas to the challenges of making the best of Artificial Intelligence. Topics range from algorithmic transparency to exploring the implications of Artificial Intelligence for democracy.

Many researchers now take seriously the possibility that intelligence equal to humanity's will be created in computers, perhaps within this century. Freed of biological constraints, such as limited memory and slow biochemical processing speeds, machines may eventually become more intelligent than humans – with profound implications for the world.

As Stephen Hawking put it at the Centre's launch, Artificial Intelligence is "likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.”

The Centre’s members therefore aim to bring together the best of human intelligence to make the most of machine intelligence.

The Centre's academic community explicitly includes machine learning alongside philosophy, history, engineering, media studies and design, and much of its project-level work engages specific AI methods rather than AI in the abstract. Current research addresses the growing cognitive capabilities of generative AI and large language models, and a project on human-machine collaboration examines recommender systems, AI and data-driven targeting, and the growing role of automation in digital life. A further strand of work on explainable machine learning studies techniques such as feature importance scores and counterfactual explanations, finding that most such tools are used internally by machine learning engineers to debug models rather than by the end users affected by them.

Currently active

Yes

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Founding year

2016

Contact details

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Categorisation

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University affiliation(s)

University of Cambridge
Cambridge

Partner Infrastructures

Royal Society

The Royal Society is the independent scientific academy of the UK, dedicated to promoting excellence in science for the benefit of humanity. Its fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters… read more about Royal Society

London

Partner Universities

Imperial College London

University of Oxford