Coby McDonald

1 month ago | alumni.berkeley.edu | Coby McDonald |Aaron Mok

AI seems to have infinite capabilities. Just ask OpenAI’s ChatGPT to write a cover letter or plan a travel itinerary, and it will spit out a comprehensive response in mere seconds. Heck, it can even pass the bar exam. Underlying these impressive capabilities are advanced machine learning models trained on massive troves of data.

May 31, 2024 | alumni.berkeley.edu | Pat Joseph |Coby McDonald

It will come as no shock that daylight fluorescent paint and the black light poster, those iconic emblems of the psychedelic ’60s, trace their origin to Berkeley. No, the surprise is not where, but when. The story goes that in the early 1930s, Robert Switzer, a Berkeley local and pre-med student at Cal, sustained a serious head injury while working at a tomato quality-control lab. On doctor’s orders, he was confined to a dark room for months.

Dec 14, 2023 | universityofcalifornia.edu | Coby McDonald

When MacKinnon created IPAR in 1949, he was already one of the world’s leading assessors of human aptitude. He had sharpened his talents during World War II as the director of Station S in Fairfax, Virginia, for the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA). There MacKinnon screened candidates for jobs in irregular warfare — as spies, counterespionage agents, leaders of resistance groups.

Nov 30, 2023 | alumni.berkeley.edu | Pat Joseph |Coby McDonald

Robots can do a great many things, but they can’t make art. That view, common even among AI boosters, has taken a hit with the recent torrent of innovation in artificial intelligence. In late 2022 ChatGPT was unleashed on the world and was met with collective astonishment. So-called natural language AI tools have been around for decades in the form of chatbots, AI assistants, and various types of text generators.