At NTT Upgrade 2025, NTT Research announced the formation of a new research unit called the Physics of AI (PAI) Group. At the launch, Dr Hidenori Tanaka talked about some of the goals that the PAI Group had. After the launch, Tanaka sat down with Enterprise Times to talk about what the Physics of AI meant.
He began by pointing out that controversially, last year’s Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to AI. That leads to the question: Is it really physics? For Tanaka, this is a multi-layered question. The only way to resolve it is to take a multi-disciplinary approach drawing on multiple fields of science.
Tanaka commented, “There can be neuroscience of AI, that we are contributing to it. There can be psychology of AI. But then again, what’s beautiful about AI is that even though it’s becoming really as smart, or in some case, smarter than us, we can get all the numbers that define the system with 100% precision.”
That definition of a system is complex. When, as technologists, we think about computer systems, we think of deterministic systems. Feed it a question and it will return the same answer every time, as long as the data doesn’t change. With AI, we’ve seen AI systems behave in a non-deterministic way. How do we deal with that?
Tanaka believes that to answer that, we need to understand more about AI. Does it have different personalities? How do we deal with those personalities? Will we have accurate or creative models? In some ways, GenAI’s hallucinations are creating the latter.
To hear what Dr Tanaka had to say, listen to the podcast.
Where can I get it?
You can listen to the podcast by clicking on the player below. Alternatively, click on any of the podcast services below and go to the Enterprise Times podcast page.
