Determining cause and effect relationships is critically important across many domains such as law, medicine, and the advancement of science itself.

Today we’re talking with Emre Kiciman and Amit Sharma, two Microsoft researchers who have been studying causal reasoning with AI for many years. These models are exhibiting surprising new abilities like reasoning, problem-solving, and translation across languages and domains. In this podcast series, I’ll share conversations with fellow researchers about our impressions of GPT-4, the work we’re doing to understand its capabilities and limitations, and ultimately how innovations like these can have the greatest benefit for humanity. Welcome to AI Frontiers. The development of increasingly powerful large-scale models like GPT-4 is accelerating the advancement of AI. I’ve spent the last 20 years working in AI and machine learning, but I’ve never felt more fortunate to work in the field than at this moment.

Kiciman and Sharma break down the study of cause and effect recount their respective ongoing journeys with GPT-3.5 and GPT-4-from their preconceptions to where they are now-and share their views of a future in which LLMs help bring together different modes of reasoning in the practice of causal inference and make causal methods easier to adopt.ĪSHLEY LLORENS: I’m Ashley Llorens with Microsoft Research. This episode features Senior Principal Researcher Emre Kiciman and Principal Researcher Amit Sharma, whose paper “Causal Reasoning and Large Language Models: Opening a New Frontier for Causality” examines the causal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and their implications. In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, AI scientist and engineer Ashley Llorens hosts conversations with his collaborators and colleagues about what these new models-and the models that will come next-mean for our approach to creating, understanding, and deploying AI, its applications in areas such as health care and education, and its potential to benefit humanity. This marks a phase change for artificial intelligence-and a signal of accelerating progress to come. Powerful new large-scale AI models like GPT-4 are showing dramatic improvements in reasoning, problem-solving, and language capabilities.

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