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Study finds computers can House, Senate pass CHIPS Act,
understand complex words but reconciliation is still needed
LOS ANGELES — In Through the Look- WASHINGTON, D.C. — Both houses of
ing Glass, Humpty Dumpty says scorn- Congress recently passed their ver-
fully, “When I use a word, it means sions of a $280 billion funding pack-
just what I choose it to mean — nei- age that includes the $52 billion
ther more nor less.” Alice replies, CHIPS Act to support domestic semi-
“The question is whether you can conductor manufacturing.
make words mean so many different
things.” Reconciliation needed
Passage of the final act requires reconcili-
The study of what words really mean is ation between the House and Senate and
ages old. The human mind must parse a Pres. Joseph R. Biden’s signature.
web of detailed, flexible information and
use sophisticated common sense to per- “The bill would spur hundreds of billions
ceive their meaning.
of dollars in private semiconductor invest-
Can AI mimic the human mind? ments in America, create hundreds of
Now, a newer problem related to the thousands of U.S. jobs, and help ensure
meaning of words has emerged: Scientists our country has the chips it needs for criti-
are studying whether artificial intelligence cal defense applications and sectors of the
can mimic the human mind to understand economy,” said John Neuffer, SIA president
words the way people do. A new study by and CEO.
researchers at UCLA, MIT and the National
Institutes of Health addresses that ques- Unified legislation
tion. In recent months, both chambers have
been working to develop unified legislation
The paper, published in Nature Human Be- that strengthens domestic chip production
haviour, reports that artificial intelligence and innovation. Some industry observers,
systems can indeed learn very complicated however, contend the current Act favors
word meanings, and the scientists discov- giant suppliers such as Intel.
ered a simple trick to extract that complex
knowledge. Intel has indicated that should the CHIPS
Act not become law, it may not go forward
They found that the AI system they stud- with its plans to build a $20 billion mega-
ied represents the meanings of words in a fab site in the area of Columbus, Ohio.
way that strongly correlates with human
judgment. After news that both chambers had passed
the Act, Yahoo! reported that Pat Gelsing-
The AI system the authors investigated er, Intel’s CEO, said the company is ready
has been frequently used in the past de- to move “full speed ahead” on its Ohio
cade to study word meaning. It learns to
figure out word meanings by “reading” fabs.
astronomical amounts of content on the
internet, encompassing tens of billions of Although the bill passed its major hurdles,
words. ucla.edu reconciling the House and Senate bills
could take some time.
