Will Douglas Heaven is the senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, where he covers AI capability, governance, and culture. His long-form features are among the more frequently cited journalistic syntheses in AI policy discourse.
Roles and coverage
At MIT Technology Review, Heaven writes long-form profiles of frontier-lab figures and their critics, conceptual surveys of contested AI terms such as AGI, reasoning, and understanding, and original interviews that capture researcher positions before they harden into camps.
"What is AI?" (2024)
Heaven's "What is AI?" (July 2024) is a roughly 12,000-word feature mapping the modern AI definitional debate. In it he argues that "AI is an idea — an ideal — shaped by worldviews and sci-fi tropes as much as by math and computer science."
The piece traces several strands of the debate. It covers the Sparks-of-AGI versus Stochastic-Parrots dispute, pitting Bubeck and Microsoft against Bender and Hanna (Stochastic Parrots (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, Mitchell, 2021) and the Octopus Test), and the Bender and Koller octopus thought experiment. It describes the TESCREAL framework (TESCREAL Framework (Gebru and Torres)) as developed by Gebru and Torres. On naming and history, it covers McCarthy's 1955 Dartmouth proposal for "artificial intelligence," the rejected alternatives, Minsky's "suitcase word" framing, and the symbolic versus neural-networks split, alongside the Turing test, Block's Blockheads, and the behaviorism critique. It reports Anthropic's Golden Gate Bridge interpretability result (Olah) and the Marcus versus Hinton disagreement on neural networks. It also discusses the Shoggoth meme as cultural shorthand for the gap between ChatGPT's interface and the model behind it.
Positions and statements
In "What is AI?" Heaven takes a position skeptical of frontier-lab marketing claims and sympathetic to the wait-and-see scientific posture of Bubeck and Pavlick. He cites his own 2020 line on GPT-3 that "the greatest trick AI ever pulled was convincing the world it exists." Across his work he surveys the AGI debate (AGI Timelines) without endorsing a particular forecast.
Relationships
- related: Stochastic Parrots (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, Mitchell, 2021) and the Octopus Test — expositor in his published work
- related: TESCREAL Framework (Gebru and Torres) — expositor in his published work
- related: AGI Timelines — surveys the debate without endorsing
- related: Emily M. Bender, Sébastien Bubeck, Timnit Gebru, Gary Marcus, Chris Olah, Geoffrey Hinton — recurring profile subjects
- supports: What is AI? — MIT Technology Review (Heaven, 2024) — author