Artificial Intelligence: Germany's youngest AI professor dispels the biggest myths
At just 30 years old, Alicia von Schenk has founded the chair for "Economics of AI" at the University of Würzburg. She advises to look beyond the current hype surrounding the technology.
Alicia von Schenk has always been ahead of her time. Trained at the age of four, she earned a 1.0 grade at 15. She then studied mathematics and economics at Frankfurt and Heidelberg, graduating with a summa cum laude, top honors. At just 30, she became a professor on a lifetime contract, despite the average starting age for German professors being nearly 44.
Today, von Schenk leads the Chair for "Economics of AI and Human Behavior" at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität in Würzburg, one of the few in Germany with an explicit focus on the economic and behavioral effects of AI. She is considered a prodigy. How did von Schenk achieve such early success, and what does she think about the AI boom?
Von Schenk emphasizes that there is not just one AI. Despite the hype, she explains that AI is a collective term for various technologies. From simple statistical tools to large generative language models like ChatGPT, and to complex neural networks of machine learning. "We call all of this AI," she says, "I find this undifferentiated."
Written by urgent.news from Handelsblatt's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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