Sharon Zhou

Generative AI, which creates entirely new content and images from existing data, is not inherently good or bad, yet many of its applications have been harmful—deepfakes, fake news articles, or chatbots that respond in toxic ways. Sharon Zhou, 29, is working to characterize the problems and advantages by developing new benchmarks with which to evaluate these systems. She notes that generative models are among the most capable AI systems we have, and yet we understand their capabilities the least. She aims to “make it possible to understand how fast our generative models are progressing at the frontier, if at all, and how they’re progressing: is it safe, and to what extent can it be deployed?”