The 2013 movie Her is a science fiction movie about AI having evolved to the point of general intelligence, even sentience. There are no robotics in this AI movie - it is all about the powerful but human-like AI capabilities of his “OS.”

Her is inspiring and thought-provoking but represents a realistically still far away or possibly unattainable. And yet, on November 30, 2022 - just nine years after the movie - ChatGPT emerged and suddenly everyone was talking about how it mimics conversation, can be trained on more data than any human could ever learn, etc. Coupled with AI technologies for turning text to voice and vice versa, one could imagine a verbal form of ChatGPT - and being to wonder if Her is much closer than we thought.

Austin Forum on Technology & Society will host a screening of Her followed by a Q&A session with AI experts, including natural language processing (NLP). They will answer your questions and will share their perspectives on the state and future of NLP and the possibility of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and sentience. The panelist at this event is Numa Dhamani, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, KUNGFU.AI