This article discusses the MIT Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab's 'Tourist Policy' and how it impacted students' access to its resources. As a high school student in Maryland, the author shares their experience of using the lab's PDP-10s over the ARPANET and how it inspired them to learn and contribute to the MIT community.
Combined with the growing trend of multimodality, or models that combine language, image, and other types of capabilities, we may see a trend of AI models operating more like a committee of different components rather than a monolithic block. This approach actually has many conceptual similarities to a set of interesting ideas described by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Paypert from the early days of AI.
