On the front lines of artificial intelligence

Christine Robson Weaver ’99 shares her experience and expertise with emerging technologies.

Christine Robson Weaver ’99 can’t remember a time when she wasn’t working in the field of artificial intelligence. While many of us associate AI’s arrival with the advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022 and the other generative AI models that soon followed, Robson Weaver has spent her professional life developing smarter machines.

The last 14 years have been at Google, where today she is responsible for enabling developers and researchers across the company to create AI products using the highest-quality data. To Robson Weaver, AI is so much more than chatbots and Google Maps.

The problems that really worry me, I want to solve them faster and better and I want the people tackling them to have the very best tools available to solve them.

Christine Robson Weaver '99

“AI is not any one thing, it is a tapestry of different surfaces,” she told a gathering of Exeter students and adults this week in an informal discussion about the emerging technology. Robson Weaver is an Exeter trustee who serves on five committees — including as chair of the AI Working Group. Given she has bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and a Ph.D from Cal-Berkeley in computer science, she’s a likely choice. But she doesn’t profess to know all the answers of how AI should and will be used in the Academy’s curriculum.

“I think what you’re seeing at Exeter is the same sort of varying responses to AI across the general population,” Robson Weaver said. “That dichotomy won’t deliver a coherent picture.

“But if I look globally, I think that the opportunties and the value of this is powerful, and Exeter has a great tradition of innovation and early adoption in its history. I suspect Exeter will manage to stay at the forefront of the pack when it comes to how it’s integrated.”

Where that won’t be, she hopes, is at the Harkness table.

“We are in a very privileged position, because Harkness in particular is very resilient. We can push learning in a very human-centric way.”

Robson Weaver calls the Harkness table “the best training I got in my whole life,” because it requires one to push themselves into uncomfortable places and take risks — “friction full” as she calls it — and that’s where the learning happens.

“If you’re just rushing to get something done, it doesn’t fill the same role as homework. Lessening the friction is skipping the learning phase.”

In general, Robson Weaver says she has little fondness for chatbot applications. “They have some value, but to me, that’s a sort of shallow, entertainment-based end of AI.” She urged her audience to not overexpose themselves to chatbots, especially in a conversational setting.

Robson Weaver ended the discussion with an anecdote from 2020 as the medical world struggled to develop a vaccine for COVID-19. She says Google stopped work to offer its data centers to work on epidemiology models. She remembers wishing AI was further along to find an antidote “so I could get out of my house sooner.”

Today, AI is being applied to a wide range of fields that have accelerated innovation, such as combatting climate change, fighting types of cancer and more. “And this isn’t a small speed up, but rather orders of magnitude, what would take thousands of years to a matter of minutes.

“The problems that really worry me, I want to solve them faster and better and I want the people tackling them to have the very best tools available to solve them.”