A dispute is brewing among the experts whose work involves efforts to make machines smarter. A recent paper coauthored by dozens of Stanford University researchers announces a new paradigm for building artificial intelligence, or AI, systems. But that claim is generating pushback from colleagues who say this paradigm is not the foundational advance the Stanford researchers claim. Their research paper doesn’t show a clear path from their work to game-changing progress that would revolutionize AI technology, says Subbarao Kambhampati, a Fulton Schools professor of computer science and a past president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. The director of Stanford’s new Center for Research on Foundation Models, however, says the large machine learning models researchers used do appear to be unique and important and show a notable improvement in the ability to handle real-world complexity.