Researchers hope the model, built on a massive Danish data set and the technology that powers large language models like ChatGPT, can kickstart a public conversation about the power of these tools and how they should and shouldn’t be used.

A Northeastern researcher and former postdoctoral fellow have created an artificial intelligence tool that uses sequences of life events — such as health history, education, job and income — to predict everything from a person’s personality to their mortality.

Built using transformer models, which power large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, the new tool, life2vec, is trained on a data set pulled from the entire population of Denmark — 6 million people. The data set was made available to the researchers only by the Danish government.

The tool the researchers built based on this complex set of data is capable of predicting the future, including the lifespan of individuals, with an accuracy that exceeds state-of-the-art models. But despite its predictive power, the team behind the research says it is best used as the foundation for future work, not an end in and of itself.

“Even though we’re using prediction to evaluate how good these models are, the tool shouldn’t be used for prediction on real people,” says Tina Eliassi-Rad, professor of computer science and the inaugural President Joseph E. Aoun Professor at Northeastern University. “It is a prediction model based on a specific data set of a specific population.”

Eliassi-Rad brought her AI ethics expertise to the project. “These tools allow you to see into your society in a different way: the policies you have, the rules and regulations you have,” she says. “You can think of it as a scan of what is happening on the ground.”

By involving social scientists in the process of building this tool, the team hopes it brings a human-centered approach to AI development that doesn’t lose sight of the humans amid the massive data set their tool has been trained on.

“This model offers a much more comprehensive reflection of the world as it’s lived by human beings than many other models,” says Sune Lehmann, author on the paper, which was recently published in Nature Computational Science.

At the heart of life2vec is the massive data set that the researchers used to train their model. The data is held by Statistics Denmark, the central authority on Danish statistics, and, although tightly regulated, can be accessed by some members of the public, including researchers. The reason it’s so tightly controlled is it includes a detailed registry of every Danish citizen.

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Original Article: A new AI model can predict human lifespan, researchers say. They want to make sure it’s used for good

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