Many believe that Large Language Models (LLMs) open the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some see opportunities while others see dangers. Yet both proponents and opponents grasp AI through the imagery popularised by science fiction. Will the machine become sentient and rebel against its creators? Will we experience a paperclip apocalypse? Before answering such questions, we should first ask whether this mental imagery provides a good description of the phenomenon at hand. Understanding weather patterns through the moods of the gods only goes so far. The present paper instead advocates understanding LLMs and their connection to AI through the imagery of Jorge Luis Borges, a master of 20th century literature, forerunner of magical realism, and precursor to postmodern literature. This exercise leads to a new perspective that illuminates the relation between language modelling and artificial intelligence.
Léon Bottou received the Diplôme d’Ingénieur de École Polytechnique (X84) in 1987, the Magistère de Mathématiques Fondamentales et Appliquées et d’Informatique from Ecole normale supérieure in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Université de Paris-Sud in 1991. His research career took him to AT&T Bell Laboratories, AT&T Labs Research, NEC Labs America and Microsoft. He joined Meta AI (formerly Facebook AI Research) in 2015. The long-term goal of Léon Bottou’s research is to understand and replicate intelligence. Because this goal requires conceptual advances that cannot be anticipated, Leon’s research has followed many practical and theoretical turns: neural networks applications in the late 1980s, stochastic gradient learning algorithms and statistical properties of learning systems in the early 1990s, computer vision applications with structured outputs in the late 1990s, theory of large scale learning in the 2000s. During the last few years, Léon Bottou’s research aims to clarify the relation between learning and reasoning, with more and more focus on the many aspects of causation (inference, invariance, reasoning, affordance, and intuition.)
The talk was delivered during ML in PL Conference 2023 as a part of Contributed Talks. The conference was organized by a non-profit NGO called ML in PL Association.
ML in PL Association website: mlinpl.org/
ML In PL Conference 2023 website: conference2023.mlinpl.org/
ML In PL Conference 2024 website: conference.mlinpl.org/
---
ML in PL Association was founded based on the experiences in organizing of the ML in PL Conference (formerly PL in ML), the ML in PL Association is a non-profit organization devoted to fostering the machine learning community in Poland and Europe and promoting a deep understanding of ML methods. Even though ML in PL is based in Poland, it seeks to provide opportunities for international cooperation.
8 апр 2024
