AI Seminar: What's wrong with LLMs and what we should be building instead

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Tom Dietterich
Event Speaker
Thomas G. Dietterich, Distinguished Professor Emeritus
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Event Speaker Description
Oregon State University
Event Type
Artificial Intelligence
Date
Event Location
CRPS 122
Event Description

Large Language Models provide a pre-trained foundation for training many interesting AI systems. However, they have many shortcomings. They are expensive to train and to update, their non-linguistic knowledge is poor, they make false and self-contradictory statements, and these statements can be socially and ethically inappropriate. This talk will review these shortcomings and current efforts to address them within the existing LLM framework. It will then argue for a different, more modular architecture that decomposes the functions of existing LLMs and adds several additional components. We believe this alternative can address all of the shortcomings of LLMs. We will speculate about how this modular architecture could be built through a combination of machine learning and engineering.

Speaker Biography

Thomas G. Dietterich (AB Oberlin College 1977; MS University of Illinois 1979; PhD Stanford University 1984) is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. Dietterich is one of the pioneers of the field of Machine Learning and has authored more than 225 refereed publications and two books. His current research topics include robust artificial intelligence, robust human-AI systems, and applications in sustainability. Dietterich has devoted many years of service to the research community. He is a former President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and the founding President of the International Machine Learning Society. Other major roles include Executive Editor of the journal Machine Learning, co-founder of the Journal for Machine Learning Research, and program chair of AAAI 1990 and NIPS 2000. He currently serves as one of the moderators for the cs.LG category on arXiv.