Roald Sieberath (Invited prof. UCLouvain & UNamur) - "Foundation models and ChatGPT"
ChatGPT has garnered an incredible amount of interest from a very broad public. Its perceived intelligibility has led some to believe it marks the beginning of Artificial General Intelligence, while others have pointed out its numerous errors and limitations. GPT-3 is one of many "large language models," such as OPT, Sparrow, PaLM, and Bloom, that have been referred to as "foundation models" in a seminal paper by Stanford HAI. These models provide a broad base of capabilities, and a new type of platform upon which extensions can be built, e.g. through fine-tuning or few-shot learning. They also suffer from many drawbacks, such as typically lacking a representation of the world, leading to errors, in turn raising many ethical, transparency, and security concerns. Moreover, because building a new foundation model requires tremendous computing power (tens of thousands of GPUs), they will likely be controlled by a few well-funded players, further raising the need for transparency. Going beyond just the scientific aspects, Roald Sieberath will draw upon his experience as an entrepreneur in data, trained in venture capital and in AI in Silicon Valley, to offer a perspective on why we need a large-scale, open-source, european effort to devise foundation models that warrant the level of trust that our citizen and companies expect.
Bio: Roald Sieberath is a engineer in computer science (UCLouvain / EPL 1991), and MBA. He has co-founded several startups in elearning, mobile messaging, big data, and is a co-founder of BeCentral (largest digital skills place in Europe). He is currently an investor with Noshaq fund, where he has led investments in Odoo, and Aerospacelab, serving as board member in both companies. He is a guest professor on entrepreneurship and innovation at UCLouvain, and UNamur.