COMP 50th Anniversary Distinguished Talk Series - "Trends and Opportunities in AI and Large Foundation Models" by Prof. CHUA Tat-Seng

AI as a concept has been around since the 1950’s. With the recent advancements in machine learning technology, and the availability of big data and large computing resources, the scene is set for the explosive growth of AI. In particular, the emergence of Large Foundation Models (LFM’s) that offer significant capabilities in content comprehension, generation, and flexible human-level dialogues, has disrupted and revolutionized the ways that we do things. At sufficiently large scale, universal LFMs possess the strengths of domain versatility, output diversity, as well as semantic coherency and alignment at human-level. But with the strengths come the fear of trust, safety and controllability of AI. This talk examines the trends, research and opportunities of AI. The talk first reviews the history of AI, and discusses the new research paradigm that combines data driven and knowledge-oriented AI towards the emergence of LFMs. It then presents the research towards multimodal LFMs to equip systems with the ability to sense the world around them. This covers the recent advances in alignment with multimodal contents and human values in order to achieve higher quality multimodal understanding and generation. Finally, the talk discusses current trends towards the agent-based AI computing, and research to make AI widely available to all.