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When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world in 2022it brought generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream and started a snowball effect that led to its rapid integration into industryscientific researchhealth careand the everyday lives of people who use the technology.
What comes next for this powerful but imperfect tool?
With that question in mindhundreds of researchersbusiness leaderseducatorsand students gathered at MIT’s Kresge Auditorium for the inaugural MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC) Symposium on Sept. 17 to share insights and discuss the potential future of generative AI.
“This is a pivotal moment — generative AI is moving fast. It is our job to make sure thatas the technology keeps advancingour collective wisdom keeps pace,” said MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan to kick off this first symposium of the MGAICa consortium of industry leaders and MIT researchers launched in February to harness the power of generative AI for the good of society.
Underscoring the critical need for this collaborative effortMIT President Sally Kornbluth said that the world is counting on facultyresearchersand business leaders like those in MGAIC to tackle the technological and ethical challenges of generative AI as the technology advances.
“Part of MIT’s responsibility is to keep these advances coming for the world. … How can we manage the magic [of generative AI] so that all of us can confidently rely on it for critical applications in the real world?” Kornbluth said.
To keynote speaker Yann LeCunchief AI scientist at Metathe most exciting and significant advances in generative AI will most likely not come from continued improvements or expansions of large language models like LlamaGPTand Claude. Through trainingthese enormous generative models learn patterns in huge datasets to produce new outputs.
InsteadLuCun and others are working on the development of “world models” that learn the same way an infant does — by seeing and interacting with the world around them through sensory input.
“A 4-year-old has seen as much data through vision as the largest LLM. … The world model is going to become the key component of future AI systems,” he said.
A robot with this type of world model could learn to complete a new task on its own with no training. LeCun sees world models as the best approach for companies to make robots smart enough to be generally useful in the real world.
But even if future generative AI systems do get smarter and more human-like through the incorporation of world modelsLeCun doesn’t worry about robots escaping from human control.
Scientists and engineers will need to design guardrails to keep future AI systems on trackbut as a societywe have already been doing this for millennia by designing rules to align human behavior with the common goodhe said.
“We are going to have to design these guardrailsbut by constructionthe system will not be able to escape those guardrails,” LeCun said.
Keynote speaker Tye Bradychief technologist at Amazon Roboticsalso discussed how generative AI could impact the future of robotics.
For instanceAmazon has already incorporated generative AI technology into many of its warehouses to optimize how robots travel and move material to streamline order processing.
He expects many future innovations will focus on the use of generative AI in collaborative robotics by building machines that allow humans to become more efficient.
“GenAI is probably the most impactful technology I have witnessed throughout my whole robotics career,” he said.
Other presenters and panelists discussed the impacts of generative AI in businessesfrom largescale enterprises like Coca-Cola and Analog Devices to startups like health care AI company Abridge.
Several MIT faculty members also spoke about their latest research projectsincluding the use of AI to reduce noise in ecological image datadesigning new AI systems that mitigate bias and hallucinationsand enabling LLMs to learn more about the visual world.
After a day spent exploring new generative AI technology and discussing its implications for the futureMGAIC faculty co-lead Vivek Fariasthe Patrick J. McGovern Professor at MIT Sloan School of Managementsaid he hoped attendees left with “a sense of possibilityand urgency to make that possibility real.”
