Yejin Choi, Wissner-Slivka Professor at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington and Senior Research Director at the nonprofit Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

from  Time's 100 Most Influential in AI - October, 2023

Title: Possible Impossibilities, Impossible Possibilities, and Paradoxes

Abstract:   Generative AI has led to an unprecedented amount of global attention---both excitements and concerns, in part due to our relatively limited understanding about intelligence---both artificial and natural. In this talk, I will question if there can be possible impossibilities of large language models (i.e., the fundamental limits of transformers, if any) and the impossible possibilities of language models (i.e., seemingly impossible alternative paths beyond scale, if at all). I will then discuss a few paradoxes including the Generative AI Paradox: for AI, at least in its current form, generation capability may often exceed understanding capability, in stark contrast to human intelligence where generation of (e.g., novels, paintings) can be substantially harder than understanding.

Bio:    Yejin Choi is Wissner-Slivka Professor and a MacArthur Fellow at the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. She is also a senior director at AI2 overseeing the project Mosaic and a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford. Her research investigates if (and how) AI systems can learn commonsense knowledge and reasoning, if machines can (and should) learn moral reasoning, and various other problems in NLP, AI, and Vision including neuro-symbolic integration, language grounding with vision and interactions, and AI for social good. She is a co-recipient of 2 Test of Time Awards (at ACL 2021 and ICCV 2021), and

• 8 Best/Outstanding Paper Awards (at ACL 2023, EMNLP 2023, NAACL 2022, ICML 2022, NeurIPS 2021, AAAI 2019, and ICCV 2013),
• the Borg Early Career Award (BECA) in 2018,
• the inaugural Alexa Prize Challenge in 2017,
• IEEE AI's 10 to Watch in 2016.