On April 24-25, 2024, 12 Mila professors took part in the World Summit AI (WSAI 2024) conference at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal, showcasing their varied expertise to a large business and government audience.
Through 7 quotes, here are the main takeaways from the conference:
1. International Cooperation Will Be Essential to Properly Regulate AI
“We need to make sure that countries of the world work together to harmonize their regulations to avoid proliferation of dangerous kinds of Artificial General Intelligence (AGIs), and to make sure that no single entity, no single person, no single corporation, no single country can take advantage of AI at the expense of the rest of us.” Yoshua Bengio, Founder and Scientific Director of Mila
2. Open Science Fosters Innovation
“Committing to an open approach doesn’t slow down innovation. In fact, it accelerates innovation because it leverages the power of a much larger community.” Joelle Pineau, Core Academic Member at Mila
3. AI-Enhanced Robots Will Be Humanity’s Assistants in the Future
“We want to make intelligent robots that aren't pre-scripted… We want them to be able to help us with not just very specific tasks, but with a very multi-dimensional and versatile robot system.” Glen Berseth, Core Academic Member at Mila
4. Studying the Human Brain Can Help Us Build Better AI
"There are many deep principles of intelligence and computation in distributed systems that we can learn about and apply to AI systems by studying the brain." Blake Richards, Core Academic Member at Mila
5. Prediction Is the Main Driver of Human and Artificial Intelligence
“In nature and in artificial intelligence, there are two key functions to learn: perception and prediction. And I believe prediction is the real driver of what we’d define as intelligence.” Guillaume Lajoie, Core Academic Member at Mila
6. AI Will Improve Human Health
"Reinforcement learning for therapeutics is a really big, untapped area of research." Doina Precup, Core Academic Member at Mila
7. A Scaling Revolution in AI Is Underway
"State-of-the-art AI systems started getting much better following large investments of computational resources and increases in training data… There’s truly a scaling revolution happening in the field." Irina Rish, Core Academic Member at Mila
Golnoosh Farnadi and David Ifeoluwa Adelani, both Core Academic Member at Mila, participated in a panel with Catherine Régis, Associate Academic Member at Mila, on how to ensure that AI is developed and used in a way that benefits everyone, everywhere. Adriana Romero Soriano and Marc Gendron-Bellemare, both Core Industry Members at Mila, also gave deep dive tech talks at the conference.
