How to balance the development of AI with its societal impact

A debate within the community

October 18th at 15:40 PM CEST (9:40 AM EDT)

Video: https://youtu.be/U5BmixXbW7A?si=QLfOzwlclGtiRVbH

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Foundation Models have taken the world and even researchers by surprise for their capabilities, notwithstanding their limitations.

This has spurred worldwide controversy about the development, the potentials and the risks of AI technologies in general.

There is no doubt that these technologies will have a relevant role in shaping our future, with their wide impact on markets and socioeconomics.

There are both optimistic and catastrophic visions of such a future, but definitely the decisions that researchers and regulators will take today will have an impact on it.

In this debate we will consider a number of questions that the community must answer in order to take those decisions wisely and, as representative of such community, the audience will have an opportunity to express its position.

We will take a poll before the debate and then two panelists will argue in favour or against each issue.

At the end we will take another survey from the audience to see whether someone was convinced by the debaters.

Here is the list of issues and the names of the debaters:

1. Should we continue advancing Foundation Models or suspend their development?

Moshe Vardi (Rice University)

2. Do LLMs understand language and can they be made reliable?

Geoff Hinton (Toronto) vs Gary Marcus (NYU)

3. Should we regulate AI applications or AI corporations?

Brando Benifei (co-rapporteurs European AI Act) vs Jacopo Pantaleoni (former Nvidia Principal Scientist)

4. Are "Openly Licensed" models or efficient fine-tuning approaches sufficient to democratise AI?

5. Can models be controlled or guardrails incorporated in their training?

Yoshua Bengio (Univ. of Montreal)

Moderator: Giuseppe Attardi

Poll