When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world in 2022, it brought generative artificial intelligence into the mainstream and started a snowball effect that led to its rapid integration into industry, scientific research, health care, and the everyday lives of people who use the technology.
What comes next for this powerful but imperfect tool?
With that question in mind, hundreds of researchers, business leaders, educators, and 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 that, as the technology keeps advancing, our collective wisdom keeps pace," said MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan to kick off this first symposium of the MGAIC, a 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 effort, MIT President Sally Kornbluth said that the world is counting on faculty, researchers, and 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 LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, the most exciting and significant advances in generative AI will most likely not come from continued improvements or expansions of large language models like Llama, GPT, and Claude. Through training, these enormous generative models learn patterns in huge datasets to produce new outputs.
Instead, LuCun 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 models, LeCun doesn't worry about robots escaping from human control.
Scientists and engineers will need to design guardrails to keep future AI systems on track, but as a society, we have already been doing this for millennia by designing rules to align human behavior with the common good, he said.
"We are going to have to design these guardrails, but by construction, the system will not be able to escape those guardrails," LeCun said.
Keynote speaker Tye Brady, chief technologist at Amazon Robotics, also discussed how generative AI could impact the future of robotics.
For instance, Amazon 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 businesses, from 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 projects, including the use of AI to reduce noise in ecological image data, designing new AI systems that mitigate bias and hallucinations, and enabling LLMs to learn more about the visual world.
After a day spent exploring new generative AI technology and discussing its implications for the future, MGAIC faculty co-lead Vivek Farias, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, said he hoped attendees left with "a sense of possibility, and urgency to make that possibility real."
