Samy Bengio, the head of artificial intelligence research at Apple, has been appointed full professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), reports Time. It’s little known, but to advance its technologies and the field of AI in general, Apple is indeed collaborating with the academic world.
The partnership between the American company and the prestigious Swiss school has already resulted in eight scientific articles, including one (Generalization on the Unseen, Logic Reasoning and Degree Curriculum) awarded an award at the International Conference on Machine Learning, one of the most important events from the middle.
Samy Bengio, a major figure in the field who spent part of his career at Google, joins one of his colleagues, Emmanuel Abbé, at EPFL. “We have published several research works together and are establishing fundamental principles for reasoning in AI”indicates to the Swiss daily the one who is both a full professor in Lausanne and senior research scientist at Apple.
« [Les grands modèles de langage] have their limits. They struggle to generalize in situations that are too new compared to the training data. In science, medicine or planning, this can be problematic because the possible scenarios are very varied. It becomes difficult — or expensive — to go through enough to learn from examplesexplains Emmanuel Abbé. We would like these AIs to be able to reason more, to be able to extrapolate beyond similar cases already seen. »
For the models to extrapolate further, the researcher and his colleagues have found a path: « [ils] must capitalize less on memorization and more on composable principles. It is a more progressive and dynamic learning. » Thanks to this advance, AI models could perform more complex tasks that require a long chain of reasoning.
The research carried out by specialists who work both for Apple and at EPFL will benefit “to both parties and by extension to the AI community at large”declares Emmanuel Abbot. This type of collaboration often involves funding from large companies to scientific institutes, but the amount of participation in this case remains secret, notes Time. Furthermore, EPFL students may have the opportunity to do internships at Apple.
