Shanghai Jiaotong University Names Prof. Amnon Shashua Honorary Professor

In a ceremony held on Tuesday, September 12, Professor Amnon Shashua was appointed as an honorary professor at the Global Institute of Future Technology and a guest professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU).

SJTU, renowned for its expertise in nurturing top engineers and scientists, welcomed Amnon to its campus, where he delivered a lecture, titled, "The State of AI: Opportunities, Limitations and Dangers" to an overflowing room of approximately 300 students, faculty, and experts.

During the lecture, Professor Shashua spoke about the emergence of reasoning and abstraction in large language models (LLMs). While acknowledging advancements in reasoning, he explained the formidable challenge of LLMs to abstract from data, a capability inherent to human cognition. He provided examples, from joint work with Prof. Shai Shalev Shwartz, demonstrating the ongoing limitations in LLMs' ability to perform abstraction, indicating that this aspect of development does not look like a natural evolution in the field and may necessitate more substantial breakthroughs.

The lecture concluded with an exploration of the pressing issue of AI alignment, by going over some recent results from his university research lab and from work with Shai, and the ongoing endeavors to establish safeguards for AI systems.

You can watch the full lecture below: