Events
Colloquium
Closing the Loop: ASI in 2026?
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Speaker: Jimmy Ba (U of T) Assistant Professor University of Toronto Tuesday, September 15, 2026 11:00AM - 12:00PM Location: Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science, Kline Tower 13th Floor, Room 1327, New Haven, CT 06511 and via Webcast: https://yale.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=3c84f0ee-7496-46ff-be0c-b4c500e63579 |
Talk summary: The recent progress of AI has been driven by scaling compute, data and general-purpose learning methods. What comes next? This talk argues that closing the loop is central to the next phase: moving beyond distilling human knowledge toward systems that can act, evaluate outcomes and improve. I will discuss the roles of pretraining, post-training and tool use in this transition, from coding assistants to research and recursive self-improvement. Finally, I will examine why progress in the digital world does not translate directly into the physical world, and how energy, embodiment and the challenge of moving atoms shape the path toward artificial superintelligence.
Speaker bio: Jimmy Ba is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. He also co-founded xAI, where he led engineering and research. He is a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He is known for inventing some of the most widely used AI algorithms, such as the Adam optimizer, layer normalization and model distillation, that have become integral to today’s large language models.
Sekhar Tatikonda is hosting. To sign up to meet with Jimmy Ba, click here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/19_bvZ6bofmgCFTSt59c3UfIwpof6DWj5N-d4N1dXap0/edit?tab=t.0
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