diff --git a/_data/events.yml b/_data/events.yml index 4642026..76a258a 100644 --- a/_data/events.yml +++ b/_data/events.yml @@ -62,6 +62,56 @@ description: bio: +- title: 'AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers' + tag: Seminar + date: '2026-02-27' + who: Stefano Soatto, Alessandro Achille + where: CSB 453 + time: 3PM + description: | + Scaling laws predict that AI agents will steadily improve and eventually exceed human + performance across a wide range of tasks. Yet at the limit of these scaling laws lies a form of + inference that involves no intelligence at all: with increasing compute and memory, a model can + brute-force any verifiable task without learning anything from past experience. Universally + optimal inference, pioneered by Solomonoff and Levin, requires no insight — only exhaustive search. + + This raises a basic question: if scaling alone does not foster intelligence, what does? And + if performance on downstream tasks is insufficient to measure intelligence, what is? + + In this talk, I will point to the critical role of time in both analyzing and fostering the + emergent reasoning behavior of AI agents. Building on insights that Solomonoff sketched in 1985 + but that remained theoretical curiosities for decades, I will show that the value of learning + is measured not by a reduction in uncertainty — the core of inductive learning and + generalization — but by a reduction in the time needed to solve new tasks. A key result is + that data can make a universal solver exponentially faster, with the speed-up tightly + characterized by a single quantity: the algorithmic mutual information between past + experience and the solution to unforeseen tasks. + + Connecting these ideas to modern AI requires rethinking what computation means for systems + powered by large language models. Unlike minimalistic models of computation such as Turing + Machines, LLMs are stochastic dynamical systems whose computational elements — context, + weights, activations, chain-of-thought — do not resemble a “program” in the ordinary sense. + I will show that LLMs are instead maximalistic models of computation: universal, like Turing + Machines, but operating through entirely different and in many ways antithetical mechanisms. + Programming such systems can be achieved through two-level control strategies — open-loop + planning and closed-loop feedback — in abstract space, a framework we have recently + released Strands Agents open-source library (www.strandsagents.com). + + Once time is properly accounted for, scaling laws reveal an inversion: beyond a critical point, + increasing resources improve benchmark accuracy while diminishing conceptual depth— a savant + regime in which models improve while learning less. I will discuss what this means for + how we build, evaluate, and scale AI agents. + bio: | + **Stefano Soatto** is a Vice President at AWS Agentic AI, and a Professor of Computer Science + at UCLA. He received his PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of + Technology, his D.Ing from the University of Padova, Italy and was a postdoctoral scholar at + Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the ACM and of the IEEE. + + **Alessandro Achille** is a Principal Applied Scientist in the AWS Agentic AI team, which he + joined after earning his PhD from UCLA in 2019. His research focuses on machine learning + foundations, including information theory, machine unlearning, logic, and hardware-software + co-design, with applications to computer vision and AI agents. + - title: 'We solved trust for AI Agents in 1973 (we just forgot)' tag: Seminar date: '2026-02-17'