We are organizing the first AI workshop on LLM/Foundation Models focusing on cross-discipline interaction, on 17-18 October, 2023 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

The last year has been a landmark one with the arrival of ChatGPT and GPT4, demarcating a new era of AI research on foundation models. While scale was always a key factor in learning, these models have shown that scale has an unexpectedly big impact on generalization and, importantly, the importance of multimodality. This paves the way for AI subfields that had splintered in the last decades, like language, vision, audio and so on, to converge once again. This happens not simply to improve numbers by an iota, but as instrumental learning components to generalist AI.

As such, together with several key researchers in NLP, vision, multimedia and so on, we took the initiative to organize one of the first European symposia on this very subject, and the first that brings renowned researchers from different AI subdisciplines in Europe, who would normally not meet each other. The symposium will be under the umbrella of ELLIS, AIDA, and AI4Media, in an effort to draw in a diverse AI population. It is the 4th edition of the AI Mellontology Symposium series. Our hope is that we have deep interactions and lead to bigger initiatives, perhaps together with outside-EU colleagues and initiatives.

On behalf of Iryna Gurevych, Andre Martins, Ivan Titov, Evangelos Kanoulas, Efstratios Gavves, Ioannis Pitas and Giuseppe Attardi.