AGI-26, the 19th annual conference of the AGI Society, which is devoted only to Artificial General Intelligence, will take place in San Francisco from July 27th to the 30th. The AGI Society has confirmed the keynote speakers and a whole speaker schedule for the event.
Researchers from organizations that are at the forefront of machine intelligence research, such as Google DeepMind and MIT, as well as Tufts University and SingularityNET, are included on the roster. These researchers bring together scholars whose approaches to AGI diverge as much as they overlap.
Karl Friston, whose neuroscience-inspired models have reshaped how researchers think about perception and inference; Gary Marcus, one of the most prominent voices for symbolic and hybrid approaches; Michael Levin and Hananel Hazan, whose work on biological intelligence at Tufts is opening new questions about the substrate of cognition; Neil Gershenfeld (MIT); and Ben Goertzel, whose pursuit of general intelligence through SingularityNET and the ASI Alliance has defined much of the field’s ambition. All of these individuals have been confirmed for the forthcoming AGI-26 conference.
Alexander Lerchner, who works for Google DeepMind, Alison Gopnik, who works for the University of California, Berkeley; Alexander Ororbia, who works for the Rochester Institute of Technology; Faezeh Habibi, who works for SingularityNET; Josef Urban, who works for the Czech Technical University in Prague; and Greg Meredith, who works for F1R3FLY.io. Neuroscience. Symbols. Agents. Hybrids. Every major school of thought, in one room.
The AGI Society has built the conference series on three themes: advancing the theoretical foundations of artificial general intelligence (AGI), developing practical pathways from today’s narrow AI systems toward robust general intelligence, and addressing the societal and ethical implications of what comes next. The program for the four-day event includes presentations of papers that have been peer-reviewed, demonstrations of software and hardware, tutorials, and workshops.
The edition that was published this year places a particular emphasis on a question that the field can no longer ignore: how rapid advancements in reasoning, adaptation, and generalization translate into systems that are accountable and beneficial over the long term, even as they leverage their general intelligence to radically overhaul their own foundations. In addition, there will be thematic sessions during the conference that will focus on Neural-Symbolic and Hybrid Methods, Predictive Coding, Practical Proto-AGI Systems, and Active Inference for General Intelligence.
As conference series co-founder Ben Goertzel says:
“There has never been such an exciting time to be working toward AGI. I have said this each year at the AGI conference for the last few years, and it keeps on being true. The rate of intellectual and practical progress toward AGI we are seeing is truly remarkable, if at times a bit dizzying. While serious AGI researchers understand that scaling LLMs will not get us to full human-level AGI, and research advances are still required, there is nonetheless a feeling across the field that accelerating progress will continue and major additional breakthroughs may be soon at hand. The AGI conference series remains the only venue gathering together AGI researchers and practitioners from across the spectrum of scientific and engineering approaches, from academia and industry and the open source community and from all around the globe.”
In conjunction with the technical program, a distinct Investor Day will be place on July 30. The purpose of this day is to discuss the current state of the investing environment as well as the wider implications of general intelligence.
The Kurzweil Prize for Best AGI Idea ($1,250), the AGI Society Prize for Progress Toward AGI ($1,000), the Springer Prize for Best AGI Paper ($1,000), and the Hyperon Prize for Best Student Paper ($250) are some of the rewards that will be considered for the outstanding papers that are submitted to the AGI-26 conference.
Over a thousand academics, practitioners, and thought leaders from academia, business, and government have participated in the AGI Conference Series since it was established in 2008. Jurgen Schmidhuber, Yoshua Bengio, Peter Norvig, Richard Sutton, Christof Koch, and Francois Chollet are some of the speakers who have previously delivered presentations. For the most part, the series has served more as a pressure test than as a showcase. It has been a site where fundamental assumptions have been called into question, and where the path that the field is headed has been fashioned.
A link to the tickets: https://luma.com/AGI-26
The Artificial General Intelligence Society (AGI Society) is a non-profit organization working to further the research and development of artificial general intelligence systems. Through the facilitation of global collaboration and communication, the society promotes the dissemination of information and a variety of perspectives about the future of intelligence.
