I had the privilege of experiencing Lukasz Kaiser (Researcher @ OpenAI) at TedAI Vienna – one of the minds behind the groundbreaking “Attention Is All You Need” paper. His vision for the future of AI left a lasting impression on me.
Key Takeaways:
🔄 Transformers as a Paradigm Shift
The Transformer architecture didn’t just replace RNNs – it created the foundation for everything we recognize as modern AI today. The ability to give each token attention to all previous tokens was key to scalability and performance.
🎯 The Central Challenge: Learning from Limited Data
While humans learn from few examples, ML models still require massive amounts of data. The next evolution? Models that are more “learnable” and can work with significantly less data.
🧠 Reasoning Models as Game Changers
Chain-of-Thought models think in intermediate steps, use external tools, and need to memorize less. An example from the talk: A reasoner improved a recent mathematics paper after extended “deliberation” – impressive!
⚡ Current Challenges
Reasoning models are powerful but slow (sequential) and difficult to train. Research is intensively working on parallelization and better learnability.
🔮 The grand vision?
Models that can conduct science – learn from few experiments, improve theories, and generate new knowledge. And according to Kaiser, these breakthroughs are expected in months to a few years rather than decades.
What fascinates me most: We’re moving from “more data = better models” to “smarter architectures = less data needed.” A paradigm shift with enormous potential for science and industry.
Question to the community:Where do you see the most promising use cases for reasoning models in your fields?
#TedAI #Vienna #AI #MachineLearning #OpenAI #Transformer #ReasoningAI #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence
Photo: © TEDAI Vienna / Robert Leslie
















