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SUMMARY:Caltech Together: Silicon Valley
DESCRIPTION:“AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers”\nThursday\, May 21\, 202611:30 a.m.–1:30 p.m. \nMoore Foundation1661 Page Mill RoadPalo Alto\, CA 94304 \nTo attend\, please click this link to register for the event. \nRSVP by May 17\, 2026Price: $32 per personAttendance is capped at 80 people \nThe catered lunch will include an assortment of sandwiches and salads. Drinks will be provided by the Moore Foundation. \n“AI Agents as Universal Task Solvers”by Stefano Soatto\, VP at AWS Agentic AI\nScaling laws predict that AI agents will steadily improve and eventually exceed human performance across a wide range of tasks. Yet at the limit lies a form of inference that involves no intelligence at all: with enough compute and memory\, a model can brute-force any verifiable task without learning anything. This raises a basic question: if scaling alone does not foster intelligence\, what does? \nI will argue that the answer is time. Building on results by Solomonoff and Levin\, I will show that the value of learning is measured not by a reduction in uncertainty — as in classical induction — but by a reduction in the time needed to solve new tasks. Data can make a universal solver exponentially faster\, with the speed-up governed by the algorithmic mutual information between past experience and unforeseen tasks. \nConnecting these ideas to modern AI requires rethinking what computation means for large language models. I will show that LLMs are maximalistic models of computation — universal\, like Turing Machines\, but operating through entirely different mechanisms. 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. \nAbout the Speaker\nStefano 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 (MS ’93\, PhD ’96)\, 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. \nTo attend\, please click this link to register for the event. \n			\n				\n				\n				\n				\n				Our Alumni Volunteers‍\nThe following alumni work together to serve you: Avni Gandhi\, Dave Adler\, Eilleen Zhang\, Jane Frommer\, Ralph Pursifull\, Reeya Chenanda\, Susan Huynh\, and Peter Tong. \n			\n				Register for the Event
URL:https://www.alumni.caltech.edu/event/caltech-together-silicon-valley-may-2026/
LOCATION:Moore Foundation\, 1661 Page Mill Road\, Palo Alto\, CA\, 94304\, United States
CATEGORIES:Caltech Together
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://www.alumni.caltech.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/Caltech-Together-Silicon-Valley-1500x500-1.jpg
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