Foundation models provide impressive abilities to generate content (text, images, sound, videos, protein structures, and more), and do so by interactive prompts in a seemingly creative manner. They hold the promise to drive innovation in many industries, changing the way we work by making tasks more efficient and providing professionals with powerful new tools.

This masterclass offers an in-depth understanding of AI foundation models like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, Llama, and GPT-4. These autoregressive, self-supervised, transformer-based models are pre-trained on extensive multimodal data and serve as the backbone of different advanced systems. They already form the basis of all state-of-the-art systems in computer vision and natural language processing across a wide range of tasks and have shown impressive few-shot learning abilities.

Participants will explore their algorithmic foundations, emergent behavior, and ethical challenges such as hallucinations and misinformation. Gaining insights into these models enables professionals to leverage their capabilities effectively, whether in data analysis, content creation, or improving operational efficiency.

• Pre-training at scale from language to vision and across modalities.
• Adaptation, alignment and parameter-efficient fine tuning.
• Generating multimedia content with diffusion models.
• Ethical, legal and societal considerations and challenges.
• Use case examples across industries.

• have a better understanding of the capabilities, workings and the impact of foundation models.
• have acquired knowledge of foundation models, current theories and the core machine learning techniques to train, adapt and deploy them at scale.
• have insight into the training processes and the importance of diverse datasets.
• understand the ethical and social implications of the use of foundation models which enables you to address ethical challenges in AI implementation in your own work.
• have insight into the promising forecast of foundations models in your industry.
• can internally discuss concrete steps your organization can take to leverage the benefits of foundation models.