| Time: | July 2, 2025, 9:45 a.m. (CEST) |
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| Universitätstraße 32 Room 101, Campus Vaihingen of the University of Stuttgart | |
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We are pleased to announce our upcoming ELLIS Unit Stuttgart Distinguished Lecture Series talk by Tim Rocktäschel (University College London)! Looking forward to seeing you all there! No registration necessary.
The talk will be followed by an informal reception during which finger food and drinks will be provided.
Professor Rocktäschel will also be available for meetings. If you are interested in scheduling a meeting, please email ellis-office@uni-stuttgart.de
Title: Open-Endedness, World Models, and the Automation of Innovation
Abstract: The pursuit of Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) requires a shift from narrow objective optimization towards embracing Open-Endedness—a research paradigm, pioneered in AI by Stanley, Lehman and Clune, that is focused on systems that generate endless sequences of novel but learnable artifacts. In this talk, I will present our work on large-scale foundation world models that can generate a wide variety of diverse environments that can in turn be used to train more general and robust agents. Furthermore, I will argue that the connection between Open-Endedness and Foundation Models points towards automating innovation itself. This convergence is already yielding practical results, enabling self-referential self-improvement loops for automated prompt engineering, automated red-teaming, and AI debate in Large Language Models, and it hints at a future where AI drives its own discoveries.
Bio: Tim Rocktäschel is the Director, Principal Scientist, and the Open-Endedness Team Lead at Google DeepMind. He is also a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the Centre for Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL), where he is the Principal Investigator of the UCL Deciding, Acting, and Reasoning with Knowledge (DARK) Lab. He is also a Fellow of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS). He obtained his Ph.D. from UCL, receiving a Microsoft Research Ph.D. Scholarship and a Google Ph.D. Fellowship.