IVADO and Simons Institute announce strategic partnership to co-organize “Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part 2”

IVADO will partner with the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at UC Berkeley to enhance and expand Simons’ Spring 2025 research program, Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part II (LLM2). This collaboration will bring together world-class researchers from diverse disciplines to explore the future of large language models (LLMs) and transformers.

The Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, located at UC Berkeley, is a global hub for collaborative research that brings together leaders in the field and the next generation of rising stars to explore the foundations of computing and their intersections with science, technology and society. Through its interdisciplinary research programs and workshops, the Institute advances research on a range of topics with deep foundational questions as well as relevance for applications, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, cryptography and data privacy, neuroscience, and economics, to name just a few.

By joining forces, IVADO and the Simons Institute aim to foster global collaboration on artificial intelligence research. This partnership will unite academic leaders and emerging scholars to address both the technical challenges and transformative potential of LLMs and transformer architectures. The partnership will support three thematic workshops within the LLM2 program, one of which will be organized by IVADO’s Yoshua Bengio (Université de Montréal), Siva Reddy (McGill University) and other collaborators. The partnership will also provide support for sending researchers and students from Canadian universities to participate in the workshops, as well as support for 8-10 researchers and students from Canadian universities as long-term programme visitors.

“Partnering with the Simons Institute provides a unique opportunity to blend our complementary strengths and create a platform for the brightest minds to come together, share knowledge, and spark new AI innovations,” observed Luc Vinet, IVADO’s CEO. “This collaboration will undoubtedly have a lasting impact on the global scientific community.”

Sampath Kannan, Associate Director of the Simons Institute, remarks, “The partnership with IVADO allows us to delve deeper into the most pressing questions surrounding large language models and transformers, while exploring their ethical, societal, and technical dimensions. We are delighted to co-organize this thematic semester together to integrate the deep expertise from the Montréal ecosystem and look forward to the breakthroughs it will enable.”

The “Special Year on Large Language Models and Transformers, Part 2” will feature three in-person workshops. By pooling resources and expertise, this initiative will foster a dynamic environment for advancing AI research, bringing together experts in machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and more.

This partnership marks the beginning of what we hope will be a long-term collaboration between IVADO and the Simons Institute, one that will continue to shape the future of AI research. Further details about this exciting thematic semester and its upcoming events will be announced in the upcoming weeks.