ARC Prize 2024 University Tour Recap

This month, we visited 13 US universities to connect with AI researchers, discuss AGI progress, and inspire more people to participate in ARC Prize.

With over 1,500 students and professors from top US AI programs, we're proud of the impact the tour made.

We want to share a few tour highlights and give thanks to everyone who helped make this event series happen.

Join Us Online

We're hosting a virtual event tomorrow to make sure everyone around the world has access to the content we shared while on tour.

Come hear directly from François Chollet, Creator of ARC-AGI, about technical approaches that might defeat ARC and win you the Grand Prize!

Register to save your spot!

And our encore appearance at the University of Washington takes place October 30.

2024 Tour Highlights

NYU

Todd Gureckis (Professor of Psychology) and Brenden Lake (Associate Professor of Psychology and Data Science) have co-authored 2 papers studying how humans interact with ARC-AGI. They're the directors of the NYU Minds, Brains, and Machines initiative designed to understand intelligence through psychology, neural science, philosophy, linguistics, data science, and AI.

Along with Wai Keen Vong (Research Scientist, NYU Center for Data Science) and Solim LeGris (Doctoral Researcher, NYU Computation and Cognition Lab & Human and Machine Learning Lab), we are excited to collaborate on upcoming improvements to the ARC-AGI benchmark.

MIT

Josh Tenenbaum (Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) is focused on understanding, "that most elusive aspect of human intelligence: our ability to learn so much about the world, so rapidly and flexibly."

His lab has likely the highest density group of researchers working on program synthesis in the world. Some are directly or indirectly working on ARC-AGI.

The lab studies an intriguing diversity of research topics.

• Program synthesis to study how language is learned and understood
• Computational models of perception and learning
• Cognitive mechanisms underlying the human moral conscience
• ML and visual computing systems to reason about unexpected cognitive effects
• Human visual perception and building computational models of procrastination
• The cognitive and computational basis of perception and reasoning about materials

UCLA

Guy Van den Broeck (Professor of Computer Science and Samueli Fellow) directs the Statistical and Relational Artificial Intelligence (StarAI) lab at UCLA. The lab researches Machine Learning, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, and AI.

We're fans of Guy's notable 2022 paper "On the Paradox of Learning to Reason from Data", which explained how a model can attain near-perfect accuracy on in-distribution test examples while failing to generalize to other data distributions over the exact same problem space. Plus, fun fact: he appeared on comedian Daniel Tosh's podcast.

The lecture hall where we spoke was right across from the room where the internet was born!

a16z NYC

David Haber (General Partner) and team hosted us at the beautiful Andreessen Horowitz NYC office. We spoke with 75 amazing AI researchers and startup founders including Zenna Tavares (Basis), Aymeric Zhuo (Agemo), and Marco Mascorro (Fellow AI, a16z), and so many more.

We shared the story behind ARC Prize and learnings from our university tour. This event reinforced our belief that ARC-AGI is a powerful guiding force for anyone working to build AGI.

Credits

Thank you to the following people and groups that helped make our idea to visit over a dozen universities a reality. We're grateful for their time and support and we look forward to more collaborations in the future.

• Carnegie Mellon University - Catherine Copetas (Assistant Dean for Industrial Relations and Director of Special Events), Zico Kolter (Professor and Head of Machine Learning Department)
• Stanford - Emily Zhang (Student, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL)), Nicholas Haber (Assistant Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education)
• UC Berkeley - Ashmita Kumar (Machine Learning @ Berkeley), Shadaj Laddad/Vivian Fang (Computer Science Graduate Entrepreneurs)
• MIT - Josh Tenenbaum, Zack Anker (AI @ MIT), Marie Mize (Program Manager, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences)
• Boston University - Yannis Paschalidis, Katherine D'Angelo, Stephen Brown, Rafik B. Hariri Institute for Computing and Computational Science & Engineering
• Harvard - Sham M. Kakade, Elise Porter, Kempner Institute, Omer Mujawar (HUMIC), Erik Wang (HCS AI Group)
• Cornell Tech - Yoav Artzi (Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science), Rocio Ortiz
• NYU - Todd Gureckis (Professor of Psychology), Brendan Lake (Associate Professor of Psychology and Data Science)
• Columbia - Vishal Misra (Professor of Computer Science; Vice Dean of Computing and Artificial Intelligence), Alexis Avedisian (Associate Director of Events and Marketing, Data Science Institute)
• UC San Diego - Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), Trey Scheid (VP of Internal Affairs at DS3), Chad Lohrli (Co-founder of SDx), Erik Mjoen (Industry Relations Manager at HDSI), Kelly Jensen (Career Advisor and Alumni/Employer Outreach Specialist at HDSI)
• UCLA - Guy Van den Broeck (Professor of Computer Science and Samueli Fellow)
• CalTech - Yisong Yue (Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences), Aditi Chandrashekar
• USC - Nora Sandoval (Executive Director, Viterbi Student Engagement); Cristina Fong (Director of Special Events, Viterbi Student Engagement), Viterbi Graduate Student Association (VGSA), USC Viterbi School of Engineering
• University of Washington - Kay Beck-Benton (External Relations Director), Luke Zettlemoyer (Professor, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering)
• a16z - David Haber (General Partner), Abby Faber (Events Specialist), Gabriel Vasquez (Investment Partner), Spencer Howard (Partner, Concierge Team)

Virtual Event

Don't forget to register for the virtual event tomorrow!

Register now