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With the ever-growing need to understand ourselves and humanity as a whole, it is necessary to examine the concepts of morality, ethics and universal values as guiding principles of the human condition. With generous support from Y.T. Hwang Family Foundation, The Korea Society presents a Series on Ethics and Common Values.

This series promotes the understanding of central themes of our human existence through a series of lectures by distinguished speakers and conversation with extraordinary individuals who exemplify the universal values in line with the mission of Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation and The Korea Society.

The Korea Society and Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation is proud to present Professor Yejin Choi who will deliver a lecture titled Beyond Scale: the Art of (Artificial) Reasoning and Discovery.

Scaling laws suggest that “more is more”: brute-force scaling of data leads to stronger AI capabilities. However, despite rapid progress on benchmarks, state-of-the-art models still exhibit “jagged intelligence,” indicating that current scaling approaches may have limitations in terms of sustainability and robustness. These limitations are sharpest at the frontier of discovery, where the goal is to produce knowledge that does not yet exist anywhere in the training distribution. In this talk, Professor Choi will discuss key insights into the strengths and limitations of LLMs, examine when reinforcement learning succeeds or struggles in reasoning tasks, and turn to what it takes to move from reasoning to discovery: test-time training that adapts models to problems they have never seen, learning to use LLMs as tools (both as cost-efficient alternatives to frontier-scale inference and as instruments for scientific discovery), and synthetic data strategies that get the best out of small language models, helping them close the gap against their larger counterparts in specific domains.

This program is made possible by the support from Y. T. Hwang Family Foundation