The LLM Paradigm Shift: From Determinism to General Intelligence

Please join us for the Orange County ACM Chapter's bimonthly evening program series.

The LLM Paradigm Shift: From Determinism to General Intelligence

Agenda
6:30 PM Doors Open & Networking
7:00 PM Announcements, Presentation, and Q&A
8:30 PM Meeting Adjourns

Event Details
The path to modern artificial intelligence is defined by a fundamental shift from hand-coded logic to large-scale emergent systems. This talk surveys that journey, beginning with a brief look at early deterministic AI from the 1950s through the 1980s: rule-based engines, expert systems, and symbolic logic. The focus shifts to deep learning in the early to mid-2010s, tracing how word vectors turned language into math, followed by recurrent neural networks and sequence-to-sequence models for language tasks.

The defining pair of breakthroughs that unlocked modern AI arrived with the 2017 Transformer architecture and the late-2022 release of ChatGPT. We explore how Transformers introduced self-attention to process entire sequences at once, aligning with GPU scaling to train on massive internet data. We then examine how scaling gave rise to emergent intelligence, and how ChatGPT paired that architecture with instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback, turning raw text predictors into intuitive conversational assistants and driving mainstream adoption. The talk concludes with a brief forward look at the emerging frontier: how models are extending beyond chat interfaces toward autonomous reasoning and tool execution

Speaker
Johnny Lin is a Principal AI Scientist and Architect with over a decade of post-doctoral experience spanning applied statistics, data science, and industry research. He currently leads enterprise AI and machine learning initiatives at Constellation Energy, having previously served as a Senior Data Scientist at NRG Energy and a Research Scientist at Amazon. He holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from UCLA and a bachelor's degree in mathematics. His work spans statistical modeling, enterprise machine learning systems, and generative AI, including experience building custom LLM orchestrators and text-to-SQL solutions.

Co-sponsors
This event is co-sponsored by the IEEE Orange County Computer Society and the IEEE OC Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS).

Venue & Parking
This meeting will be held at the Knobbe Martens' Irvine offices. Parking validation will be provided to attendees.