
Jay Shah Podcast
Why Today's LLMs Still Don't Understand Culture | Simran Khanuja
Simran Khanuja is a Ph.D. candidate at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on making AI systems more useful for people across different languages and cultures, with an emphasis on multilingual and multimodal foundation models.Prior to CMU, Simran spent over two years as a Pre-Doctoral Researcher at Google Research, contributing to multilingual language technologies and also did some interesting research at Microsoft Research India. Her recent work includes the Pangea multilingual multimodal foundation model, image transcreation for cultural localization, and new approaches to evaluating culturally relevant AI systems.00:00:00 Highlight & Introduction00:01:20 Journey into AI00:06:27 Industry Experience before Ph.D.00:12:38 Why Pursue a Ph.D. in AI?00:17:54 From Multilingual to Multicultural AI00:24:11 Are Foundation Models really general purpose?00:29:51 Should every Culture have tts own AI model?00:32:38 The biggest bottleneck in cultural alignment00:38:49 Can Prompting solve cultural alignment?00:44:41 Why Images need Translation too00:51:14 Beyond Text: Translating culture across modalities00:55:01 How do you evaluate Image Transcreation?01:00:48 Preventing catastrophic forgetting in Multilingual LLMs01:04:50 Can LLMs learn undocumented cultures?01:11:05 Are LLMs reliable as AI Judges?01:19:32 Can creativity ever be benchmarked?01:28:20 How AI Has changed research workflows01:41:12 Choosing an AI research topic in 202601:52:12 The most overlooked problem in AI today02:01:28 Closing thoughtsMore about Simran's ongoing research: https://simran-khanuja.github.io/About the Host:Jay is a Machine Learning Engineer III at PathAI working on improving AI for medical diagnosis and prognosis. Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahjay22/Twitter: https://twitter.com/jaygshah22Homepage: https://jaygshah.github.io/ for any queries.Stay tuned for upcoming webinars!***Disclaimer: The information in this video represents the views and opinions of the speaker and does not necessarily represent the views or opinions of any institution. It does not constitute an endorsement by any Institution or its affiliates of such video content.***

