Quo Vadis, LLMs? From Statistical Parrots to Synthetic Colleagues

Prof. Dr. Lucie Flek, Universität Bonn

Once dismissed as mere “stochastic parrots,” large language models have quickly grown into powerful tools that appear to reason, create, and collaborate. How did systems designed to predict the next word come to assist with programming, research, and even teaching? And what lies ahead? This talk will reflect on their surprising trajectory and explore the frontiers that may define their future: scaling to ever-larger models, extending their capacity for reasoning, developing social intelligence skills, and aligning them with human goals and values. The central question is not just what these models can do, but how they may evolve—from clever statistical artifacts into synthetic colleagues that shape how we think, work, and discover.

Lucie Flek is a full professor at the University of Bonn, leading the Data Science and Language Technologies group. Her main interests lie in machine learning research for natural language processing (NLP), including AI robustness and safety. She typically works at the intersection of Large Language Models, machine learning, and human alignment, to build systems that are useful, interpretable, factually and socially aware while developing rigorous methods for reasoning and evaluation. Her interests span human-centered language systems; social intelligence in LLMs engaged in human-like social reasoning; and LLM agents for scientific discovery and collaboration. 

Prof. Flek has been active both in academia and industry – she used to manage the dialogue research programs in Amazon Alexa and contributed to the Google Shopping Search launch in Europe. Her academic work at the University of Pennsylvania and University College London revolved around user modeling from text, and its applications in psychology and social sciences. Her PhD at TU Darmstadt focused on meaning ambiguity, incorporating expert knowledge into deep neural networks. She serves as a program chair and senior area chair at numerous NLP and ML conferences, and as an editor of several AI journals. Before her career path in natural language processing, Prof. Flek has been contributing to particle physics research at CERN in the area of dark matter searches.