In this session Michael Dorkenwald and Bernhard Rieder will discuss the transformative potential of so-called “foundation models” by focusing on a series of perspectives including their technical mechanisms, promised applications, ethical considerations, and economic implications. Rather than taking the transformative potential of these technology for granted, this session will examine how this transformative potentials are discursively, economically, and technically produced. The session will also examine how AI technologies are becoming “platforms” and why this matters for critical analysis.

About the Speakers

Michael Dorkenwald is a PhD student at the QUVA lab working with Yuki Asano and Cees Snoek at the University of Amsterdam, and is part of the ELLIS PhD program in cooperation with Qualcomm. His research interest revolves around foundation models for vision and language and how to apply them to video data. Before, he received his master’s degree in physics from Heidelberg University during which he was part of the research group from Björn Ommer. There, he was working on understanding human and object dynamics within generative frameworks. He also completed an internship in the AWS Rekognition team where I worked on self-supervised video representation learning.

Bernhard Rieder is an Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator with the Digital Methods Initiative. His research focuses on the history, theory, and politics of software and, in particular, on the role algorithms play in the production of knowledge and culture. This work includes the development, application, and analysis of computational research methods and the investigation of political and economic challenges posed by large online platforms.

You can find an overview of the first edition of the series (2023) here.