Talk Title: Computer Use: Modern Moravec’s Paradox

Talk Abstract: Computer-use agents reveal a modern form of Moravec’s Paradox: today’s AI excels at symbolic tasks like math and coding yet struggles with the everyday cognitive work humans perform effortlessly on computers. We will discuss the inherent challenges of computer use such as idiosyncratic environments and contextual understanding. We also argue that computer use is not only one of the hardest frontiers for AI but may also be the most important, because it can potentially offer the next Internet-scale learning opportunity and the most immediate path toward practical, goal-directed AGI.

Bio: Yu Su is an Associate Professor at the Ohio State University, where he co-directs the NLP group. He has broad interests in artificial intelligence, with a primary interest in the role of language as a vehicle for reasoning and communication. His group is a driving force on the emerging topic of LLM-based language agents, with seminal contributions such as Mind2Web, SeeAct, HippoRAG, LLM-Planner, and MMMU. He is a 2025 Sloan Fellow and has received several paper awards from CVPR and ACL.