The Future of Personalized Universal Assistant
Abstract
We've moved way beyond the old days of building discovery, recommendation, decision support, and other AI tools using traditional ML and pattern recognition techniques. The future of universal personal assistance for discovery and learning is upon us. How will multimodality image, video, and audio understanding, and reasoning abilities of large foundation models change how we build these systems? I will shed some initial light on this topic by discussing 3 trends: First, the move to a single multimodal large model with reasoning abilities; Second, the fundamental research on personalization and user alignment; Third, the combination of System 1 and System 2 cognitive abilities into a single universal assistant.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Recommender Systems and Techniques
Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
Publication details
- Journal / source
- ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)
- Pages
- 2–2
- Publication date
- 16 February 2026
- Language
- EN