the langlands functoriality conjecture is one of the basic problems in the theory of automorphic forms and representations. in the past four decades, there was essentially no progress made until a few years ago when the langlands functoriality was established for generic cuspidal automorphic representations from classical groups to general linear groups in a series of papers by cogdell$-$kim$-$piatetski$-$shapiro$-$shahidi, ginzburg$-$rallis$-$soudry, and jiang-soudry. many important applications were found afterwards. the problem of establishing the theory for general cuspidal automorphic representations remains a big open problem. in this talk, i will report on some recent progress on this problem, based on my work and my work with soudry