October 14, 2024 – Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, recently dismissed concerns about artificial intelligence posing a threat to human existence as “complete B.S.” in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
A pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and a Turing Award winner, LeCun currently serves as a professor at New York University and a senior researcher at Meta. He had previously stated on social media that before worrying about controlling super-intelligent AI, we need to figure out how to design a system smarter than a house cat.
Elaborating on his views during the interview, LeCun responded to a question about AI becoming so intelligent that it poses a threat to humans by saying, “You’ll have to forgive my French, but that’s complete nonsense.”
According to LeCun, today’s large language models lack crucial “cat-level” abilities such as long-term memory, reasoning, planning, and understanding of the physical world. He believes that these models only demonstrate that “you can manipulate language, but you’re not smart,” and they will never lead to true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
It’s worth noting that LeCun doesn’t completely deny the possibility of achieving AGI, but he suggests that new approaches are needed to make it a reality. He points out that the Meta fundamental AI research team he leads is exploring ways to digest real-world videos, which could be a promising direction.
